The Linguistic Archive of Renaissance Italian Writers aims to build a solid and reliable database in order to permit the analysis of spelling and morphosyntactic features of Italian texts written between 1450 and 1550. The idea is to create a linguistic section integrated into ALI Autografi dei letterati italiani online site (`Autographs of Italian writers online': http://www.autografi.net), that already hosts more than 40.000 HD images.
The project foresees a double transcription for each manuscript (these, thanks by an agreement with ALI, will be visualized along with HD images of the transcribed autographs): the interpretative one will guarantee readability, preserving the graphic and phono-morphological features; the diplomatic one will bring out aspects that are usually normalized in modern editions.
Scholars will be able to search into the interpretative transcripts and also to focus on a single document (thanks to an open source software, adapted to the targets of the project, displaying the two kinds of transcript next to the HD image of the autograph). In this way, it will be possibile to gather linguistic data that are to date very difficult to carry out on 15th and 16th century Italian language.
Advancement of knowledge
The project will have an impact on the following areas:
1. Research on the history of graphic habits, for which historical data are still fragmentary and not always homogeneous. In order to ensure the highest fidelity in reproducing autograph texts, the database will gather data on both individual uses and more general trends in literary and non-literary texts (see for example the spelling differences observed in Machiavelli's autographs by FROSINI 2014).
2. The study of graphic systems (i.e. uppercase and lowercase, punctuation marks, paragraphs, etc.). The selected time span (1450-1550) is a period of radical transformation of these aspects (see COLUCCIA 2008 and RICHARDSON 2008), for which the database will simultaneously offer to scholars two level of transcripts and HD images for checking each individual graphic feature directly on the autograph.
3. Research on the language of individual writers. The database will provide scholars with first-hand, reliable materials for updated studies on the language of individual authors. This will allow researchers to improve existing studies and to conduct new investigations on writers for which an adequate study is still missing (e.g. Pietro Aretino and Francesco Guicciardini).
4. Research on the graphic and phono-morphological uses of learned writers between the 15th and 16th centuries. Results on individual writers can also offer useful data regarding the quantitative recurrence of the phenomena as a whole. In the introduction of her paper on Machiavelli's language, Giovanna Frosini writes: «per il panorama linguistico coevo (o di pochi decenni precedente), al di là del preziosissimo studio di Paola Manni (1979) e di alcune analisi su testi specifici, non disponiamo di uno strumento (banca dati e vocabolario) analogo al Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini (TLIO), per cui manchiamo della possibilità di un confronto sistematico» [`for the coeval (or within a short time before) linguistic situation, besides the precious study by Paola Manni (1979) and some studies on specific texts, we do not have an instrument (database or vocabulary) like the Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini (TLIO), so we cannot proceed to a systematic comparison'] (FROSINI 2014: 720).
The database aims to contribute to this kind of research by constituting the first nucleus of a textual database able to provide data on XV and XVI century Italian.
Bibliography:
COLUCCIA 2008 = R. Coluccia, Teorie e pratiche interpuntive nei volgari d¿Italia dalle origini alla meta¿ del Quattrocento, in MORTARA GARAVELLI 2008, 65-98.
FROSINI 2014 = G. Frosini, Lingua, in Machiavelli. Enciclopedia Machiavelliana, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2 voll., II, 720-32.
MANNI 1979 = P. Manni, Ricerche sui tratti fonetici e morfologici del fiorentino quattrocentesco, in «Studi di grammatica italiana», VIII, 115-71.
MORTARA GARAVELLI 2008 = Storia della punteggiatura in Europa, dir. da B. Mortara Garavelli, Roma-Bari, Laterza.
RICHARDSON 2008 = B. Richardson, Dalla meta¿ del Quattrocento alla meta¿ del Cinquecento, in MORTARA GARAVELLI 2008, 99-121.