THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: STRATEGIC BIVALENCY

The early modern Spanish-Latin texts discussed in this article illustrate the linguistic and ideological phenomenon that Woolard 1999 calls “strategic bivalency.” By “bivalency” we mean the simultaneous membership of a given linguistic segment in more than one linguistic system in a contact setting; strategic bivalency is thus a language user's deliberate manipulation of such elements.²

A bivalent word is one that “belongs” equally to two recognized linguistic codes, descriptively and sometimes even prescriptively. In the prototypical case, the element not only belongs to two systems but is treated by language users as having a fundamentally similar semantic content in both. For example, no is bivalent in English and Spanish, as it also is in many pairs of Romance languages that are in contact, such as Spanish and Catalan. (We might say that no is multivalent across these languages.)³

Sociolinguistic and ethnographic data from modern, 20th-century bilingual communities provided the basis on which Woolard first posited the notion of bivalency. It can be frequent and extended in Romance language pairs such as Catalan and Spanish or Galician and Spanish in contemporary Iberia. For example, Joan Pujolar (2001:162) reports that 20th-century anti-military groups in Catalonia popularized the slang phrase la mili no mola as the slogan of their campaign to support conscientious objection. It reads as ‘military service doesn't please’ bivalently, in both Catalan and Spanish. Similarly, José del Valle (2000:130) quotes a bivalent Galician-Castilian slogan, Porque nos interesa este País ‘Because we care about this nation’. This was used in the 1997 parliamentary elections in Galicia by the Bloque Nacionalista Galego, the second largest party in the Galician autonomous community.

Modern sociolinguistic analysts of language contact have tended to view convergent linguistic practices such as those we are calling “bivalency” as a lowering of mental barriers between the languages or a neutralization of language contrasts (Gardner-Chloros 1995:71; Giacalone Ramat 1995:59; but see Kabatek 1997 for a different view). Woolard 1999 argued, however, that in some cases it is better to think of such zones of linguistic overlap as doubly charged or bivalent rather than neutralized, and the contrast between two languages as still activated for speakers. The incidence of bivalent phenomena is not only an objective fact of linguistic systems nor simply a consequence of a kind of psycholinguistic principle of least effort. Rather, the overlap may be deliberately and strategically mobilized by language users, in relatively effortful attempts to attain pragmatic goals. The texts we examine here are in fact nothing if not labored. It takes work for speakers and writers to stay for long within the confines of a bivalent zone of convergence between languages.⁴

By definition, bivalency is a phenomenon of language ideology because it depends on the diagnosis of a communicative act as belonging to distinct recognized systems. Language ideologies (cultural construals of the intersection of linguistic structure and social relationships) inevitably carry a freight of social and political interests (Irvine 1989:255, Woolard 1998:3–4). As suggested by the Catalan and Galician sloganeering quoted above, members of bilingual communities may not always choose between their two contrasting linguistic systems. Instead, they may exploit the overlaps that exist not only for linguistic but also for political purposes, using elements that are identical or similar in the two languages in order to lay claim to speaking or writing the two languages at once. We understand such a phenomenon as an act of language politics, and often of politics through language.

However, no direct empirical confirmation was available in the 20th-century data that Woolard first analyzed to show that bivalency was indeed deliberate or strategic. It was only inferred from patterns of linguistic practice that bivalent forms were a socially meaningful choice rather than just a linguistic fact. The set of early modern Spanish compositions that will be discussed in this article remedies this shortcoming and fills the evidentiary gap, providing historical support for the argument developed in that earlier work. These texts give explicit evidence not only of the deliberate nature of bivalency, but also of its strategic use as a valued politico-cultural instrument.

BIVALENCY IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN

More than 40 texts written to be read simultaneously “in the Castilian language and Latin together” (Morales, cited in Ruiz Pérez 1991:134) are known to have been composed in the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish colonies from the 16th through 18th centuries. The earliest known publication dates from 1518, but one text credits an oral performance from 1498. Found in both prose and poetic forms, the bivalent genre ranges from short snippets through a poem of 65 tercets en latin congruo y puro castellano ‘in congruent Latin and pure Castilian’, to an hispano-latino heroic poem of 572 quartets (Briesemeister 1986; Buceta 1932:398–400). There were some similar efforts to compose in other pairs of Romance languages, including Latin-Portuguese, Latin-Catalan (or Valencian), Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-Portuguese, and Latin-Italian, although this last pair arose much later than the others (Carbonero y Sol y Merás 1890:377).⁵

Only very limited and strained attempts were made to compose in Latin and French, no doubt because more extensive phonological change severely limited the bivalent opportunities in that pair of languages (Rossich 1996:507). There are even some triadic compositions in Latin-Spanish-Catalan and Latin-Portuguese-Spanish. Of all of these, however, the Latin-Spanish enterprise was by far the most extensive and well developed (Rossich 1996:507).

