Empires Of The Word Part 19

The end to the Roman occupation of Britain, when it came, was determinate and sudden. Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, was threatening to invade Italy. In 401 Stilicho, himself a Vandal but the empire's commander-in-chief, withdrew the garrison from Britain to reinforce the empire's heartland. This left Britain itself defenceless against the steadily increasing incursions of Germani along its 'Saxon sh.o.r.e', the coast facing Europe. In 410 the Britons sent an appeal to the emperor for reinforcement: his reply was to order them to look to their own defence; somewhat surreally he added that the raising of local forces would not be taken as hostility to Rome. That was the last they heard. Within a generation, there was no British province to defend. The Saxons had come to stay.

The end of the Roman empire in the west was soon to follow. On 31 December 406 there had been a ma.s.s crossing of the frozen Rhine: Suebi from the east side of the Rhine, together with Vandals originally from farther east, and Alans (not German speakers at all, but Iranians, driven out of the Pontic steppes by the Huns), then cut a swath across Gaul and entered Spain. The Vandals kept going, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (then still known as the Pillars of Hercules), and by 439 were established at Carthage in North Africa (where they built a navy and became the new power in the Mediterranean).

Alaric had succeeded in entering Rome in 410 (although the centre of government had moved to Ravenna), and committed the ultimate horror of sacking it, but died shortly after. The Visigoths then continued an advance that took them across southern France and into Iberia, constricting into its corners the preceding Suebi, Alans and Vandals. There they founded a new kingdom that lasted 250 years, ruling first from Toulouse, and later Toledo.* Ultimately, in 711, their reign was terminated by something completely new for Europe, a Muslim (Arabic-speaking) invasion from the south.

But back in the east, the generation following Alaric had seen Attila, king of the Turkic-speaking Huns from 435 to 453, bring the Hunnish domain west to include all of Germany. He was held off from Gaul in 451, and when he died soon after, his empire disintegrated into a mosaic of German tribes in the west, and a Slav area in the east, with the Huns dominant only back round the Black Sea.

By 476 the political centre of Rome had fallen, and the last emperor, the juvenile Romulus Augustulus, had been humanely deposed by Odoacer, who had once been a German-speaking follower of Attila, but most recently one of the empire's own commanders. Different tribes of Germani then spread and settled with bewildering speed across the corpse of the old empire. Within fifty years, the Franks (who for two hundred years had been settled in the area of modern Belgium, even employed by the empire as border patrols) had a.s.sumed control of most of Gaul, spreading from the north, with the Burgundians holding a large, but diminishing, area in the south. The Ostrogoths, soon to be displaced by the equally Germanic Lombards, held Italy, the south-west of Gaul and Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic coast. After this the west of Europe began to settle down; but the east of Europe had yet to undergo incursions in turn from Avars (from 550) and Bulgars swiftly followed by Khazars (from 650) and Magyars (from 750).

Amazingly, the linguistic effects of this political and demographic turmoil, which lasted 150 years in the west of Europe, were slight. Certainly a polyphony of new languages must have been heard, if briefly, west of the Urals between 400 and 850. But west of the Elbe there can have been precious little change from the state of affairs essentially brought about by Caesar's conquest of Gaul around 50 BC, other than the vanishing echoes of Germanic languages, Saxon, German and Gothic, as they pa.s.sed rapidly across the central plains of Gaul and out of hearing in the farther reaches to the south and west.

* Their ascendancy was notable for unending struggle against the Basques: each king making the proud, but apparently empty, boast in his annals 'domuit Vasconeshe tamed the Basques'.

Strangely, Attila is really his nickname in Gothic, and means 'Dad'.

Of these, only the language spoken by the Magyars is clear: it was Hungarian, related to the Uralian languages of northern Siberia. As for the others, Avar was probably a Mongol and Bulgar and Khazar Turkic languages. Old Avar does not seem to have been the same as what is now known as Avar, which is a language of the north-east Caucasus, spoken in Daghestan and Azerbaijan, and quite unrelated to Turkic. Bulgar may survive in scattered pockets across Siberia to this day, known as Chuvash. (This name is identical with Tabgach, the name of a people famous for their fourth-century conquest of northern China.) (See Chapter 4, 'Language from Huang-he to Yangtze', p. 140.) The Khazars ruled from the Caspian Sea to Kiev for a century (c.650-750), and are chiefly famous for their choice of ma.s.s conversion to Judaism in 861. Today's Karaim are their descendants. Another Turkic group, the Tatars of the Golden Horde, moved across in the thirteenth century.

