Elio, un hombre para la eternidad:una estrella más en la noche medieval. Hallazgos y legado lingüístico de un humanista para la lengua española

Abstract

Figures such as Antonio de Nebrija ─whose 500th anniversary since his death we are now celebrating in 2022─ allow us to critically rethink the role played by the Middle Ages in Humanism and to recover the profile of the humanist, which prefigures that of the modern intellectual, since it involves both the vindication of freedom of expression and freedom of thought. Furthermore, his philological contribution is inescapable (not only for his work as a grammarian ─lucid, brilliant and didactic─ but also as a lexicographer), above all as a promoter of an appropriate use of linguistic form (and of its critical reflection) by virtue of the precision and clarity of ideas, and as a promoter of measures which, without rejecting the extension of usage, sought to simplify the system in order to guarantee a certain unity (in this sense, together with the political unification of the Catholic kings and the geographical or territorial unification brought about by the discovery of America, we would find Nebrija's unifying efforts) and the survival of the language.