In Spain, these compositions were not simply the work of eccentric figures on the margins of the literary world of the time, as might be supposed. Examples such as a “sonnet in two languages” composed of “such words as, at the same time, belong to both languages” (Rengifo 1704:105) were included in a handbook on the art of poetry first published in 1592; it was consulted by enough aspiring poets to be republished several times over the following centuries. Many more bivalent texts were produced, reproduced, or praised by royal chroniclers and tutors and by some of the most important linguistic experts and language stylists of the period. For example, an extended bivalent Latin-Spanish dialogue appears in the work of one of the leading Latin grammarians, Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (known as “El Brocense”) (see ex. 2 below). Although most of these compositions are at best unwieldy as prose or poetry (and hardly exemplars of either language), even the superb Mexican Baroque poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz contributed a poem in bivalent form, first published in 1679 (Carbonero y Sol y Merás 1890:381).

These literary exercises were always mannered and probably always playful. They became more artificial and gamelike between the early compositions that were associated with Spanish humanism and late examples (Buceta 1932:401; Ruiz Pérez 1991:115). Not surprisingly, they have often been characterized in modern Spanish philology as mere parlor tricks, frivolities (Fitzmaurice-Kelly 1904:5), “puerile efforts” (Reyes 1920:51), or inanities (Ruiz Pérez 1991:130). There are, however, some important exceptions to this dismissiveness among philologists, notably two definitive articles on the genre by Erasmo Buceta (1925, 1932)⁶

and recent analyses of specific elements within it by Pedro Ruiz Pérez (1991) and Albert Rossich (1996).⁷ Our discussion is deeply indebted to these philological sources, whose contributions we bring to bear on current linguistic anthropological discussions of language ideologies and on our argument for the potential significance of bivalency.

Buceta (1932:388) characterizes these compositions as “written, really, in neither one language nor the other.” Readers familiar with standard forms of the two languages who peruse the examples given here are likely to agree. These texts strike our modern eye as neither Latin nor Spanish, but more a Latin that has been amputated to fit into a crude Spanish straitjacket. Nonetheless, not only were some of them composed by leading literary figures and scholars, they were given serious attention by influential contemporary commentators, as will be shown in detail below. These forgiving contemporaries discussed the texts in print as if they were really Latin and really Spanish, and as if something important were demonstrated by this dual nature. It is these judgments that draw us to the texts as meriting the attention of scholars of language in society.

EXAMPLES OF THE TEXTS IN QUESTION

Given space limitations, we will present here only a few illustrative extracts from the corpus. An example of the ideological and political as well as the linguistic facets of the bivalent genre is the amusing report given by the Valencian historical chronicler Martín de Viciana in his Book of praise of the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Castilian, and Valencian languages, published in 1574. Viciana claimed to reproduce a speech that had been given in 1498 by Garcilaso de la Vega (father of the famed Spanish poet of the same name) when he was Spanish ambassador to the court of Pope Alexander VI.⁸

This was a time when serious geopolitical contentions between Spain and France were playing out at the papal court, and Garcilaso's speech was addressed as a challenge to the French ambassador (Buceta 1925).

In what now reads like a comedy routine clothed in Gothic print, Viciana reported that four ambassadors to the papal court – the Spanish, the French, the Portuguese, and the Tuscan – were debating one day about whose language was superior. They agreed that since Latin was the universal language, whichever could be shown to be more like Latin would be better than the others. A contest was proposed, and a few days later they gathered again to give orations that would meet the challenge, not only in their content but in their very form. Only the Spanish ambassador Garcilaso produced a speech, excerpts of which follow:

‘If you, France, [are] most Christian, Spain [is] most ancient and Catholic, honored by the supreme Roman Pontiff, Pope Innocent VIII. And [I am] asking you, France, to write such proofs by practicing your eloquence and excellence: as many and such as I write concerning Spain; [by] comparing peoples, nations, and provinces, such as I manifest by speaking and by going on for some pure Latin and Spanish pages…. Answer, France, give and propose contrary proofs: and show such great nations, such fertile and fruitful provinces, such peoples so ingenious, so scientific, virtuous, prudent, just, modest, liberal, gracious, and splendid.’⁹

According to Viciana, the French ambassador capitulated without performing after hearing Garcilaso. The Portuguese announced that he considered himself represented by Spain, and the Tuscan asserted that although his own language could be shown to be the best, the hour was late and he would have to respond another day. That day never came. Viciana concluded that the Spanish language carried the honors henceforth, though he followed immediately with his own challenge in an attempt to award that honor to “Valencian” (Viciana's name for his native form of Catalan), as we will show later in this article.

