Rules and Grammars of Italian in Eighteenth-century England: The Case of Giuseppe Baretti

Abstract

In England, after the Renaissance, the Italian language enjoyed a renewed interest in the eighteenth-century, due to the appeal of Italian literature, as well as travel, opera, commerce, and fashionable education. This led to a fertile production of language manuals and in particular of grammar texts. Grammar was identified with rules, but in the eighteenth century the trend towards simplification meant that the need to list extensive rules was reassessed. One of the most innovative approaches to grammar in eighteenth-century Britain emerges from the work of the Piedmontese Giuseppe Baretti (1719-89). This essay examines his teaching methodology with regard to grammar rules in his A Grammar of the Italian Tongue (1760), and his treatment of what he called 'a multiplicity of puzzling rules', which, he claimed, can hinder rather than assist the acquisition of Italian as a foreign language, if excessive attention is devoted to them.