Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana
This paper aims at a re-consideration of Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana (1525, with later revisions) from a philosophical-linguistic point of view. The author focuses on the way Tolomei described the realm of language as conditioned by social-spatial and time coordinates. Historical factors intertwined, in Tolomei’s mind, both in the origins and in the normal functioning of language, providing a “natural” reason for the multiplication of languages. The myth of Babel was therefore discredited. The author also pays attention to Tolomei’s metalanguage, where the standard nature/arbitrariness distinction was replaced by the nature/art distinction, indebted to the rhetorical tradition. On the one hand, it is argued, Tolomei refrained from using the term arbitrariness because it did not acknowledge the role of chance in language; on the other hand, he employed a multifaceted concept of nature to explain the features that rendered Tuscan a language “in its own right”.