Nearly the same text that Viciana reported as Garcilaso's speech was presented as the Epistola Latina et Hispanica ‘Latin and Spanish Letter’ in one of the earliest Spanish grammars written to instruct speakers of other languages (Lovaina 1977 [1555]). The anonymous grammarian of Louvain described the letter as “written in Spanish words that were Latin, in such a manner that, retaining in each language the force, nature, and propriety, and even the syntax or order and agreement among the parts of speech, the Latins took them for Latin, and Spaniards for Spanish” (Lovaina 1977:4).¹⁰

This makes entirely explicit the view of these texts that is of interest to us, a view that treats them as fully bivalent in the strictest sense.

In the present discussion we wish to focus less on the details of the linguistic form than on the way in which that form was received at the time, as simultaneously Latin and Spanish. For our purposes, the central data are not the textual forms in and of themselves but rather the comments evaluating these forms from authors and their contemporaries. Of particular note is the positive politico-cultural significance that such perceived linguistic duality was given by authors and observers. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to discuss briefly some of the key linguistic structures and strategies on which these compositions typically drew, as they are exemplified in this and other brief extracts. Together with the contemporary metalinguistic commentary, they allow us not only to appreciate the artifice and effort demanded by extended bivalency but also to glimpse which features of linguistic form were counted as revealing the nature of a language and which were generously overlooked as not of the linguistic essence.

First, the generic form of Garcilaso's speech, direct address to a second person, typifies the corpus, in which dialogue, epistle, and apostrophe predominate. These genres were very important literary forms of the period and thus were perfectly conventional and fitting. However, the choice was also linguistically strategic, since all involve address of one person to a second. The first and second person singular grammatical forms afforded the most morphological congruence between Spanish and Latin, not only in the second person pronouns (tu and te in ex. 1), but particularly in present active verb endings, e.g., scribo (1st sing. pres. indic. ‘I write’) and scribas (2nd sing. pres. subjunc. ‘you should write’). The informal Spanish imperative was identical with the Latin and appears repeatedly in this text: Respõde, da, propone. These forms are relied on heavily throughout the corpus, and most other verb incidence is fundamentally excluded.

Infinitives were systematically avoided, suggesting that the Spanish loss of the syllabic final -e of Latin infinitives (e.g., Lat. rogare, Span. rogar) was considered a salient difference between the two languages. In contrast, throughout the entire corpus there is a striking reliance on the -ando gerund form, seen here in rogando (asking), tractando (treating, practicing), comparãdo (comparing), dictãdo (speaking), continuãdo (continuing).¹¹

This form has different syntactic roles in the standard forms of the two languages (present participle in Spanish, ablative of the gerund in Latin), giving the text slightly different nuances depending on whether it is read through the filter of Latin or Spanish. But this difference seems to have been ignored, and the form was intended to be understood in these texts in a nominative or absolute sense, rather than ablative. Ruiz Pérez (1991:132) points out that these uses of the gerund not only allowed authors to avoid differences in verb morphology, they also resolved the problem of nonbivalent conjunctions, which were simply omitted as clauses were chained together with the gerund.

Ex. (1) gives an idea of the very limited syntax that resulted from the constraints of working in this bivalent zone of overlap between Latin and Spanish. In addition to repetitions of the forms mentioned above, the zero copula that occurs twice in the first line to avoid differences between the two languages in the verb forms is stilted and artificial for both languages (‘If you, France, [are] most Christian, Spain [is] most ancient …’). Much of the text from which (1) is taken consists simply of long lists of adjectives, as in the final sentence of the extract; many other such compositions rely similarly on chains of adjective–noun enumerations.

Contemporary commentary suggested that the lexicon, more than syntax or even morphology, was the defining aspect of language in determining bivalency. Indeed, this is consonant with the importance of the “copiousness” of a language's vocabulary for establishing its merit in the early modern period. The measure of a language was the sum of its individual words. Showing the focus on vocabulary, one contemporary wrote of the bivalent texts: “Making these compositions is more a matter of work than skill, because one has to gather an abundance of words, and from there pull out the ones that are appropriate for the purpose” (Carvallo, cited in Briesemeister 1986:114). Ex. (1) exemplifies how heavily authors depended on learned words, or cultismos, that had in fact been borrowed directly from Latin into Spanish since the medieval period. Such words retained their Latin form not only because they were late – in some cases, extremely recent – additions to Spanish, but also because deliberate preservation of Latin pronunciation would display an educated speaker's own Latinity. Among the lexical items in this short excerpt that are learned or semi-learned Latinisms or cultismos are antiquissima, decorate, summon, probationes, excellentia, comparando, manifestando, fructiferas, fertiles, ingeniosas, scientificas, virtuosas, prudentes, modestas, graciosas, magnificas (Coromines 1954). Such learned Latinate words were, however, perfectly appropriate to the literate register to which the bivalent genre belongs, as Ruiz Pérez has observed (1991:132), and they would not have made these texts seem anomalous.

