Project description
The rise of contrastive grammar in the Middle Ages
Despite today’s concerns about the challenges posed by migration, history reveals how migration could represent new opportunities and have a positive impact. The migration flow from the Byzantine Greek empire in the late Middle Ages and particularly after the fall of Constantinople in Europe represented a first major brain drain from the East to the West. Western Europeans met a new culture and a language with a rich cultural and grammatical tradition. The EU-funded MigraLing project will study the impact migrants had on the transformation of grammar from a monolingual Latin-centric specialised knowledge to a multilingual discipline taking into consideration that the teaching of the Greek language led to contrastive access to language studies.
Objective
Migration and its societal impact have never been higher on the agenda than in our globalized world, which is why it features prominently in the Horizon 2020 Work Programme 13. It is a challenge that not only poses problems, but also offers opportunities in various ways. The possibility of a positive impact of migration often tends to be neglected in present-day debates. History, however, demonstrates that optimistic expectations should not necessarily remain unattainable. The crumbling apart of the Byzantine Greek empire in the late Middle Ages, for instance, engendered a steady influx of Greek migrants into Western Europe during the Renaissance. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 further stimulated this population movement, triggering a first major brain drain from the Greek world. This confronted Western Europeans not only with another culture, but also with another language boasting a rich cultural and grammatical tradition, the full impact of which remains to be investigated. The proposed action aims to counter this state of affairs by studying an important linguistic dimension of this vast research lacuna: the way in which the Greek migrants contributed to transforming grammar from a monolingual, Latinocentric knowledge domain to a multilingual and flexible discipline. Indeed, their intensive teaching of the Greek language and its grammar was a key turning point in the history of linguistic thought, since it gave rise to a contrastive approach to language studies and education. It is this revolutionary development which the action intends to analyse by investigating Renaissance linguistic handbooks. In particular, it aims to study (A) how and why contrastive grammar emerged in the wake of Greek migration movements during the Renaissance, (B) how this related to the Greek migrants' teaching of Western European students, both male and female, and (C) what the impact of this new genre of language study was on later linguistic thought and praxis.
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Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
0313 Oslo
Norway