lingua franca 337
they gain entrance to the Christian quarters, they kill a wounded general lying in a
makeshift sickroom—confirms the impression that they are not speaking clear or sin-
cere Italian, but on the contrary are weaponizing language. As this episode illustrates,
from the perspective of speakers of Italian, the lingua franca is “our language, when
they—extra-communitarians: natives of the southern or eastern Mediterranean;
renegades—speak it to us.”
The seventeenth century sees much more abundant citation of the language, most
notably in Sosa’s account of his captivity in Algiers.^7 I emphasize the early record—
sparse as it is—in part to emphasize this puzzling scarcity, and in part because schol-
arly discussions of the language regularly (and for very good reasons) focus on the
later period. Between 1484 and 1650 the corpus consists of 20 documented com-
ments in the lingua franca known to philologists, 12 of them from Sosa’s description
of Algiers. Seventeen of the early lingua franca texts are spoken by men described as
Arabs or Turks; two speakers are described as renegades; and one is a dragoman, or
translator. Of these, the shortest is Ruffino’s—a single word—though three others are
only three words long. The longest is 58 words long:
Veccio, veccio, niçarane Christiano ven aca, porque tener aqui tortuga? qui portata de
campaña? gran vellaco estar, qui ha portato. Anda presto piglia, porta fora, guarda diablo,
portar a la campaña, questo si tener en casa, estar grande pecato. Mira no trovar mi altra
volta, sino a fee de Dio, mi parlar patron donar bona bastonada, mucho mucho. (Cifoletti,
1989: 161; Cifoletti, 2004: 201)(Old man, old man, Christian (nasrani), Christian (Christiano), come here, why are you
holding that turtle? Who brought it from the field? He’s a big scoundrel, the one who
brought it. Go, quickly, pick it up, take it outside, for goodness’ sake, take it to the field,
if you keep it in the house it’s a great sin. See that I don’t find it another time, if so—by
God—I’ll speak to the boss, who will give you a good thrashing, an awful lot.)Strung together, the corpus consists of a total of 305 words representing 115 different
lexemes. The word that appears most frequently in the texts—after prepositions;
personal pronouns; “estar,” the verb “to be”; and “grande,” big—is “cane,” which is
found seven times in the corpus. “Perro” appears three times. The two words both
mean “dog” in Italian and Spanish respectively, and are addressed by slave masters or
corsairs to Christian captives. The word “dios” or “dio,” “God,” also appears seven
times.
A paltry trail of evidence indeed: too few bones remain to allow us to reconstruct
the skeleton of the language. To muddy the waters even further, we possess curious
and fragmentary references which suggest that the language at one point might have
been on the verge of becoming something more. The English philosopher Jeremy
Bentham, in a letter written in 1780, refers to the use of lingua franca as a written
vehicular language, used in the process of translating a German work into English,
although it is impossible to know what precisely he means by “lingua franca” (and
indeed difficult to tell whether the comment is facetious; Bentham, 1968: 2:405).
Again, an English translation of a French book published in 1750 refers to a biogra-
phy of Tamerlane written in Arabic and translated “by an Arabian” into lingua franca,
although I have found no other reference to this ghost-translation; it must have van-
ished without trace, if indeed it ever existed (Du Bec, 1750: v–vi). Under the auspices