Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
3 - Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter gives a comparative account of the development and gestalt of plurilingualism in two German imperial cities from late medieval times to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It includes a brief overview of their more general religious, political and cultural backgrounds, discusses early forms of vocational language training, focuses on the precarious existence of the 183 Augsburg and Nuremberg masters of languages found in the archives and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century printed sources, includes a section on the teaching of modern languages to the female gender in early modern times, gives a brief analysis of the surprisingly large corpus of teaching and learning materials available to contemporary foreign language students, and concludes with a short summary of project results.
Keywords: Foreign language education and gender, Grand Tour, internships, learning and teaching materials, masters of languages, mercantile elites, methods of teaching, vocational training
The general background of the study
Five fundamental developments shaped the history of Europe on the verge of the early modern period: the advent of nation states, the inclusion of overseas territories, the formation of competing religious creeds, the further advance and specialization of scientific disciplines and the development of plurilingual elites within a new, multilingual Europe. The processes were inextricably interwoven. Though Latin continued until the eighteenth century and beyond as the idiom of the scientific and educated world, and, of course, as the idiom of the Catholic part of Christianity, its status as an international language gradually dwindled. It was questioned by politicians, philosophers, but also by the newly established Protestant churches, as it had been questioned before, along the eastern European and Byzantine fringe, and along the western borders of the Ottoman Empire, giving rise, ever since the thirteenth century, to linguistic alternatives and to a new profession in the context of trade and missionary work: the profession of cultural mediator. The central European terms for these interpreters and translators, Tolk, Tulmatsch (Dolmetscher in modern German) or Dragoman are not of Latin origin, as they are in the western European languages, but of Slavonic, Hungarian and Turkish descent: The middle High German tolmetsche or tulmetsche is a loanword from the Ottoman Turkish tolmaç.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural IdentityNorthern Europe, 16th–19th Centuries, pp. 79 - 94Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016