«Bivalence stratégique»
Kathryn Woolard
woolard_genovese_bivalency.pdf — Woolard, Kathryn A. and E. Nicholas Genovese, 2007. “Strategic Bivalency in Latin and Spanish in Early Modern Spain.” Language in Society (36)4: 487-510. (Woolard est l'anthropologue, Genovese le latiniste.)
“A phenomenon called “strategic bivalency”… both the ideological erasure of language boundaries by experts and the purposeful mobilization of bivalent elements that belong simultaneously to two languages in contact… By using such bivalency strategically, speakers and writers in contact zones create the effect of using two languages at once, and… this can be a political act.”
La situation de diglossie et la stratégie d'écriture de textes bivalents décrits par Kathryn Woolard et Nicholas Genovese sont un cas particulier d'une situation et d'une stratégie plus générales dans lesquelles je range, pour ma part comme indianiste travaillant au Kerala, l'invention de textes en langue «perle-et-corail» (Manipravâlam) combinant le sanskrit et le malayalam (Ce dossier indianiste est à paraître sur le site philosophindia.fr). Cette étude d'anthropologie historique sur le castillan et la stratégie utilisée pour en démontrer la supériorité sur le latin doit être aussi rapprochée des études, multipliées ces dernières années, sur le Convivio de Dante et les arguments qu'utilisait Dante pour démontrer la supériorité du vernaculaire florentin sur le latin.
Voir la page: Une variété noble de la langue
C'est une toute autre stratégie qu'adopte Dante pour inventer l'italien. Il n'y a, certes, aucune «bivalence stratégique» dans l'œuvre de Dante, mais l'émergence de l'italien dans le respect de la diversité de ses dialectes est un dossier d'anthropologie historique à étudier en parallèle à celui qu'ouvre Kathryn Woolard sur le castillan.
1 / Un genre littéraire en lieu et place de traductions
(487) In early modern Spain, a curious genre of literary texts emerged that could be read at one and the same time in both Latin and Spanish (often called Castilian or Romance by writers of the time). By the beginning of the 16th century, a number of Spanish authors deliberately wrote compositions in such a fashion that, as one of them boasted, “one who knows Latin and no Castilian under- stands everything, and in the same way, one who knows Castilian and no Latin understands it” (Ambrosio de Morales as given in Ruiz Pérez 1991:134).
Dans ces créations littéraires bilingues, Woolard souligne “deux dimensions de l'idéologie linguistique” qui les détermine:
(488) Two dimensions of language ideology. They exemplify, first, the manipulation of linguistic boundaries by language specialists and, second, the deliberate mobilization of overlap between languages for rhetorical, social, and political ends, a phenomenon that we refer to as strategic bivalency. The linguistic form of these texts is an extended, specialized kind of punning. The play is not between the two meanings of a single word, since each word allegedly has only one, but rather between its two linguistic affiliations. Just as duality is essential to a pun, so it is also essential to these compositions.
Les virtuoses (grammairiens et écrivains) qui développent ce genre littéraire gomment les frontières entre deux langues distinctes (Such ideological work erases rather than erects boundaries between discrete languages).
Cet «effaçage» (erasure) ou ce gommage des frontières est un processus exactement inverse à celui de la traduction. La traduction — du latin à l'espagnol, en l'occurrence, ou de l'espagnol au latin — fait émerger les langues romanes mais en renforçant les frontières entre langues distinctes et concurrentes du latin. L'idéologie linguistique qui commande cette stratégie de bivalence promeut, au contraire, l'effacement des frontières ou l'abaissement des barrières entre deux langues en contact:
(488) When we study languages in contact, the apparently bounded and discrete languages with which we begin are not simply empirical facts. Rather, they are the products in large part of expert knowledge enacted in discourses such as those of translation, grammars, dictionaries, and style manuals. The texts we examine in this article show that the work of grammarians, philologists, and literary stylists sometimes challenges rather than reinforces the discreteness of linguistic systems. It can aim to move languages toward, as well as away from, one another. Such ideological work erases rather than erects boundaries between discrete languages…
Dans les stratégies de bivalence, les locuteurs bilingues refusent de choisir entre les deux systèmes linguistiques à leur disposition:
(489) Members of bilingual communities may not always choose between their two contrasting linguistic systems. Instead, they may exploit the overlaps that exist not only for linguistic but also for political purposes, using elements that are identical or similar in the two languages in order to lay claim to speaking or writing the two languages at once. We understand such a phenomenon as an act of language politics, and often of politics through language.
