Nebrija’s Gramática Castellana in the light of his Introductiones Latinae: a method of language learning for non-native speakers

Abstract

In 1481, Nebrija published the Introductiones Latinae (IL), a revolutionary Latin textbook radically opposite to the textbooks in vogue in that moment, by returning to the model of the ancient artes grammaticae. The work achieved such success that soon afterwards he republished a bilingual version, “Latin-Romance”: by doing this translation, he is already drafting the Gramática Castellana (GC). One of the profits that the author foreshadows for the GC is the possibility of learning more effectively the Latin language as it is described in the IL, according to de methodological principle “from the thing known to the unknown”. Moreover, Nebrija envisages another profit for the GC: to be a textbook that allows to learn Spanish as second language. To this end, he devotes a special section of his work: the Fifth Book, which bears remarkable structural and thematic similarities with the Liber Primus of the IL. At this point, we should ask ourselves about what would be “the thing known” for a foreign speaker in the XVI century, considering the non-existence of any grammars but Latin grammars, that the only language extensively and methodically studied is Latin, and that the IL was a huge success, both inside and outside Spain. Our hypothesis, based on internal data from the work of Nebrija and on historical primary sources, is that the prior knowledge required to access to the learning of Spanish, as set out in the Fifth Book of GC, is not only the Latin language, but specifically the Latin textbook of Nebrija, the IL.