The bivalent lexicon with which the authors worked was limited almost entirely to the first three Latin noun declensions and to the first and third verb conjugations (infinitives ending in -are, -ere), because morphological identity was preserved only in these, and even then only partially. The noun morphology used throughout the collection of texts excludes almost all Latin cases except the nominative, accusative, and ablative. Often, fortuitous matches across different cases are exploited. For example, in de tua eloquentia (ex. 1), Vulgar Latin de + ablative has replaced the genitive. The form of the ablative happens to coincide with the Spanish noun form, which is uninflected.

Finally, (1) shows typical orthographic strategies of Latin-Spanish bivalency. Standard abbreviations were mobilized to avoid forms that were not equivalent. These did not stand out as anomalous, however, because such abbreviations were very common in the usual orthography of the period. In (1), the Gothic equivalent of an ampersand elided the contrast between Latin et and Spanish y. This suggests that the written form was treated as being as significant as the oral, even though this was alleged to be the report of a spoken event.¹²

However, for most other features and in most of the compositions, identity of pronunciation generally trumped dissimilar spelling. The arbiter of poetry Juan Díaz Rengifo (1704:104) wrote about his exemplar of a bivalent sonnet: “It is true that the writing of one language and the other are different, but it is enough that the pronunciation be one, or almost one.”

Archaic, Latinizing orthographic forms were generally favored over Spanish orthography, in keeping with the purpose of the texts to demonstrate how Latin-like Spanish was (rather than how Spanish Latin was). For example, in. (1), scribo, scribas ‘I write’, ‘you should write’ lack the Spanish prothetic e- (escribo, escribas). Other Latin spellings include the preservation of the double s where Spanish has one (e.g., antiquissima) and similarly the double l of excellentia. Orthographic t was retained before the suffix -ia, where even learned contemporary Spanish would often have substituted c (as also seen in excellentia). Lucien-Paul Thomas (1909:40) points out that these Latinate spellings coexisted in the Spanish of the period with the forms that have since become normative (escribo, excelencia), and were accepted then as conforming to an etymologically oriented orthography.¹³

The Latin spelling tam also occurs in this text and appears very frequently in the corpus, rather than the Spanish spelling tan ‘such’. However, the pronunciation would have been the same in Spanish, since preconsonantal nasals are homorganic and word-final nasals are always alveolar.¹⁴

Our second brief extract is from the “Bilingual Dialogue” found in a collection of the work of the Erasmist grammarian Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, “El Brocense” (Morante 1859).¹⁵

That El Brocense should have authored such a composition is particularly noteworthy because he was also the author of the Minerva, a grammar of Latin that was widely read and very influential throughout Europe. El Brocense was also an advocate of teaching in the vernacular, believing that general use would only degrade Latin, not improve students' mastery of it. For both of these reasons, it is not surprising that his bivalent work is among the most prescriptively correct and virtuosic. We give here the prologue that El Brocense addressed to the reader, because it comments self-referentially and wryly on the form of the dialogue itself:

We see here many of the same features discussed in relation to (1). The author, writing in the first person singular, addresses the reader directly, taking advantage of the bivalency of mi, the Latin vocative of the possessive adjective ‘my.’ The direct address to a second person allows the expected reliance on the imperative (ama ‘love’, abhorresce ‘abhor’, confunde ‘confound’). Once again, cultismos borrowed directly into Spanish from Latin abound, e.g. lector, pronunciando, sermons, intentiones, dissimulando, confunde, defensiones (Coromines 1954). Again the gerund form is ubiquitous (pronunciando, dissumulando, condemnando, allegando). Latin spellings are favored, including again as in (1) tam; the double l of the learned borrowing allegando; double s of dissimulando; and retention of etymological Latin h and s in abhorresce (Span. aborrece). We also see the preservation of Latin c in sanctas, junctos (Sp. santas, juntos). All were learned variations of spellings and corresponding pronunciations of the period (Thomas 1909:41; Ruiz Pérez 1991:132).

A third example will lead us directly to our discussion of the ideological significance of the genre in the next section. Ex. (3) appeared in a book that was much discussed in its time, an influential history of the Spanish language by the respected philologist Bernardo José de Aldrete (1992 [1606]). In that work, Aldrete repeated the Italian humanist historian Lucio Marineo Siculo's observation that he had read “letters written in Spanish that jointly were in Latin” (Aldrete 1992:187). Noting that many such works had been published and naming a few, Aldrete asserted that the following brief excerpt would suffice to prove the point:

This passage is unusual in that it is expository and relies heavily on third person. As a result, the verbs are not perfectly bivalent in their written form. The third person plural Latin –t is retained in the orthography (tractant, procurant, est, dant, collocant), where it would not have been in Spanish (Span. tratan, procuran, es, dan, colocan). Nonetheless, this form would have worked when read aloud in Spanish, because final -nt in that language is unstopped. Once again, then, there is a preference for Latinity in the literate form and satisfaction with identity in the oral form (seen also in the now familiar tam, the learned retention of c in tractant, and the double l in collocando).

