Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, marks the first effort to purify the German tongue and set it on a firm basis.
It must be confessed that the earlier humanists had not so much wished to impede the use of the vernaculars in Europe, as to add another language to those already in “vogue.” “Just as a gem set in a gold ring ornaments it rather than disfigures it,” wrote Laurentius Valla in 1450, “so our language (Latin), if added to the vernaculars of other nations, increases rather than diminishes their lustre.”[1] Latin, though essentially a scholar’s tongue, was not to be treated as a classic language, but was to be placed on exactly the same footing as the vernaculars. To write like Cicero was not sufficient, the accomplished man of letters was also expected to talk like the characters of Terence and Plautus. If the Latin vocabulary of the golden age proved unequal to the heavier demands of sixteenth-century life, it had to be stretched and supplemented by Greek words. Above all, fluency was the great desideratum. In addition to the accuracy that he acquired by a patient study of grammar, of the moods and of the figures, a school-boy had to learn to chatter in Latin without any hesitation and with as much correctness of expression as could be obtained. Some idea of the task thus imposed on teachers may be realised by those who have experienced the difficulty of imparting a colloquial knowledge of French or German through the medium of class instruction. The humanist schools sought to solve the question by making it obligatory that boys should talk Latin and nothing else during their play-hours as well as in school; but this was very difficult to enforce, and, in spite of the usher with his tabella delatoria[2] ready to report the slightest lapse into the mother-tongue, they drifted into the vernacular on every possible occasion. “Our boys,” wrote Cordier in 1530, always chatter French with their companions, or if they
- ↑ Laurentii Vallensis, Elegantia Lingua Latinæ, preface.
- ↑ Pueri . . . tabellis illis delatoriis ad Latinæ linguæ observationem in Gymnasiis adiguntur.—‘Commentarius puerorum de quotidiano sermone, qui prius Liber de corrupti sermonis emendatione dicebatur. Maturino Corderio autore. Parisiis, 1541 (1st ed. in 1530). Preface.
