THE FIRST DEATH OF LATIN

Philosophantem rhetorem intellegunt pauci, loquentem rusticum multi. 

The rhetorician philosophising is understood by few, but the plain man speaking by many. 

-(Gregory of Tours, Preface to Historia Francorum (C.AD 575)-

The history of western Europe after the German invasions is the tale of how the kingdoms established by the conquering tribes went on to become distinct nations. Dialectal differences in the Latin that people spoke widened, and wide-ranging travel became less common, as the road system decayed and public order became unenforceable far from cities. No longer was there a Roman army with a common tradition, and troops that might expect to be transferred anywhere. Where literacy survived, principally in the Church, so did written Latin. But this was not enough to maintain any spoken standard. The gap between spoken and written language widened, but without people having any sense of what was really happening, namely that the spoken language was changing. Little by little Latin spelling came to seem more and more irregular and perverse: but this obscurity was acceptable, even desirable, as reading and writing were the preserve of a small elite, mostly clerics and lawyers.

This period, the second half of the first millennium AD, gives us our main evidence of what happens to a universal language in the western European, Christian, tradition, when it begins to lose currency, when people, although still speaking it, begin to lose sight of its vast scope, and live above all in their local communities. Three hundred years after the Goths and Germans had divided up the territories of the empire, it had become extremely difficult for the people of Spain, France and Italy, when they did meet, to understand one another’s speech. The learned, the only ones who would be conscious of the problem, came to call anyone’s ordinary speech an idioma, to be contrasted with the universality of grammatica, which was the normal word for Latin in the Middle Ages.

Charlemagne’s Europe, 8th Century AD

From the early fifth to the mid-eighth centuries, the powers in western Europe shifted from generation to generation, allowing the idea to establish itself that universal kingdoms or citizenships could never be of this world. But then, from the late eighth century, the power of the Frankish king grew, in alliance with the papacy, and for a century the areas of France, western Germany and most of Italy were united. The Frankish king who presided over the height of this glory was Charlemagne, who reigned from 768 to 814. His aspirations were cultural as well as political. In 781 he invited Alcuin, the head of the cathedral school at York, to become head of a new academy of scholars at Aachen, his capital. The fruit of this congregation has become known as the Carolingian Renaissance. In the course of it, and along with many other reforms in education, Alcuin established new standards for the spelling and pronunciation of Latin.

Alcuin, as a speaker of North-Country English, approached Latin as a foreign language, to be learnt ab initio from books; in this he would have been at one with perhaps the majority of the scholars at Aachen, many of whom would have come from the German-speaking east of Charlemagne’s empire. He succeeded in establishing a common pronunciation for Latin, close to what we now think of as ‘the modern pronunciation’, which was an intelligent attempt to reconstruct the sound of the language on an authentic ancient model; as he entitled his work:

Mē legat antīquās vult qui prōferre loquēlas; Mē quī nōn sequitur vult sine lēge loquī. 

Let him read me who wishes to carry on the ancient modes of speech; He who does not follow me wishes to speak without law.

This involved a practical shift which was greatest for the Romance-speaking scholars. When reading out a text, they now had consciously to deviate from their traditional, vernacular pronunciation of the language: for example, viridiārium, ‘orchard’, could no longer come out as verger, as it would when they were speaking naturally. The practical shift ultimately led to a conceptual one. Gradually, they began to see this written style differently: grammatica was not just the natural, indeed the only correct, way to write for speakers of a Romance idioma; once given a distinct style of pronunciation, it was a separate language, just as it was for their German-speaking fellow-citizens (and the English- and Irish-speaking scholars across the seas).

Once written Latin had become established as a distinct, if not yet foreign, language, occasions began to arise when there was a need to write down something that would explicitly record the sounds of a vernacular. The earliest known example of this is the so-called Strasburg Oaths of 842, when two brothers, Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald, grandsons of Charlemagne, had to swear to support each other in the hearing of their respective followers, but in a situation complicated by the fact that their audiences spoke different languages, German and Romance. Their words have been recorded for us verbatim by Nithard, yet another grandson of Charlemagne, and the Romance version provides the first surviving text in Romance rather than Latin. It seems that the texts had been set down before they were uttered. It was highly unusual for anything other than proper Latin to be written down, and to explain it, it is assumed that the purpose was to offer each of the two brothers a crib sheet. Any Romance speaker could of course read out a Latin text to the common people in a pronunciation that they might understand: he would just come out with the vernacular words suggested by the Latin text. But it was a very different matter if a German speaker were to be asked to do this. And so Ludwig was offered the ninth-century equivalent of a teleprompter.

The first few phrases will show that speaking Romance was no longer just a matter of changing a few details of regular Latin:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in ajudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift…

In proper Latin, one cannot get much closer to this than:

Pro Dei amore et pro christiano populo et nostro communi salvamento, de hoc die in posterum, in quanto Deus sapientiam et potentiam mihi donabit, sic servabo ego hunc meum fratrem Carolum et in adiumento et in re quaque, ut quis iure suum fratrem servare debet…

This need for transition between written and spoken language was the major problem left unsolved by Alcuin’s reforms. He had provided a common spoken and written form of Latin that would unite the literate across western Christendom, from Donegal to Dalmatia. But the cost was that now ordinary Romance parishioners could not understand their own priests during church services; and in this era, to ensure orthodoxy, not only liturgy but even the sermons tended to be recited or read from a written Latin text, rather than delivered extempore. As a result, at the Council of Tours in central France in 813, as at the Council of Mainz in Germany in 847, an explicit exception is made, to guarantee the continued understanding of the people: ‘…And that each should work to transfer the same homilies into plain Romance or German language [rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam], so that all can more easily understand what is said.’

