4. The concept of orality from the Ordine delle lettere to the Diálogo de la lengua

Abstract

Leon Battista Alberti, in his Grammatica Toscana, makes use sixty times, and of the verb dire and seven times of the verb pronuntiare, with the purpose of explaining the rules or making examples, while scrivere appears eight times. In a similar context, Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramática Castellana points out more than one hundred recurrences of the verbs dezir, hablar, pronunciar, in their different conjugations. On the other hand, escrivir appears twenty four times. This speech orientation is also observed in Diálogo de la lengua by Juan de Valdés. The aim of this work is to prove the theoretical convergence of the concept of orality between Italian and Spanish Humanism. For this reason, the contrastive analysis of the linguistic assumptions found in the former romance grammars is carried out.