The rediscovery of ancient literature, and concur-
rently with it, the opening up of new intellectual
horizons in the Renaissance both had effects on lan-
guage study. The subtleties of the Schoolmen were
discarded, the more willingly as they were formulated
in what the humanists considered as barbarous Latin.
Grammar again became ancillary to literature. More-
over, Greek again became necessary equipment for
scholars and gentlemen, and Hebrew was studied ex-
tensively. The Renaissance men refused to take the
medieval authorities on trust; they went back to the
sources.
At the same time interest in the popular languages
awakened all over Europe. In his De vulgari eloquentia
(ca. 1300) Dante made an impassioned plea for the
superiority of the mother tongue over the artificial
language of the clerics that was the Latin of the Middle
Ages. As more and more of the popular tongues of
Europe became literary languages, awareness of the
differences among the grammars also naturally in-
creased.
However, no really revolutionary advances were
made in linguistics by the humanists and their immedi-
ate followers, but there is a remarkable sanity and
soberness about much that was written. Thus J. J.
Scaliger published in 1599 a remarkably correct ac-
count of the languages of Europe and their relation
to each other. Also knowledge of the Hebrew language
led to a realization that the parts of speech theory of
antiquity might be called in question: Hebrew gram-
marians recognized only three parts of speech, noun,
verb, and particle. In phonetics progress was made by
the Englishman John Wallis, who published Grammat-
ica linguae anglicanae in 1653. The attention to facts
and common sense rather than to authorities and meta-
physics was bearing fruit.