When the dust from galloping hoofs had cleared, the creak of covered wagons had died away, and the gilt had dried on the palaces of the newly self-appointed royal families of medieval Europe, language boundaries were eerily familiar. The edge of Germanic had possibly slipped a little to the west during the long period when the empire's borders had still been defended, not least because neighbouring Germans had increasingly been invited across it, as foederati, 'treaty people', or laeti, 'joyous ones', to serve in the army, or on the land, for the benefit of Roman society. But the line between Germanic and Romance was still drawn from the western end of the mouths of the Rhine in a south-eastward direction. And the repeated falling of parts of Gaul under German domination, and ultimately being firmly settled under the Franks, did not serve to translate it or rotate it further.

The failure of Frankish domination to replace the language of Gaul was paralleled in the other new German kingdoms. In Italy under the Ostrogoths and Lombards, in Iberia under a succession of Vandals, Suebi, Alans and Visigoths, in coastal North Africa under the Vandals, the language established under the Roman empire persisted.* Despite the fact that the Visigoths ruled Spain for 250 years, one cannot even detect a significant number of Gothic words borrowed into Spanish from this period. Menendez Pidal, the Spanish historical linguist, writes: It appears that the Germanic elements in Spanish do not proceed, in general, from the Visigoth domination of the peninsula, as might have been expected: the number of invaders was relatively slight to have much influence; moreover, the Visigoths, before reaching Spain had lived for two centuries in intimate contact with the Romans, now as allies now as enemies, in Dacia, Moesia, in Italy itself and in Gaul, and were very much permeated with Roman culture.43 * Latin bore a charmed life in North Africa, for a century (428-533) under the Vandals, and then controlled by the Roman empire resurgent from Constantinople until 696. The career of the most famous resident, St Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo, would have been unthinkable outside a Latin-speaking milieu. Remarks he makes in some of his sermons provide evidence that bilingualism with Punic, the old language of Carthage, may have persisted until the fourth century (Sznycer 1996). Evidently the common people continued to speak Berber (as they do to this day). But the Arab takeover in the eighth century, backed up by the conversion to Islam of the Berber-speaking hinterland, would be much more quickly influential in changing the region's working language than the Vandals had been (or perhaps even the Romans, in the 750 years since the destruction of the independent Carthage).

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 doc.u.ment 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 Ma.r.s.eilles) recognises that not only rustici but even negotiatores (merchants and businessmen) may be unable to read.46 Without widespread education, consciousness of the norms of cla.s.sical 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 Volkerwanderung was nil, their fellow victims of incursion from the east, the Slavs (Tacitus's Veneti), had far better luck. In the mid-fifth century, the Huns surged through and past them, then withdrew to the Black Sea, leaving the Veneti and their kin to move permanently into the eastern plains (polye) of Poland vacated by the Vandals and Lombards, among others. The following surges of Avars and Bulgars were more or less successfully resisted by the eastern Roman empire. But they served not only to flush the remaining Germans (Gepids, Ostrogoths and Lombards) out of the more southerly areas, the Carpathians and the Balkans; they also served to cover the Slavs' push southward. In the sixth century, the Slavs took possession of the arterial route from Aquileia on the Adriatic to Constantinople, a road that had kept this part of the empire, alone in the east, strongly linked to Latin-speaking Italy. In this way they finally moved into the Balkan territories of the Roman empire, including-as we have seen (see Chapter 6, 'Intimations of decline', p. 261 )-Greece itself. In that traditional centre of the civilised world they were to be diffused and a.s.similated by the residents; but farther north, their relative numbers were far more overwhelming. By the seventh century the Slavs had been left in linguistic possession of most of eastern Europe, where they are to this day.*

The question naturally arises: why did the Slavic conquerors' language establish itself, while that of the Germans largely disappeared? But there is no evident answer. Latin survived as Romanian at least; and this might suggest that, as in western Europe, the Slavic invaders had abandoned their language in an area where they were confronted with a more organised culture. But the geography hardly fits. It was Dalmatia and Moesia (former Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) that were long-term Roman provinces, unchallenged since Trajan had conquered the whole area of the Balkans in AD 106-7; Dacia (modern Romania) had been abandoned for strategic reasons in 271, when Germanic-speaking Gepids and Visigoths had taken over. It is true that Dacia had at first been heavily settled with colonists by Trajan.47 And there were surviving Romance speakers (known to the Greeks as Rhomsnoi) up and down the Dalmatian coast until the beginning of the twentieth century. But the explanation seems to be that the Latin-speaking population drifted northward from Moesia into Dacia over the next few centuries; Blaxoi hoditai, 'Vlach nomads', were a feature of the scenery on the northern marches of the empire up until the eleventh century.48 * They made a late exception to admit the Magyars in the tenth century, creating the Hungarian pocket in the midst of Slavic central Europe.

