Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

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. [508]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. [86]

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. [509]

Besides this work in Latin, Dante wrote another one, the Convivio or ‘Banquet’, in Italian—not a poem, but a prose work aimed at explaining 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.’ [510]

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.

And who, in time, knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores

This gain of our best glory shall be sent,

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds in the yet unformèd Occident

May come refined with accents that are ours?

from Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599)

DAVID: What newes? haue you heard nothing of the coming of any ship?

ABRAHAM: I heard the thundering of Ordnance, which is a signe of ships coming.

D.: And I heard that a shippe was come from Guiserat.

A.: And what Marchandizes doth she bring?

D.: She is laden with rice, almonds and raysons, she bringeth also many cloathes of all sortes, and very much bombace.

A.: Is this so? surely this news is very much desired.

D.: I heard it so affirmed for a truth.

DAOEDT: Appa ach gabar? tieda ga-barbarou derribarang cappal?

EBRAHIM: Souda beta denga’r boenij bedil, iang itoe alamat derri cappal dagang.

D.: Lagihamba deng’ar catta iang satoe cappal derri Guiserat souda datan.

E.: Appa peruiniága debaua dia?

D.: Ini ber’isi, ken bras, ken gorma, zebibt; lagi bauadia bania káyin alus derri samoe’ aieni: lagicapas bania.

E.: Begitou? itoe gabar bania baick.

D.: Ia beta deng’ar catta sach begitoe.

Augustine Spaulding, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages , 1614, pp. 1-2 [232] Sykes (2001, chs 7, 10); Weale et al. (2002). See Chapter 7, ‘Against the odds: The advent of English’, p. 310.

The discovery by the western Europeans that their ships could cross oceans, and bring them directly to distant lands, whether for trade or outright conquest and exploitation, opens a new era in the global history of language spread. All too often, the language communities at the destinations of European shipping proved unable to mount effective military, or political, resistance to the adventuring invaders. When this happened, the victims were frequently decimated, and always forced to submit to a new elite. The spread of languages through the dominance of the new elites was far more pervasive than anything that had been seen before. The results are evident today in the presence of six colonising languages in the list of the world’s top ten languages by population. [87]

The Romance half of these colonising languages, as we have just seen, owed their very existence to the changes that came over the Roman empire after its western regions were dissolved by the Germanic conquests; the decline in mutual intelligibility, and the redefinition of Latin or grammatica , to be no longer just their written form but a language separate from them, had led to their development as vehicles of a different sort of community. This community was less intellectual, but often as rich culturally as the Church, which continued to rely on Latin, spoken and written. [511]