Valdés y Salinas: dos actitudes frente a la lengua

Resumen

The concern for the problems of language, an obvious inheritance from Quatrocento, reaches its peak with the humanists of the Spanish Renaissance as much within as outside Spain. Juan de Valdés and Miguel Salinas are two of the many academics who, faced with the reality of a living language, are trying to help in the search for concrete answers to the diverse difficulties raised by the early writings of Castilian romance. Historically and linguistically linked, Salinas and Valdés approach romance fully aware of its Latin base but convinced of the need to establish a pattern which allows an appropriate use of this foundation. From the St. Engracia monastery in Zaragoza, and the courtly atmosphere of the great emperor's Italy come two important answers to the problems of the origin of language, and to the setting down of spelling norms which, changing with the passage of time, can in some way reflect the phonetic and phonological modifications which have taken place. Salinas in Spain, and Valdés elsewhere, are two of the most representative figures with regard to the grammatical theory of the Spanish Golden Age. Despite being linked by a common language an period, they are authors with different views, answers and attitudes to the same problem, that of language.