Learned borrowings into Spanish from Latin are again a staple of the vocabulary: inutiles, machinas, exquisitas, superfluas, molestia, doctrinas, necessarias, collocando, deprauando,¹⁶

facillima, animos, professores, varias, discrepantes (Coromines 1954). Largely owing to such cultismos, the lexicon and morphology of this passage are shared by the two languages, except the anomalously Latin-only fructus ‘fruits’. This retains the Latin fourth declension accusative plural form in place of Spanish frutas.

The expository form of this text allows us a few more comments on the morphosyntax of Latin-Spanish bivalency. Because of the loss of most case markings in Spanish, few Latin nouns or adjectives are bivalent with Spanish in the nominative as well as the accusative case, but the plural forms inutiles, artes, and gentes, from the third declension in Latin, are possible and appear in this text. Vanas, tantas, and machinas (Span. máquinas) are examples of the Latin first declension, which to be bivalent in Spanish may be used only in the accusative form, as they are here. The second declension Latin plurals are bivalent with Spanish only in the accusative, as animos is here. Second declension singular nouns and adjectives are bivalent only in the ablative; for example, quanto (learned Span. spelling of cuanto ‘how much’), tanto ‘so much’. These forms appear in (3), where the literal meaning of the Latin ablative is ‘by how much … by so much’, but their use with maiores … maior renders them adverbial as in Spanish.

It is apparent in this example, as in (2) and to some extent in (1), that the Latin a- conjugation predominates in the bivalent lexicon. Of the Spanish conjugations, the -are forms retain the personal endings most similar to Latin.¹⁷

Finally, this composition, like the others, relies heavily on the signature feature of the gerund, such as mostrando, collocando, and deprauando.

In sum, these three examples show recurring lexical choices and repeated discursive, lexical, morphological, syntactic, and orthographic strategies that authors relied on to create these bivalent texts. It is clear that a standard repertoire of techniques and even some boilerplate collocations developed and were imitated from author to author. However, it is also apparent that effort, artifice, and the forbearance that El Brocense begged of his reader were all needed in order to meet the constraints of the dual linguistic norms. In the next section we will consider the motivation that sustained such efforts, by examining more closely the explicit discussion of the bivalency of these texts by authors and contemporaries, and the value that was attributed to them.

RECOGNITION AND IDEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EARLY MODERN BIVALENCY

We begin our exploration of the contemporary recognition and ideological significance accorded bivalency with the commentary Bernardo de Aldrete offered on the text shown in our ex. (3). Aldrete invoked his example of the Latin-Spanish genre as evidence for his argument that the Spanish language, which he called “Romance,” had descended from Latin. Although it might seem that this theory of linguistic origins should have been uncontroversial, it in fact had been called sharply into question in Aldrete's time. In a vitriolic dispute that commanded the attention of royalty, clergy, and literary luminaries, Aldrete's opposition argued that Spanish was not descended from Latin at all, but rather was the primordial language of Iberia, one of the 72 languages created by God at Babel. Gregorio López Madera, a royal prosecutor and jurist who rose to great power in the Castilian court, was the most vociferous proponent of this primordialist position.

This linguistic controversy intertwined with the political and cultural management of the expansive Spanish empire in ways far too complex to summarize here (see Woolard 2002, 2004). In relation to the literary genre that is our focus, however, the important aspect of the debate was the question it raised about honor and insult to the Spanish nation and fatherland (la patria). For López Madera, nothing but God-given and timeless autonomy – political, cultural, and linguistic – could honor the Spanish nation, and the suggestion of derivation, even from Latin, was a profound insult to it. For others, a claim to inheritance of the linguistic mantle of Rome glorified the Spanish nation and even legitimated its empire. Aldrete's work on the Latin origins of the language bolstered this version of Spanish nationalist sentiment even though it offended López Madera's patriotism.

The chapter of Aldrete's linguistic history in which he discussed the bivalent compositions was entitled “In which it is shown that the Latin language is not completely destroyed in our Romance, because speaking in Romance one can simultaneously also speak Latin” (Aldrete 1992:186). He asserted that the language in such bivalent texts, “at the same time as being [Romance] is also Latin, without a single defect, and with the same meaning” (1992:186). Aldrete quoted approvingly the prologue to the poem he excerpted, which posited an almost mystical relation between Latin and Romance, linked through the concept of the figura: “The Latin language has not been destroyed to the extent that the figure (figura) of that ancient Roman language can't be recognized in the language that we vulgarly use. Because we can say many things in Romance that are at the same time in Latin” (Aldrete 1992:187). The figura is a medieval exegetical notion in which the events of one epoch are seen as present in those of another, with both understood as equally real in their coexistence (Auerbach 1952:9). Invoking this sense of simultaneous reality, Aldrete concluded that the short sample text he gave was “sufficient to show not only that Romance descended from the Latin language, but also … that [Latin] has not yet been completely destroyed or consumed” in the process (Aldrete 1992:188).

