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Nobilior est vulgaris: Dante’s Hypothesis and Sign Language Poetry 189 DAVID M. PERLMUTTER 14 To the memory of Clayton Valli (1951–2003) More than seven hundred years ago, Dante (1305)1 articulated with amazing clarity the concept of “natural language” that many twenty-first-century people still fail to grasp: Vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam quam infantes assuefiunt ab assistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus. I call “vernacular language” that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds; or, to put it more succinctly, I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses. (emphasis mine— DMP) I am greatly indebted to Sharon Allen and Merrie Davidson for working with me on ASL poetry; to Sharon Allen, Peggy Swartzel Lott, Rachel Mayberry, and Carol Padden for help with the text; to Sharon Allen, Rain Bosworth, Page DuBois, Nigel Fabb, Michael Flynn, Pascal Gagneux, Sharon Kwan, Peggy Swartzel Lott, Ceil Lucas, Rachel Mayberry, Donna Jo Napoli, Irina Nikolaeva, Carol Padden, and Jonathan Saville for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter; to Françoise Santore for checking my French; and to Linda Murphy for bibliographical assistance. Responsibility for all errors and inadequacies is mine alone. 1. Botterill (1996, xiii–xiv) places Dante’s writing of the manuscript in the period 1303–1305. The quotations from Dante and their English translations cited here are from Botterill (1996, 3). 190 David M. Perlmutter In Dante’s time, the spoken language or vernacular that children learned without instruction differed considerably from the written language. Today we think of them as different languages: Old Italian and Latin (the latter—no longer anyone’s native language—was governed by consciously promulgated rules that had to be taught). Dante pointed out that not all peoples have this kind of language , which he called “secondary to us,” noting that “few . . . achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study.” He continues: Harum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris: tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata; tum quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur, licet in diversas prolationes et vocabula sit divisa; tum quia naturalis est nobis, cum illa potius artificialis existat. Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third, because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial. Dante is saying that natural language preceded the development of consciously promulgated rules of grammar, that it is universal, and that it is natural to us. His claim that it is the “more noble” was daring at a time when the vernacular was viewed as a degenerate form of the written language. Dante aimed to show that the vernacular is “illustrious, cardinal, aulic, and curial” and “to teach a theory of [its] effective use” (Botterill 1996, 45), with recommendations about what would enable it to achieve the highest poetic expression .2 By writing poetry in it himself, he was, in essence, testing a hypothesis: Dante’s Hypothesis: Natural language has what it takes to serve as the vehicle of poetry. The result was La divina commedia, which established a literary standard for Italian and is considered by many to be one of the finest works of poetry ever written. Dante’s definition of vernacular language as “that which we learn without any formal instruction” includes the sign languages of Deaf communities. Only recently , however, has it become possible to test his hypothesis against these languages in a serious way. TH E EM E R G E N C E O F ASL PO E T R Y At the dawn of the twenty-first century, there are people known as American Sign Language (ASL) poets. Their work is published on videocassette or DVD. Conferences are held where ASL poetry and literature are discussed. All this is relatively new, having emerged only in the 1970s and 1980s. 2. After discussing the range of Italian vernaculars (in what may have been the world’s first dialect survey), he opts for the one used by vernacular poets “which belongs to all Italy, is called the Italian vernacular” (Botterill 1996, 45). [3.144.233.150...

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