Juan de Miranda's "Osservationi della lingua castigliana": An evaluation of its contribution to the Spanish grammatical tradition.

Abstract

Juan de Miranda's Osservationi della lingua castigliana, a grammar of Spanish written for Italians, was first published in 1565. Modern scholars have cited this text for its descriptions of the sixteenth-century Spanish language and also for its copious lists of examples. Nonetheless, it has never been the subject of a major study nor has it been reprinted since 1622. This dissertation studies systematically: (1) Miranda's contributions to Spanish linguistic analysis; (2) the data he supplied concerning sixteenth-century Spanish; and (3) his place in Spanish linguistics. Although Miranda's directives for spelling are conservative, his comments on pronunciation provide valuable data for chronologies of sound changes. In the sections which deal with grammar, he includes important descriptions of morphophonological variation in adjectives, derivational morphology, pronouns of direct address, the functional differences in the verb pairs ser-estar and haber-tener and the use of the gerund. Miranda's origins in Spain are unknown, but the sources for his grammar have become less obscure. This study suggests that Lodovico Dolce's Le Osservationi (Venice, 1550), the anonymous Util y breve institution para aprender los principios y fundamentos de la lengua hespanola (Louvain, 1555) and Giovanni Mario Alessandri d'Urbino's Il paragone della lingua toscana et castigliana (Naples, 1560) contributed to both the structure and content of Miranda's Osservationi. In this way he drew from two important traditions: descriptive grammars in Italy and pedagogical grammars of Spanish printed abroad. The repercussions of Miranda's Osservationi were widespread and long-lived: his grammar served as a model for later pedagogical grammars of Spanish. Cesar Oudin in France (Grammaire espagnolle, 1597), John Sanford in England (An Entrance to the Spanish Tongue, 1611) and Lorenzo Franciosini in Italy (Grammatica spagnuola ed italiana, 1624), among others, borrowed extensively from Miranda's text. The numerous data in his grammar, his synthesis of analyses and descriptions from various grammatical sources and their eventual dissemination throughout Europe have rightly gained Miranda a renowned position in the history of Spanish linguistics.