2 / Jeux littéraires de virtuoses
(491) These literary exercises were always mannered and probably always playful. They became more artificial and gamelike between the early compositions that were associated with Spanish humanism and late examples.
(495-496) Our second brief extract is from the “Bilingual Dialogue” found in a collection of the work of the Erasmist grammarian Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, “El Brocense” (Morante 1859). That El Brocense should have authored such a composition is particularly noteworthy because he was also the author of the Minerva, a grammar of Latin that was widely read and very influential throughout Europe. El Brocense was also an advocate of teaching in the vernacular, believing that general use would only degrade Latin, not improve students’ mastery of it. For both of these reasons, it is not surprising that his bivalent work is among the most prescriptively correct and virtuosic. We give here the prologue that El Brocense addressed to the reader, because it comments self-referentially and wryly on the form of the dialogue itself:
(2) Mi lector, tu pronunciando
Tam junctos ambos sermones,
Ama sanctas intentiones
Errores dissimulando:
Abhorresce condemnando
Invidiosos detractores,
Confunde falsos lectores
Defensiones allegando.‘My reader, [in] your pronouncing
Both languages so united,
Love the holy intentions
[While] disregarding the errors.
Abhor, condemning,
Invidious detractors,
Confound false readers
[By] offering defenses.’We see here many of the same features discussed in relation to (1). The author, writing in the first person singular, addresses the reader directly, taking advantage of the bivalency of mi, the Latin vocative of the possessive adjective ‘my.’ The direct address to a second person allows the expected reliance on the imperative (ama ‘love’, abhorresce ‘abhor ’, confunde ‘confound’). Once again, cultismos borrowed directly into Spanish from Latin abound, e.g. lector, pronunciando, sermons, intentiones, dissimulando, confunde, defensiones (Coromines 1954). Again the gerund form is ubiquitous (pronunciando, dissumulando, condemnando, allegando). Latin spellings are favored, including again as in (1) tam; the double l of the learned borrowing allegando; double s of dissimulando; and retention of etymological Latin h and s in abhorresce (Span. aborrece). We also see the preservation of Latin c in sanctas, junctos (Sp. santas, juntos). All were learned variations of spellings and corresponding pronunciations of the period (Thomas 1909:41; Ruiz Pérez 1991:132).
3 / Transition idéologique d'une diglossie au bilinguisme
(500) The commentaries on these bivalent texts from the 16th century through the 18th suggest in some senses even more flexibility and fuzziness in the ideological transition from intra-language variation or diglossia to bilingualism.
Woolard et Genovese résument la thèse de Roger Wright concernant la rupture du continuum latin-roman et le passage d'une diglossie interne à la langue latine tardive à un vrai bilinguisme:
(499-500) The sociophilologist Roger Wright (2002a, 2002b) has proposed a compelling if provocative argument that the rupture between Romance and Latin should be understood as primarily a metalinguistic rather than a linguistic phenomenon… For Wright, it was not the formal linguistic difference itself between Latin and Romance that created the boundary between the two. Rather, changing consciousness and interpretation of this difference (and specifically, of the distance of the written form from the spoken vernacular) were necessary to transform a Latin-Romance sociolinguistic continuum into Latin-Romance bilingualism. Wright traces this metalinguistic rupture specifically to the Carolingian reforms of the medieval period that introduced an English speaker’s perspective on Latin into the Romance language world, through new conventions for reading aloud. From this English-influenced viewpoint, Latin was clearly a foreign language, not just a written standard for the vernacular. Wright argues that Latin and Romance became separate metalinguistic concepts in the Iberian Peninsula only after these reforms arrived there in the late 11th century, and that the distinction between the languages was fully consolidated only in the 13th century (Wright 2002b:39– 42). This is considerably later than most historical linguists place the divide on various formal criteria.
