Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [172]
Our explanations have to be post hoc. No doubt the majority of advancing Germans would have been fighting men, and no doubt they would have taken brides from the populations among whom they eventually settled. The language in the new homes, so far from Germany, would have been set by the local mother and her family. But the same could have been said about the Roman invaders of Gaul five hundred years before, or indeed Mexico and Peru after the Spanish conquests a millennium later. Yet there, the conquerors’ language, spreading no doubt through the opportunities it gave to be part of the new economic order, soon began to win out. Here, apparently, the conquerors had no wish other than to put the old order under new management. But after beating its defenders, they ultimately depended on their victims to provide the life they sought. It is a tale more familiar in China than anything in the history of the West.*
Spoken Latin is from this point on called Romance, signalling that the emerging dialects of Vulgar Latin were now free to develop independently of one another (although the first vernacular document that survives in a precursor of French dates only from 842).† The German and Alan invasions marked the final, total failure of the empire’s civil defence. One of the effects of the social dislocation that came in its train would have been a breakdown in the availability of education. In fact, there is evidence that illiteracy had been growing everywhere since the instability of the preceding century. Numbers of preserved inscriptions decline in the mid-third century, severely in Italy, drastically in a border region such as Upper Moesia (modern Bosnia), dying out everywhere around 400.44 Augustine, writing in North Africa in the early fifth century, recounts as a miracle the story of a slave who could read.45 In the middle of the sixth century, Caesarius of Arelate (Arles, near Marseilles) recognises that not only rūsticī but even negōtiātōres (merchants and businessmen) may be unable to read.46 Without widespread education, consciousness of the norms of classical Latin would no longer act as a brake on oral transmission.
Besides the weakening of scholarly tradition and memory, two other forces will have fostered the break-up of Latin as a single language. One is that, all over its range, Latin had speakers who were in positions of influence but whose parents had grown up speaking something else, most often a Germanic language. The other stemmed from the breakdown of the centralised systematic administration, and the rise of feudal society: individuals and families were organised much more into personal hierarchies, from the king and his baronial supporters down to the smallholder and his serfs, each link bound by personal loyalties of homage. This meant that localities became more inward: increasingly, people stayed put, in contact only with their neighbours; and the result was a faster separation of Roman speech into local dialects and languages.
* Just the latest example is the Manchu, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911, but were totally absorbed by their subject population. Their language is now on the edge of extinction. (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 143.)
† The ‘Strasburg Oaths’, a treaty between Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald. Ironically, it comes only after the restoration of a single government across most of France, German and Italy. (See Chapter 8, p. 317.)
Slavonic dawn in the Balkans
But if, from the language point of view, the net effect of the Germans’ westward Völkerwanderung was nil, their fellow victims of incursion from