Whatever the intervening history, the Roman culture of the Balkan area, always something of an outpost, does not seem to have been strong enough ever to revive under the new Slavic masters.

Against the odds: The advent of English

Perhaps something similar happened at the opposite end of the Roman dominions, for Britain too lost its Latin in the face of invasions in this period. It also lost its British. This event of language replacement, which is also the origin of the English language, was unparalleled in its age-the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold on to their own language.

Prima facie, the fate of Britain should have been just like that of Gaul or Iberia, or indeed Italy. Germanic invaders, in this case from the north-western coast of Europe, entered a reeling province of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD, and never went home. In light of the experience of western Europe, this should have resulted in a few centuries of turmoil before the establishment of a more or less stable kingdom or (failing unification) an array of states, which would have ended up speaking some new variant of Latin. In fact what happened was a gradual advance and settlement of the invaders (whom we may term oversimply 'Saxons'*), from the south-east towards the north-west, a process arguably never completed but at least covering the lowland areas up to the Pennines and Dartmoor by the end of the sixth century, and most of modern England and south-eastern Scotland by the end of the seventh. Gradually, over the same period, the number of regional kingdoms reduced to three, Northumbria, Mercia and Wess.e.x.

Linguistically, the intermediate stages are obscure, but the triumph of Latin as a popular language, a.n.a.logously to what always happened on the Continent, never even looked possible. There is never any sense of a takeover of British society by Saxons; it is more the cla.s.sic story of alien invaders gradually establishing a bridgehead, then spreading out, and building a new order on their own terms, like European imperialists in the Americas. There are no records in British of the period, but the records left in Latin (notably Gildas's De Excidio Britonum, 'The Ruin of the British', c.540, and Nennius's compilation of Excerpta up to c.800) paint a hostile picture of the Saxons as destroyers. West Saxons were literate from the ninth century in their own language (itself a curiosity for Germanic invaders), the Nors.e.m.e.n from a little later. Neither pay much heed to their British predecessors.

How could this be? The Britons, after all, were heirs to four hundred years of Roman civilisation, just like the Gauls, and were if anything notorious for their military prowess; indeed, potentates from Britain (Maximus in 388, Constantine in 407) had twice led successful forces on to the Continent in the previous fifty years. Granted that the major forces had already been withdrawn to Italy, allowing the Saxons to make their bridgehead, in the generations that followed the Britons should still have had expertise in depth to regroup in the 90 per cent of the country they still controlled, and either drive back, or force a compromise with, the incomers.

* There is actually an implicit dispute in the sources on who these invaders were. Evidently they were speakers of a Low German dialect, but Gildas ( a Celt, writing before 550) calls them Saxons ( or more exactly Saxones ferocissimi illi nefandi nominis Saxones deo hominibusque invisi, 'those ferocious Saxons of unspeakable name hateful to G.o.d and men', xxiii.l), while Procopius (a Greek-less personally involved-writing also before 550, and probably using information from Angles on a Frankish mission to Byzantium) says they were Angles and Frisians (Gothic War, iv.20). It is the Venerable Bede, in his history published in 731, who calls them Angles, Saxons and Jutes ( i. 15 ). The Saxons and Franks (named for their favourite weapons, the seax or knife and the franca or javelin) were not among the tribes known to Tacitus, but would have lived where he places the Chauci and the Tungri, at the mouths of the Weser and Rhine respectively.

Instead we see a steady fall-back, and the unmixed spread across the country of English, a mixture of Angle, Saxon, Frisian and perhaps Jutish varieties of Low German. The only parallel, in fact, to this spread of a Germanic language is what happened when the Germanic invaders encountered virgin territory, in the islands of the North Sea and in Iceland. There of course the Vikings' language, Old Norse, spread, because it had no compet.i.tion. Could the Britons of the urbanised lowlands somehow have just melted away? Nothing less is needed to explain the complete walkover within Britain of those Germanic languages, and above all of English.

A recent theory, from David Keys, says that they may have.49 The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortalitas magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of Ulster, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other cla.s.s). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the Annales Cambriae. A folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area-one of the characteristics of bubonic plague.

There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50-100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a ma.s.s migration from Friesland.50 On the usual a.s.sumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England.

So English supervened. It did not long have the eastern and central regions of the island to itself: in the late eighth century a new force entered the system, a new set of Germanic invaders, the Nors.e.m.e.n or Vikings, from Scandinavia. They progressed from coastal raids to settlement in the west of Scotland and the east of Northumbria to a part.i.tion of the island with the Saxons by treaty (c.886), and finally in 1013 to outright conquest of the whole kingdom. This was by Sveinn Forkbeard, succeeded by his son Knutr, better known as Canute.