We have found only one contemporary commentator who denied any linguistic significance to these bivalent texts. Unsurprisingly, this was Aldrete's adversary in the heated debate over the origins of Spanish, Gregorio López Madera. Since López Madera held that Spanish was not a corruption of Latin at all, but rather an independent and God-given language, he dismissed the bivalent Latin-Spanish texts. Such compositions were easy to concoct for any two languages, he argued, whether related or not, because they depended on “general manners of speaking” that are common to diverse languages. Such similarities are mere “accident,” he wrote, and not what in principle one should attend to in determining the relation between languages (López Madera 1601:68r). That is, nothing of linguistic essence was revealed in such texts, in López Madera's view.

All other contemporaries whose comments we have found in the published record agreed with Aldrete that these texts were of some linguistic import. Juan de Robles, for example, was a cultural conservative and a Quixotic defender of what he called “the beauty of that Princess Dulcinea, our language” from what he considered to be the depredations of Baroque innovators (Gómez Camacho 1992:21). Robles tactfully discussed the dispute between Aldrete and López Madera, and he was cautious about criticizing the views of the politically powerful López Madera. Nonetheless, Robles concluded that bivalent compositions in Latin and Spanish showed indisputably that the contemporary vernacular had “multiplied” from Latin (Robles 1992:139).¹⁸

Robles gave his own example of “these compositions that have been written with such words that they are at once Latin and Romance, and they are increasing every day, as we see.”

Francisco Quevedo, a leading figure in Spain's literary Golden Age (Siglo de Oro), also commented not only on Aldrete and López Madera's dispute but also on the bivalent genre itself. In a 1609 manuscript entitled (revealingly, for our purposes) “Spain Defended” (España defendida), the cantankerous Quevedo defended the nation's honor against attacks by Northern European intellectuals such as Scaliger and Mercator on Spanish scholarship, literature, and Latinity. Invoking several bivalent compositions, including the one presented by Viciana, Quevedo wrote that “one can make an entire book that is Latin and Romance, with the proper grammar and words” (Rose 1916:154).

The opinions of all of these elite figures, other than López Madera, illustrate well the most basic point that we want to highlight: Language users may deliberately present themselves as using two languages at one and the same time in a single linguistic act. As seen in Aldrete's discussion, this almost mystical literary project of bivalent writing offers a challenge to the conceptualization of languages as discrete systems, as either one or the other. It is not the case that Spanish is simply denied existence as a distinct entity and absorbed into Latin through these compositions. Rather, their dual nature was emphasized by all. At one and the same time that Spanish was celebrated in these commentaries as nothing if not Latin, it was also celebrated as Romance or Spanish, a distinct and increasingly national (i.e., politically symbolic) language. One 19th-century commentator put the paradox very aptly: Only after the entry into the modern period, when the “boundaries of the languages of the races and nations had been completely delimited,” could poets exploit their similarity in such bilingual compositions (Carbonero y Sol y Merás 1890:376). The existence of an ideology of boundaries is necessary in order for them to be transgressed.¹⁹

The sociophilologist Roger Wright (2002a, 2002b) has proposed a compelling if provocative argument that the rupture between Romance and Latin should be understood as primarily a metalinguistic rather than a linguistic phenomenon (see also Janson 1991; see other contributors to Wright 1991 for debate over this position). For Wright, it was not the formal linguistic difference itself between Latin and Romance that created the boundary between the two. Rather, changing consciousness and interpretation of this difference (and specifically, of the distance of the written form from the spoken vernacular) were necessary to transform a Latin-Romance sociolinguistic continuum into Latin-Romance bilingualism. Wright traces this metalinguistic rupture specifically to the Carolingian reforms of the medieval period that introduced an English speaker's perspective on Latin into the Romance language world, through new conventions for reading aloud. From this English-influenced viewpoint, Latin was clearly a foreign language, not just a written standard for the vernacular. Wright argues that Latin and Romance became separate metalinguistic concepts in the Iberian Peninsula only after these reforms arrived there in the late 11th century, and that the distinction between the languages was fully consolidated only in the 13th century (Wright 2002b:39–42). This is considerably later than most historical linguists place the divide on various formal criteria.

The commentaries on these bivalent texts from the 16th century through the 18th suggest in some senses even more flexibility and fuzziness in the ideological transition from intra-language variation or diglossia to bilingualism. Indeed, Alejandro Coroleu has argued that the grammarian El Brocense (author of our ex. 2) saw Latin and vernacular literature as forming complementary parts of a continuous whole and “not as two sharply divided corpuses” (Coroleu 1999:129–30). It is not so surprising, then, to find that this same eminent grammarian composed an extended Latin-Spanish bivalent dialogue.

