From dogs and hounds to languages and dialects
Chapter 4 illustrates the way in which the Swiss humanist Conrad Gessner, an important language scholar, bibliographer, and zoologist, conceived of the Latin term dialectus in opposition to lingua. Renaissance intellectuals were confronted with a major information explosion, also on the languages of the world, and Gessner was one of the first to try and classify human speech in all its diversity. He did so in his Mithridates of 1555, the first ever language catalogue, in which the term dialectus frequently appeared. The word served to bring more nuance into the relationships between speech forms and is, as it was not in ancient and medieval times, clearly taken to be a variety of a language. For this interpretation, Gessner was inspired not only by ancient sources but also by the works of his contemporaries. Unlike Roger Bacon, the Swiss humanist was not an isolated pioneer, but the exponent of an early sixteenth-century trend.