Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (70 page)

The long-term effect was a linguistic partition of Europe that has been familiar ever since: Romance in the south and west, Germanic in the north and centre, Slavic in most of the east, and Greek in the extreme south-east. The main event in the fifth century was in fact the switch of Britain in the northwest from the Romance (or perhaps still Celtic) to the Germanic zone. There was considerably more change to come in this island: the further spread of Germanic into the last redoubts of Celtic over the next thousand years, compounded by a late attempt at a reassertion of Romance over Germanic, and the Norman conquest of England. But the tale of these events must wait until we turn to the growth of English itself.

^*
Compare these pronouns in Old English (
hē, hit, hēo, hīe
) with Old Norse (
hann, that, hon, their/thau/thær
—using English th for the Norse
ō).
Mix-ups between rather different systems of endings, well preserved in both Old English and Norse, may also have caused the breakdown of case marking for nouns.

^*
(These asterisks show forms that have been reconstructed by linguists, but are not actually found in some text.) This absence of P is not as strange as it might seem. It also seems to have afflicted the indigenous language of Iberia, and even early Basque, and is typical too of modern Arabic. But Celtic did not remain a totally P-less language for long. At least some of its variants, including most dialects of Gaulish, and also British (leading to modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton), later started to pronounce the sound qu- as p. Hence its presence in the words for four and five (
pedwar
and
pump
in modern Welsh, probably
^*
petuar
and
^*
pinpe
in Gaulish, on the evidence of some kiln records, mentioned in note 22 on p. 566). As a result, where initial qu- had been the mark of question words in the original language (cf. Latin’s conservative
quis, quid, quando
, ‘who, what, when’), initial p- has this role in this variety of Celtic language (cf. Welsh
pwy, pa, pam
, ‘who, which, why’, and presumably much the same in Gaulish). The other Celtic languages also changed the qu-, but just simplified it to a k- sound. Hence Irish
ceilhir, cóic
(’four, five’), and
cé, cad, cá
(’who, what, where’). What evidence there is for Celtiberian suggests it was more like Irish than Gaulish in this respect.

^*
The earliest known Etruscan inscriptions date from about a century earlier,
c
.700 BC. The Etruscans had themselves learnt how to write from the Greeks, though probably through contacts much farther south, round Cumae in the Bay of Naples.

^*
Contrast Lusitanian, spoken farther south: we know hardly more than two words of this language, but those two words are enough to disqualify it as Celtic:
porcom tavrom
, ‘pig bull’. The first has a P; the second has its V and R in the wrong order: compare Gaulish
tarvos.
Old Irish
tarb
, Middle Welsh
tarw.

^*
By contrast, Germanic has the same underlying root for ‘bronze’ as Latin: Gothic
aiz
, Old English
ār
, Old High German
ēr
versus Latin
aes
, suggesting that this technology was already an established acquisition before the common ancestors of the Italic- and Germanic-speaking tribes went their separate ways.

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:

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.
³
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,
⁴
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.
⁵
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:

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

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.’
⁶

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.
⁷
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:

while the saint comments in (ungrammatical) Latin:

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:

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.