Speaking in Tongues
Language and Communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4163299 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eric R Dursteler (0000-0003-2420-6161, Brigham Young University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 217 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 47-77 |
| Publication date | 2012-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Past & Present (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pastj/gts023 |
| OpenAlex | W2317641783 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 18 |
Upon arriving in the Mediterranean for the first time, most early modern travellers were struck by the linguistic cacophony that greeted them. In 1608 Thomas Coryat reported that in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, one could ‘heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes’.1 Thirty years later, the intrepid French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier noted thirteen languages in use at a dinner, comprising ‘Latin, French, German, English, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Indian, Syrian and Malaysian’. In this company, a conversation was ‘begun in one language ... continued in another and completed in a third’. This ‘mélange de nations’ resulted in a situation, according to Tavernier, in which ‘there are no Turks or Armenians who do not know three or four languages’.2 At mid century, the Englishman Robert Bargrave reported that the sultans’ ‘territories conteine by generall Credit: 72: distinct Languages 7 speeches; most whereof are dayly spoken in Constantinople’.3 In the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador in Istanbul, experienced this diversity first-hand: I live in a place that very well represents the Tower of Babel; in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian; and what is worse, there is ten of those languages spoke in my own family. My grooms are Arabs, my footmen French, English and Germans, my nurse an Armenian, my housemaids Russians, half a dozen other servants Greeks, my steward an Italian, my janissaries Turks, that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here. They learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it. There is very few men, women or children here that have not the same compass of words in five or six of them. I know myself several infants of three or four year old that speak Italian, French, Greek, Turkish and Russian ... This seems almost incredible to you and is, in my mind, one of the most curious things in this country.4
Ancient history · Armenian · Art · Catalan · German · Greeks · Humanities · Linguistics · Political science · Portuguese · Turkish · Wife · Classics · History · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Linguistics and language evolution
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Quarantine, Diseased Geographies, and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean
Learning Languages in Early Modern England
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Insights from a travel journal
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Language and Power in an English Convent in Exile, C. 1621 – C. 1631
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| Unique citing works | 18 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,38 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2025 (13) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |