Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 38, Issue 1-2, 2011

The Ars Ambrosiana is an early medieval Latin grammatical commentary on Donatus’ Ars maior, written in Northern Italy in the 6th or 7th century A.D. In comparison with preceding grammatical commentaries, the Ars Ambrosiana displays a much more profound Christian-exegetical way of thinking. This study opens with an overview of the historical-cultural context of the grammatical commentary and of the general way of thinking of its anonymous author. The remainder of the article consists in an analysis of the, to some extent highly original, framework which the author uses for describing the Latin language, illustrated by a brief study of the terms agnitio (“recognition”) and nuntiatio (“[linguistic] form”), and their combinations with the adjectives specialis (“special”) and tota (“entire/whole”).

A pioneer of the language sciences, John Bulwer (1606–1656) published on universal language at the beginning of the English ‘scientific revolution’. The Comenians, centered in Bulwer’s own city of London and known for open communication, were interested in this subject area; yet Bulwer’s contact with them, if any, is unclear. This article argues that Bulwer’s Baconian research program on expression and gesture was the response of a non-puritan physician to the convergence of three factors: publication of John Wilkins’s Mercury (1641); ongoing discussions about universal language during Comenius’s stay in England (September 1641–June 1642); and the religious-political crisis of the time.

Hitherto unknown works by Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes (1804–1878) show that he used the term phonème earlier than assumed until now: the word is attested in manuscripts of March 1865 but the publication of the first article in which it occurs was apparently delayed until 1868. Possibly, Dufriche did not “invent” the expression himself but borrowed it, at least indirectly, from the Bulgarian philosopher Petăr Beron (c. 1799–1871), who had used it several years previously for the sound aspect of a word. This usage may also be the reason why some later authors applied the term phonème to sound sequences.

This article suggests a link between Roman Jakobson’s Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (1941) and a short book review of C. & W. Stern’s Die Kindersprache (4th ed., 1928) by Alf Sommerfelt in Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap (1929). The fundamental idea of Kindersprache is that children’s phonological systems develop from initial broad contrasts to subsequent finer contrasts, so that unmarked phonological oppositions which are found in most languages develop first, with any language-specific contrasts developing later. In aphasia, according to Jakobson, the opposite development occurs: finer contrasts disappear first, broader contrasts later. It is shown in this article that Jakobson, in working out this theory, was probably inspired by an idea put forward in the 1929 book review by Sommerfelt. This may help to explain why Jakobson, on the first page of Kindersprache, dedicated his book ‘Til min venn Alf’ (“To my friend Alf”). Jakobson worked on and completed Kindersprache during his stay in Scandinavia 1939–1941, and details connected with his stay and work in this period are also commented on.