These literary claims to the identity between early 17th-century Spanish and Latin may be somewhat reminiscent of the proud myth that modern-day Appalachians speak Elizabethan English. A difference, however, is that Appalachian is still conceptualized as English, and thus simply as a form of that language with a longer and more direct pedigree than neighboring dialects. For the study of language ideology, what is remarkable in the Spanish case is the conceptualization of the discourse as being two different things, Spanish and Latin, at the same time. The characterizations we have quoted all write of dual languages and dual intelligibility, of a discourse being two kinds of systemic acts at the same time and as readable in either or both of them.

THE POSITIVE VALUE OF BIVALENCY

The bivalency of these texts was not only explicit and deliberate, it was also positively valued by authors and their contemporaries, as several of the quotes given above have already suggested. These compositions were not parodies or mockeries of hybrid speech in the way that macaronic texts that mix languages often are (Dowling 1981). Instead, these were both offered and taken as celebrations of the vernacular (Rossich 1996:512). Elite Spaniards were increasingly conscious of their language in this period and anxiously defended its adequacy and even its particular genius (as our earlier brief mention of the dispute between Aldrete and López Madera indicates). From one perspective, emulation of Latin was an important means of the defense.

We emphasize this positive evaluation because of its contrast with more familiar views of bivalency and because of its confirmation of the strategic nature of the phenomenon. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentaries on convergence in minority language communities are almost always censorious, seeing the recourse to bivalency as a sign of the impoverishment of a subordinate language (see Woolard 1999). Within the Romantic nationalist vision, distinctiveness, boundedness, and independence are essential to a “proper” language, in the sense both of a fitting, true language and of a people's “own” language (lengua propia in Spanish). Within currently prevailing language ideologies, the lack of such distinctiveness and independence is taken to diminish a variety. (Consider the stigma attached in the American popular view to the term “dialect.”) As Albert Rossich points out, for example, modern critics have interpreted Catalan-Castilian examples of the bivalent genre as evidence of the decadence of Catalan literature, a “lamentable manifestation of dependence and servility with respect to the dominant literature, the negation of all individuality in the lengua propia” (Rossich 1996:509–10). This attitude could be seen in Barcelona in the 1990s in the debate over the media's use of an allegedly diminished and impure, Castilianized form of Catalan, dismissively labeled “Catalan light” (Woolard 1999:12–14). Ironically, such criticism privileges the dominant language over the subordinated one in that it cedes to the former the bivalent zone shared by the two languages.

In contrast, in the 16th and 17th centuries, bivalent compositions were celebrated as demonstrating a linguistic fact of very positive cultural and political import. Far from debasing the vernacular, mimesis was for the early moderns a means of exalting it and asserting its beauty and perfection (Rossich 1996:512). If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, in these bivalent efforts the flattery was of the imitator, not just the model (not so surprising given the importance of the exercise of imitatio in classical learning). As Buceta observed, these “seeming bagatelles were manifestations of the Renaissance movement to affirm the vernacular language” (1932:389). To the degree that they demonstrated its resemblance to the dominant language, such compositions were seen by proponents to vindicate rather than condemn a subordinate literary language (Rossich 1996:510).

Identity with Latin thus was taken to show not only the intrinsic worth of Spanish, but also its superiority over other contenders. The descriptive title of one of the earliest bivalent texts made this explicit: “Dialogue among Siliceus, Arithmetic, and Fame in the Spanish and likewise Castilian language … which disagrees little or not at all from Latin speech; by which it is clearly most easily concluded that Castilian speech comes before the rest except of course for Greek and Latin” (from the Latin original as given in Ruiz Pérez 1991:135). Its author, the early Spanish humanist Fernán Pérez de Oliva, was known to hold his native language in great esteem. “In a man of discretion, a principal aspect of prudence is knowing well his native language … which is the tie to friendships, the witness to wisdom, and the sign of virtue,” he wrote (Abellán 1967:46). His nephew and editor, Ambrosio de Morales (himself a respected humanist, tutor to royalty, and author of another bivalent text), asserted that his uncle's bivalent dialogue showed “the great love that my teacher had for the Castilian language, that made him demonstrate its excellence through the great likeness it has with Latin, so esteemed and celebrated as very excellent among all the languages of the world” (Ruiz Pérez 1991:134).

Since Latin was, after Hebrew and Greek, the most prestigious language in the Western world, the alleged fact that one could write or speak at one and the same time in Latin and Spanish was taken to demonstrate not only the excellence of Spanish itself but also its superiority over other European vernaculars. This same technique was on occasion turned against Spanish itself. Having established Garcilaso's demonstration of the superiority of Castilian over all competitors at the papal court (ex. 1), Viciana then went on in the same text to promote his own native vernacular, Valencian (his name for the form of Catalan he spoke).²⁰

Viciana asserted that Latin had in fact undergone extensive corruption in Spanish while, in contrast, Valencian remained truer to Latin roots, containing “over three thousand words” that were “pure Latin.” Viciana demonstrated this in a selective comparative inventory of the vocabulary of the three languages. A few excerpts from some six pages of examples he chose are reproduced in (4), in the form in which Viciana gave them. (We have added English glosses.)

