Luca Serianni, historian of the Italian language, academician of the Lincei and of the Crusca, died after being hit by a car on Monday 18 July, while crossing the road on the Roman coast of Ostia. Serianni, who was 74, taught in several universities and ended his academic career at Sapienza in Rome in 2017. He did so with a farewell lesson held in front of hundreds of people, colleagues, alumni, friends, but above all in front of his students who crowded the classroom I of the faculty of literature. And he closed the opening address by addressing the latter: “Do you know what you represent for me? I guess you don’t know. You represent the state ”.
He expressed himself in this way without emphatic accents, rather lowering his voice and keeping his eyes fixed on the paper where he had pinned his speech. He remained faithful to his staid style even in an emotionally involving circumstance for those who have dedicated as much effort to being a teacher as to being a scholar of absolute and recognized quality. The only breach in the austere profile of him Serianni opened to let you pass a controlled irony played on the register of the apparently serious and instead amiable professor, willing to parody in order to make his knowledge accessible.
You represent the state, told his students, also provides the idea that Serianni cultivated of a community and in particular of a linguistic community, of a community of speakers. It is a community that recognizes the rules and refers to a code. But it is an open community and the fundamental purpose of its members is to understand each other. The rules and their respect allow this relationship, but then the way in which the rules are used is also important, including the fact that they can change over time, because it is always the community of speakers that decides how a language should be.
Serianni elegantly escaped when someone wanted to set him up as a severe judge of an Italian language that was now considered defeated. And if the presumed low frequency of the subjunctive was used as a parameter, he, data in hand, showed that it was not at all scarce and that, even limited to the spoken language, after “I hope” it was difficult for a verb to not appear even in a chat. subjunctive.
A pupil first of Arrigo Castellani, then of Ignazio Baldelli, who wanted him as an assistant in the history of the Italian language chair, Serianni became full professor in 1980. His scientific production is vast. Since the mid-seventies he has been experimenting with the literary language of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then he works on historical grammar. His lessons are based on insights into the evolution of Italian always supported by the analysis of texts and examining both the transformations of the language and the transformations of Italian society that can be verified through the language.
At the same time, however, the pupils’ attention is drawn to the role that language plays in promoting awareness, a sense of orientation in the world, a widespread culture. How can this happen? With the gradual expansion of one’s vocabulary, with the enrichment of syntax, with the comparison of one language with another, including one’s own dialect, with the adaptation of the language to a specific context, with reasoning on the differences between written languages and spoken language.
Serianni scrupulously looks at language training and therefore at school homework. In his lectures and then in a 2010 book, The Italian time (Laterza) disputes that the theme is the best tool to accustom children to writing. He allows you to improve your command of the language, but does not limit the temptation to go freewheeling. He adds to “squirt”.
The summary, on the other hand, is the queen of proofs, because it requires us to understand a text, to put its parts in a hierarchical order, from the most important to the least important, and to say in other words what is in the text. The excess of grammaticalism, typical of the classic version of Latin, completely devoid of references to a context, must be banned, Serianni insists. Instead, Latin serves in its historicity, giving importance to its lexicon, to the meaning of the words, in constant comparison with Italian.
The clarity of the argument pushes Serianni out of the academic enclosures. He is a consultant to the ministry of education for school programs and his suggestion to eliminate the historical theme from the written tests for the high school diploma (chosen, by the way, by an absolute minority of students), will arouse some controversy. Its scientific production multiplies.
Between 1993 and 1994, together with Pietro Trifone, he curated a History of the Italian language in three volumes, which joins the Einaudian Italian literature directed by Alberto Asor Rosa. Then, among others, will come First lesson of grammar (Laterza 2006), Read, write, argue. Reasoned proofs of writing (Laterza 2013), The feeling of the language (conversation with Giuseppe Antonelli, il Mulino 2019), The right way. 100 Italian poems (Laterza 2020) and finally Word of Dante (il Mulino 2021), in which he reasons, dismantling it, on the presumed otherness of the language of Commedia compared to Italian today.
Serianni inside and outside the university classrooms, with his books, public meetings and interviews, shows himself to be the reasonable guardian of a quality of the language and banishes both sloppiness and apocalyptic visions. Are there too many Anglicisms? It is the use of speakers and therefore the long time of a language to accept those that are admissible and to discard those that are inadmissible.
The same goes for neologisms. Rather, it is detrimental to the right of anyone to understand what a public administration requires if it stuffs communication with English words or, worse, with ill-advised translations. But it is not a drama for those who, like Serianni, argue that it is not the norm that makes the use, but the use that makes the norm.
Speaking to his students on the day he left the university – it was a sultry morning in June 2017 – Serianni recalled his teachers and the rule he always followed with his students, namely to recognize their qualities without force their inclinations for study and research. Provided, however, he added, addressing the complicit gaze towards the boys, that, whether they favored historical linguistics, whether they were oriented towards the textual, literary or sociolinguistics, they adhered to an imperative obligation: that of using the acute emphasis on the self of oneself. His deep-rooted and proverbial concession to grammatically correct.