Preservation of documents for a thousand years tends not to happen without serious intent, and so not surprisingly there is little record of the vernacular languages when all the serious records were still being kept in Latin. There is a cheese-larder list from a Spanish monastery datable to the late tenth century, preserved because it had been scribbled on the back of a document of donation. But in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, phonetic transcriptions of vernacular languages are usually found as little snippets in Latin documents. There are verbatim statements in Italian, recorded as sworn, to validate ownership for lands belonging to Montecassino monasteries. There is a vivid caption to a fresco on the wall of St Clement’s church in Rome from the late eleventh century, illustrating a famous but futile attempt at persecution of St Clement, when his attackers were miraculously deluded into mistaking him for a column. Their leader shouts to his men:

Filli delle pute, traite. Gosmari, Albertel, traite. Fàlite dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle Sons of whores, pull! Gosmario, Albertello, pull! Push back with the stick, Carvoncello!

While the saint comments in (ungrammatical) Latin:

Duritiam cordis vestris saxa traere meruistis 

Hardness of heart yours rocks to pull you have deserved.

Only when serious works of literature started to appear in the vernacular, invading the traditional ground held by the written language, did the real status of the ‘rustic’ languages begin to become clear. And this happened first at the other end of the Romance-speaking world, in Normandy and England, where the Normans started writing down ballads and lays of the kind that they heard the minstrels sing. The Chanson de Roland, from the late eleventh century, is the oldest and best of these works, telling the tale of a heroic rearguard action fought against the Moors in the time of Charlemagne. It is signed in its last line:

Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet 

Here ends the adventure that Turoldus retold

and there seems no reason not to identify this Turold with a specially named character who appears in the Bayeux Tapestry, delivering a message to William the Conqueror.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, poetry in the Romance languages begins to be written down all over western Europe, in Provence, in northern France, in Galicia, Castile and Catalonia, and in Italy. The breakthrough came in areas that Latin had never strongly represented, in the celebration of courtly love—the modern sense of the word ‘romance’ is no coincidence—and in heroic tales of chivalry and war. Latin was increasingly hived off as a learned language for monasteries, schools and universities.

The first theorist of these new linguistic developments is none other than the leading Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, who lived from 1265 to 1321. In his De vulgari eloquentia he recognised that Latin, grammatica, was in essence the preserved older form of the Romance languages.

He seems to have had as much difficulty in convincing his audience that these ancestral differences were the predictable result of gradual change as Darwin was to find, with a different subject matter and timescale, five centuries later.

Nor should what we say appear any more strange than to see a young person grown up, whom we do not see grow up: for what moves gradually is not at all recognized by us, and the longer something needs for its change to be recognized the more stable we think it is. So we are not surprised if the opinion of men, who are little distant from brutes, is that a given city has existed always with the same language, since the change in language in a city happens gradually only over a very long succession of time, and the life of men is also, by its very nature, very short. Therefore if over one people the language changes, as has been said, successively over time, and can in no way stand still, it is necessary that it should vary in various ways quite separately from what remains constant, just as customs and dress vary in various ways, which are confirmed neither by nature or society, but arise at human pleasure and to local taste. This was the motive of the inventors of the faculty of grammatica: for grammatica is nothing but the identity of speech unalterable for diverse times and places.

Besides this work in Latin, Dante wrote another one, the Convivio or ‘Banquet’, in Italian—not a poem, but a prose work aimed at explaning some of his earlier poems, but at the same time educating people who could not read Latin: ‘I was motivated by the fear of infamy, and I was motivated by the desire to give teaching such as others truly cannot.’

This was the beginning of the end of Latin’s monopoly on learned information. Henceforth, there would be no field of discourse or function of speech reserved for it. Latin, the language of the grammar books, once felt to be eternal but now recognised as artificial, faced ever increasing competition from spoken languages being committed to writing. It began to die.

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The word idioma was a borrowing into Latin from Greek idíōma, ‘peculiarity’, while grammatica was of course the name of the school subject in which everyone learnt their Latin.

It was Alcuin who instituted the systematic difference between capital and lower-case letters, which has lasted in Roman scripts (such as the English used in this book) to this day.

Dante (De vulgari eloquentia, viii.l) distinguishes Greek from the Germanic languages, and  also from the Romance. His criterion (the word for ‘yes’—jo in Germanic) would tend to split up the Romance languages into at least three groups (oc, oil, sì), but he notes that they have a large amount of basic vocabulary in common: ’quia multa per eadem vocabula nominare videntur, ut Deum, caelum, amorem, mare, terram, est, vivit, moritur, amat, alia fere omnia’; ‘because they seem to name many things with the same words: God,
sky, love, sea, earth, is, lives, dies, loves, and almost everything else.’ Surprisingly, Dante sees oc as marking Spanish Romance, not the Provençal of southern France (known anyway as Langue d’oc). Perhaps he was affected by Provençal’s similarity to Catalan.

By Nicholas Ostler in "Empires of the Word - A Language History of the Word", Harper Collins, UK, 2005, excerpts part 8. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.