Unlike the British-English divide, relations between Anglo-Saxon and Viking, if initially hostile, proved fairly permeable in the longer term. One way of understanding this is to see the Vikings as cla.s.sic Germanic invaders, military raiders who won most of the battles but lost the peace, in that they settled down-perhaps with English wives-and largely picked up their subjects' or victims' language. Nevertheless, since the language into which they were settling was a close-ish relative (though with a good twenty generations of separate development behind it), there was easy scope for bilingualism and a degree of mutual understanding. The result was an abundant infusion of Norse loan words into English, and quite a lot of impact on the grammar too. In modern English, some 7 per cent of the basic vocabulary is of distinctly Norse origin (including such words as take, get, keep, leg, sky, skin and skirt);51 and it is this mix of the two languages which gave rise to the bizarrely unrelated set of third-person p.r.o.nouns he, it, she and they.*

The early era of western European conquests thus closed with a kaleidoscopic shifting of Germans westward, and of Slavs southward. The Germans were able to retain their language only when they conquered territory that was largely, or totally, empty-Britain devastated by plague, and Iceland previously uninhabited. Their conquests in the western heartlands of the Roman empire had essentially no linguistic impact. Latin remained strong in the west and south of the continent; there, the linguistic effects of Roman conquest were never undone. The Slavs, perhaps because they were invading less civilised-and hence less highly populated-regions had much greater effect where they settled in the Balkans; but they too were absorbed or eliminated in the areas of ancient civilisation that they overran, parts of Greece and Anatolia.

The long-term effect was a linguistic part.i.tion 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 rea.s.sertion 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 p.r.o.nouns in Old English (he, hit, heo, hie) with Old Norse (hann, that, hon, their/thau/thaer-using English th for the Norse o). 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 p.r.o.nounce 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, coic ('four, five'), and ce, cad, ca ('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 c.u.mae 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 ar, Old High German er 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.

8.

The First Death of Latin

Philosophantem rhetorem intellegunt pauci, loquentem rustic.u.m multi.

The rhetorician philosophising is understood by few, but the plain man speaking by many.

Gregory of Tours, Preface to Historia Francorum (C.AD 575)1 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 p.r.o.nunciation for Latin, close to what we now think of as 'the modern p.r.o.nunciation', which was an intelligent attempt to reconstruct the sound of the language on an authentic ancient model; as he ent.i.tled his work: Me legat antiquas vult qui proferre loquelas;

Me qui non sequitur vult sine lege loqui.

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 p.r.o.nunciation of the language: for example, viridiarium, '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 p.r.o.nunciation, 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 a.s.sumed 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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: 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 c.u.m 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ment of donation.7 But in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, phonetic transcriptions of vernacular languages are usually found as little snippets in Latin doc.u.ments. There are verbatim statements in Italian, recorded as sworn, to validate ownership for lands belonging to Monteca.s.sino monasteries. There is a vivid caption to a fresco on the wall of St Clement's church in Rome from the late eleventh century, ill.u.s.trating 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. Falite dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle Sons of wh.o.r.es, 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.*

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 ident.i.ty of speech unalterable for diverse times and places.8 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.'9 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 compet.i.tion from spoken languages being committed to writing. It began to die.

* The word idioma was a borrowing into Latin from Greek idioma, 'peculiarity', while grammatica was of course the name of the school subject in which everyone learnt their Latin, It was Alcuin who inst.i.tuted the systematic difference between capital and lower-case letters, which has lasted in Roman scripts (such as the English used in this book) to this day.

* For G.o.d's love and the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forward, insofar as G.o.d gives me knowledge and power, I shall so keep this my brother Charles both in aid and in every thing as when a man in right his brother should keep...

* Dante (De vulgari eloquentia, viii.l) distinguishes Greek from the Germanic languages, and also from the Romance. His criterion (the word for 'yes'-jo in Germanic) would tend to split up the Romance languages into at least three groups (oc, oil, si), but he notes that they have a large amount of basic vocabulary in common: 'quia multa per eadem vocabula nominare videntur, ut Deum, caelum, amorem, mare, terram, est, vivit, moritur, amat, alia fere omnia'; 'because they seem to name many things with the same words: G.o.d, sky, love, sea, earth, is, lives, dies, loves, and almost everything else.'

Surprisingly, Dante sees oc as marking Spanish Romance, not the Provencal of southern France (known anyway as Langue d'oc). Perhaps he was affected by Provencal's similarity to Catalan.

PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA.

And who, in time, knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue, to what strange sh.o.r.es

This gain of our best glory shall be sent,

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident