Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [178]
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.’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:
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