Other pages in this chapter : [ Biographie ] [ Film ] [ Ses origines ] [ Sa langue ] [ Sa date de naissance ] [ Ses enfants ] [ Sa famille ] [ Son physique ] [ Son écriture ] [ Sa  signature ] [ Ses dessins ] [ Ses armes ] [ La fin de Colomb ] - [ Remonter ]

What is Columbus’ mothertongue? 

The exact origin of Christopher Columbus still remains an enigma.  Columbus himself contributed to the mystery by disclosing no information pertinent to this topic. More than a few historians have studied what was available to try to gain some information; thus they studied his writings.  From the available documents, hand-written by Columbus, these investigators appear to have found several interesting features:

 Columbus knew Latin, wrote Castillano (Spanish) but with numerous mistakes, and most interestingly he did not write “Italian” (at this time, it was mostly Tuscanian).  One has to point out that Columbus wrote in Castillano to his friend Father Gorricio, an Italian clergyman living at the monastery Cartuja Santa Maria de las Cuevas, in Sevilla. It could be possible that Columbus just had difficulties to write Italian. However, Father Gorricio answered Columbus in Castillano. As a consequence, one may suppose that Columbus knew better Castillano than Italian!

The above data are also supported by deductions made from the notes left by Columbus within the margins of Pline’s book “Natural History”. He annotated the book in Castillano with the exception of two comments written in an Italian-like language simply not comprehensible by those who master this language.

As a whole, Columbus was not fluent at all in Italian, his Latin words were “stuffed” with Castillano and his Castillano was not that good!  Several authors proposed that Columbus used to speak the language of the Mediterranean sailors: the "lingua franca". Alexandre Cioranescu well summarized these data:

  “He (Columbus) writes exactly as he speaks, and he does not speak well. He is an “alien” to whom Spanish is only a third or a fourth language that he learnt serendipitously during one or the other of his travels or halts, a language never studied, and consequently always insufficient.”

Columbus’ language is only one of the problems relative to his biography. That he spoke the Genoa dialect while he was a child cannot be challenged. It appears he knew only imperfectly “literary” Italian that was at this time only one more dialect. He certainly studied in Latin as this was the common practice at that time. He has also been living for long years in Lisbon, where he married a Portuguese wife. By such way, he might have acquired a reasonably good knowledge of Portuguese. But Spanish was eventually the language that he was forced to use

He knows to write in Latin, though making mistakes. Latin, however, was not in use to correspond with the Kings. He does not write better Italian, as he never learnt how to write it. He was obliged to use Spanish, but this was a rough Spanish, faulty and obscure, the meaning of which being often hard to catch, and with no consideration for subtle adjustments or complex concepts. He writes Spanish as he speaks it, as a foreigner conversing without refinement, happy to express what he things. He often shows obvious difficulties in according the ideas that arise in his effervescent mind, having insufficient turns of phrase and an unnaturally preserved vocabulary. His words lack the smoothness that we call style. His verbal communication is at times a skin-tight suit, under which one has to guess his thoughts sliding along words that he does not master, and at times an obscure twaddle, in which the thread of the speech becomes muddled in the meanders of a too mobile thought. 

The expertise of Giustiniani fades in front of that of Fernando, Columbus son, who asserts that his father Christopher was not born in Genoa, and that Giustiniani, by telling the story of the Admiral and by having him born " in the Genoese plebs " said up to twelve lies in half a page.

Documentation

Documents de référence :

Autres pages dans ce chapitre : [ Biographie ] [ Film ] [ Ses origines ] [ Sa langue ] [ Sa date de naissance ] [ Ses enfants ] [ Sa famille ] [ Son physique ] [ Son écriture ] [ Sa  signature ] [ Ses dessins ] [ Ses armes ] [ La fin de Colomb ] - [ Remonter ]