Viciana understood his comparative list to demonstrate that Valencian was more similar to Latin lexically and morphologically than Castilian was. Since Castilian's superiority over others had already been demonstrated by Garcilaso, the Valencian Viciana reasoned that Valencian truly took precedence over other languages.

As seen in Viciana's work, rivalry among the Romance languages surfaced repeatedly in the commentaries on these texts. Italian was a particular target for the Spaniards because of its already recognized status as the daughter of Latin. Much of the praise for Spanish-Latin bivalent compositions made comparisons unflattering to the Italian language or Tuscan. For example, writing in 1589 “of things Romance and Latin,” the humanist Luis Zapata boasted: “Although they say that the Tuscan language is corrupted Latin, ours is uncorrupted Latin, and there is no language closer to Latin than our glorious Spanish” (Zapata 1999:227).

One of the earliest discussions of a kind of bivalency was motivated by this rivalry between Spanish and Italian. This appeared in the Spanish humanist Juan de Valdés's charming Diálogo de la lengua (1984, from ms. of 1535), written during his lengthy stay in Rome.²¹

In it, the character “Valdés” is repeatedly asked by his Italian interlocutors which he believes is more similar to Latin – Tuscan or Castilian (Valdés 1984:130). Valdés concedes that Tuscan has more whole Latin words but asserts that more of Castilian's vocabulary is corrupted Latin. Had the full forms been retained, rather than corrupted by careless writers and speakers, Valdés argues, then any book written in Latin could be understood by a Castilian, and any book written in Castilian understood by a “Latin” (1984:256–57). Valdés gives examples of Castilian proverbs, which he says represent “the purest Castilian.” Asked what they think of the similarity of these proverbs to the Latin equivalents that Valdés provides (which he confesses are “kitchen Latin, but understandable”), the Italians indeed concede with some amazement, “Que es casi lo mesmo” ‘It is almost the same’ (1984:258).

In his discussion of the text given in (3) here, Bernardo de Aldrete also noted that it demonstrated the superiority of Spanish over Italian in this respect. The Italian language is well known to be “a daughter of Latin,” he wrote, but it can produce only very short discourses bivalent in Latin, while ones of considerable length were possible in Spanish. In the same vein, Juan de Mariana, in his famous Historia general de España in 1601, wrote that the affinity of Castilian with Latin is so great that it enjoys “that which is not given even to the Italian language, jointly and with the same words and context one can speak Latin and Castilian, in prose as in verse” (Bahner 1966:95–96 n.)

The competitive nationalistic implications in the bivalent attempts to emulate Latin often went beyond cultural considerations to the religious and political. The defense of Castilian was more than just the defense of the vernacular; it was a defense of a national language conceived of as a pillar of la patria (Ruiz Pérez 1991:113), as some of the quotes about “our” glorious language have already suggested. The political implications of the genre were illustrated in Viciana's account of Garcilaso's exploits at the papal court. A demonstration of linguistic superiority supported Spain's claim to precedence in international affairs, of which the papal court was an important locus.

Buceta argued that the political implications of Latin-Spanish bivalency were not only nationalist but were also part of an “egregious imperial tradition” (1932:388). Texts that showed that Spanish could be identified as the closest and most legitimate heir to Latin supported a Spanish claim to Latin's legacy not only as the most prestigious but also as the universal language. In keeping with the principle of translatio imperii ‘transfer of imperial power’ of medieval political theory, “if the Spanish language was the incontrovertible heir of the Roman language, then Spain could also claim for itself the patrimony of that great empire” (Buceta 1932:389; see also Ruiz Pérez 1991:114). For example, the longest bivalent poem, a panegyric to the colonial city of Lima, was dedicated to Charles II, “Emperor of the Indies, King of the Spains.” That dedication asserted that the rare privilege of identity with Latin “is the prize of the purity of the Roman Catholic faith” that has been awarded to “our Spain and its discreet, elegant language.” It characterized the “union and identity” with the universal language, Latin, as a “mysterious privilege and admirable prerogative of our Catholic nation which gives it advantage over all others of the orb” (cited in Buceta 1932:398–99). That is, the figura of Latin that Aldrete saw in Spanish, discussed earlier in this article, established that the figura of the Roman Empire could be seen in the expanding Spanish global empire. As Briesemeister (1986:105) has put it, the identification of the two languages was taken to signify that “Spain was the new Rome, and Castilian the new Latin.”