Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [177]
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.2
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