Most Artes grammaticae of late antiquity start with a 'phonetic complex' traditionally placed into chapters entitled De voce and De lit(t)eris. The content and terminology of the complex became an object of criticism among humanist scholars. In this paper, the complex will be briefly characterized and then the attitude of Julius Caesar Scaliger towards the term lit(t)era in De causis linguae Latinae will be presented. This contribution will describe in detail Petrus Ramus's definitions of the key terms of the complex and his classification of Latin speech sounds based on a dichotomic approach. In the context of Ramus's dichotomic model of the Latin sound inventory, two vernacular models of the sound inventory of a Slavic language will be analysed. The aim of the paper is to outline how Ramus's approach was adopted in the grammatical texts of a Slavic language: Nudožerinus's Grammaticae Bohemicae libri duo and Anonymous's De litteratura Slavorum germanissima. This research was inspired by the statement of G. A. Padley in Trends in Vernacular Grammar I concerning the small degree of mutual awareness among scholars working in the Latin and vernacular grammatical traditions. 1
Graeco-LatinaBrunensia 21 / 2016 / 2 ČLÁNKY / ARTICLES Ľudmila Buzássyová The 'Phonetic Complex' in Renaissance Latin Grammar Graeco-Latina Brunensia 21 / 2016 / 2 ČLÁNKY / ARTICLES Donat's Ars maior (Keil 1864; GL IV, 368, 15 = Holtz 1981: p. 605): accidunt uni cuique litterae tria, nomen, figura, potestas -'name', 'shape', and 'power/value/phonetic meaning, phone'. 6
Renaissance grammatography and its criticismIn Renaissance grammatography, a critical attitude affected the introductory parts of the Roman Artes grammaticae. The autonomous passage of De voce disappeared, and the De lit(t)era chapter was open to discussion, its content being usually incorporated into the part about orthography or morphology.Renaissance scholars contributed to the history of phonetics with a more consistent distinction between the sound and graphical levels of communication, with a focus on the development of articulatory phonetics. These two facts stemmed from a humanist interest in the practical usage of languages, including Latin and living vernaculars. 7 Before looking at what attention Scaliger and Ramus paid to the phonetic questions, it is firstly important to remember that it had been Erasmus from Rotterdam who had focused the attention of humanists on the pronunciation of Latin sounds in his dialogue De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528).Both Scaliger and Ramus critically addressed the same phonetic questions. However, in the case of Scaliger we can observe his preference for the concept of lit(t)era; its three accidentia; terminological questions about the names of basic classes of speech sounds, mutae, somivocales, etc.; and other questions connected with the relationship between graphemics and phonemics. On the other hand, in addition to the same topics, Ramus built a completely new classification of Latin sounds.
Ľudmila Buzássyo...