References
Wright, Roger (ed.) (1991). Latin and the Romance languages in the early Middle Ages. London & New York: Routledge.
_(2002a). Early medieval pan-Romance comprehension. In J. J. Contreni & S. Casciani (eds.), Word, image, number: Communication in the Middle Ages, 25– 42. Sismel: Galluzzo.
_ (2002b). A sociophilological study of Late Latin. Turnhout: Brepols.
4 / Pratiques langagières bivalentes et code-switching
(505-506) The analytic move we suggest by treating bivalency as potentially strategic parallels the move that John Gumperz led several decades ago, from a psycholinguistic to a sociolinguistic understanding of the related phenomenon of conversational code-switching. Gumperz argued with enduring influence for the field of sociolinguistics that in code-switching what we find should not necessarily be understood as incomplete linguistic mastery or a cognitive access problem. Rather, he identified the social messages that could be signaled by fast-moving alternations between linguistic systems (Blom & Gumperz 1972).
We argue now that, like code-switching, strategic bivalency may serve as a rhetorical tool for bilinguals to renegotiate their linguistic and social positioning by drawing on their two languages, in this case not just in the same speech event but in the very same linguistic elements. Of course, many empirical occurrences of bivalent elements may indeed stem from a lowering of cognitive-linguistic barriers by speakers. But under some contemporary circumstances, just as in the 16th century, it can take more effor t to stay within the constraints of the bivalent zone than to stray outside them, and to do so might sometimes represent an achievement.
5 / Valorisée aux 16ème-17ème, mais décriée aux 19ème-20ème siècles
(501) We emphasize this positive evaluation because of its contrast with more familiar views of bivalency and because of its confirmation of the strategic nature of the phenomenon. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentaries on convergence in minority language communities are almost always censorious, seeing the recourse to bivalency as a sign of the impoverishment of a subordinate language (see Woolard 1999). Within the Romantic nationalist vision, distinctiveness, boundedness, and independence are essential to a “proper” language, in the sense both of a fitting, true language and of a people’s “own” language (lengua propia in Spanish). Within currently prevailing language ideologies, the lack of such distinctiveness and independence is taken to diminish a variety. (Consider the stigma attached in the American popular view to the term “dialect.”) As Albe t Rossich points out, for example, modern critics have interpreted Catalan-Castilian examples of the bivalent genre as evidence of the decadence of Catalan literature, a “lamentable manifestation of dependence and servility with respect to the dominant literature, the negation of all individuality in the lengua propia” (Rossich 1996:509–10). This attitude could be seen in Barcelona in the 1990s in the debate over the media’s use of an allegedly diminished and impure, Castilianized form of Catalan, dismissively labeled “Catalan light” (Woolard 1999:12–14). Ironically, such criticism privileges the dominant language over the subordinated one in that it cedes to the former the bivalent zone shared by the two languages.
In contrast, in the 16th and 17th centuries, bivalent compositions were celebrated as demonstrating a linguistic fact of very positive cultural and political import. Far from debasing the vernacular, mimesis [imitatio] was for the early moderns a means of exalting it and asse ting its beauty and perfection.
Pouvoir écrire ou parler d'une seule et même voix en latin et en espagnol prouvait l'excellence de l'espagnol et sa supériorité sur les autres langues romanes. L'Espagne était donc une nouvelle Rome comme le Castillan un nouveau Latin.
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Le 21ème siècle valorise de nouveau la Bivalence stratégique, mais sous le signe du postmodernisme, de l'hybridité et du métissage, des jeux du langage subvertissant les frontières des langues nationales.
Voir la page: Il n'existe pas de locuteur monolingue