Authors

Discussion

The present contribution is an account on the classification and description of the lingua Sclavonica or lingua Illyrica in early modern scholarship. Our points of interest are the writings of Renaissance scholars of different origins and from different backgrounds, but with a shared interest in language and the description of language. As active participants in the 16^th century res publica litteraria (The Republic of Letters), they communicated across religious, political, and ideological boundaries, shared information about their published books or works in progress, and exchanged texts and ideas. Swiss scholar Conrad Gesner (1516–1565) is the author of a pioneering work on comparative linguistics entitled Mithridates: De differentiis linguarum (1555). In this comprehensive survey of the world’s languages, a particular chapter entitled Illyrica sive Sarmatica lingua is dedicated to the origins and native speakers of the Illyrian language – known today as the Slavonic language group. Gesner collected linguistic material on the lingua Illyrica from the previously published writings of Swiss linguist Theodore Bibliander (1509–1564) and Croatian humanist Bartol Đurđević (1506–1566). This paper is an overview of their contributions to the description of the lingua Sclavonica,also called lingua Illyrica at the time, and of the information they shared.