Biondelli e il gergo

Abstract

Starting from a brief outline of Bernardino Biondelli’s scientific biography, an intellectual who was a member of Carlo Cattaneo’s entourage, a well-informed, and certainly not a ‘pre-scientific’ linguist, the paper will focus on his contribution to Italian dialectology ( Saggio sui dialetti gallo-italici , 1853) and, in particular, the study of jargons ( Studii sulle lingue furbesche , 1846). Biondelli captures the fundamental unity of jargon in Italy and in Europe investigating its historical and sociological origins. He divides jargons into two broad categories according to the linguistic mechanisms utilised: ‘teasing jargons’ ( gerghi di trastullo ) namely ‘mechanical jargons’ ( gerghi meccanici ) based on phonetic mechanisms; and ‘figurative jargons’ ( gerghi figurativi ) that are professional jargons based on semantic mechanisms (mainly metonymy). Among ‘teasing jargons’, Biondellli places the “language of flowers”, a rhythmical jargon spoken by harem odalisques that, far from being an oddity, shares similarities with the rhyming argot or the rhyming slang spoken by thieves and convicts in England, America and Australia. Biondelli studies jargons’ practical purposes – according to Cattaneo’s view of science’s social utility – and for this reason he insists on their secrecy motivated by illegal purposes, in order to unmask those “cunning languages”.