A natural history of Latin
It is not possible to say much in detail about how all this took place, as the sources we have from the period immediately following the fall of the Roman empire are very meagre.Those who wrote at all wrote in Latin, and in the few schools that did function people as far as possible learnt the same written language as Cicero and Virgil had used in the century before Jesus was born, more than half a millennium earlier. No one wrote their spoken language down, and so we do not know very much about how it must have sounded. Nonetheless, we can draw some conclusions from the mistakes less well-educated writers made when they tried to express themselves in Classical Latin. Such mistakes occur already in antiquity and allow us to build up a rough picture of the development.
As we might expect, spoken Latin was already changing in antiquity, while the written language that the schools taught remained the same, so that by the fifth century the differences between writing and speaking had become quite considerable. The situation can be compared to English, which is still mainly spelled the way it was pronounced in the seventeenth century. Similarly, for those who lived in late antiquity the way Latin was written down was rather archaic beside their own pronunciation.
An example is the fact that the sound [m] at the end of words ceased to be pronounced quite early on. Since a good many Latin words end in -m, this small change had a big effect. Another change is that the pronunciation of vowels shifted quite markedly, so that for instance u was pronounced as [o] and i as [e] in some contexts. The combined effect of these changes meant that, for example, where people wrote imperium romanum they actually said [imperio romano]. And this pronunciation corresponds exactly to how this expression is pronounced and spelled in modern Italian and Spanish: imperio romano. Already in late antiquity Latin had moved a few steps in the direction that was to lead to the modern Romance languages.
Nonetheless, at this time there was still quite clearly only one language.There are many Latin texts from the fifth and sixth centuries
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from different parts of Europe, but it is not possible to discover any dialectal changes at all, although many have looked for them. The misspellings that reveal the actual pronunciation are the same wherever the texts are from. The few Latin texts that have survived from the seventh and eighth centuries mainly indicate that their authors barely had enough education to get the words onto the page. Some are so full of strange features that we can only half understand them. In the ninth century Charlemagne implemented a major educational reform. After this there is a considerable resurgence in the writing of Latin throughout the territory that had once been the Roman empire, only now the written language reveals nothing at all about the everyday pronunciation as writers once again adhere faithfully to the ancient norms which they have learnt in school.
But what language did people actually speak in the ninth and tenth centuries? Was it still Latin or was it already the new languages French, Spanish, Italian, and so on? This is not an easy question to answer. We do not have much evidence as to how the spoken language sounded, but that is not in fact the biggest problem. The big question is how to determine which language people are speaking. In principle there are two ways. Either you discover some facts about how they speak and compare them with other known languages, or else you ask the speakers themselves what their language is. In most instances the result is the same either way. If you listen to the way people speak in, say, Norfolk it sounds like English, and people in Norfolk, if asked, will maintain that they speak English.
Things are much more difficult when it comes to the people who lived in France in the ninth century. We know enough about how their language sounded to say that it did not sound particularly like Latin. Indeed, it was not so different from the language that people started calling français a couple of centuries later. From that point of view it seems reasonable to say that they spoke French. On the other hand, there is absolutely no evidence that the people who lived in France at that time used this name for their language. On the contrary, in some Latin texts from the ninth century there are expressions like
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rustica romana lingua ‘the rustic Roman language’ or just lingua romana ‘the Roman language’, referring to the spoken language. In normal Latin usage lingua romana and lingua latina mean exactly the same thing, the Latin language. On this evidence, then, it seems as if the French of that period thought they spoke Latin, though perhaps a somewhat rustic variety.
As far as Latin is concerned, it is not very important what people thought they were speaking. What is quite clear is that those who wrote did so in Latin. The situation remained like that in all the countries where people had spoken Latin until new written languages were created. This happens for the first time in northern France, where a number of writers in the eleventh century started writing a language which was based on the spoken language of that time. This was radically different from Latin, and after many changes it has developed into modern written French. In Italy and Spain similar things happened, but not until a couple of hundred years later, in the thirteenth century. Gradually all the Romance areas acquired their own written languages.
These new written languages obviously competed with Latin. Until they were created everything was written in Latin, and so they took over the function of Latin. But this happened only slowly and gradually. In the beginning it was mainly writers of imaginative literature who wrote in the new languages. Little by little people started using them in private letters and simple documents such as receipts and IOUs. Institutions like the courts and government offices instead clung on to Latin for hundreds of years. Even more conservative was the Church, which kept Latin as its major language for longer than any other institution. Higher education and all kinds of science were also areas where Latin remained in use for a long time.
In sum, both the written Romance languages and Latin were used in parallel for a very long time, from the eleventh right down to the twentieth centuries. It was close to a thousand years before the new ways of writing definitively ousted the old ways within the former Roman empire.
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Missionaries, Latin, and foreign languages
In the year 432 a monk by the name of Patricius left the monastery of Lérins in France to preach Christianity in Ireland. He succeeded beyond all expectation, and is still remembered as St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. He was the first in a long line of Christian missionaries who dedicated their lives to spreading the word of God to places where people did not speak Latin. Ireland had never belonged to the Roman empire and the population spoke Irish, a Celtic language. Patrick mastered the language and obviously used it in his mission, but it seems that the men of the Church used Latin for reading and writing. The Irish language certainly started being written with Roman letters soon after Patrick’s mission had begun, but the texts that have survived from the oldest times do not betray any Christian content.
In Ireland the monastic system proved very successful, and in consequence many of the Christians lived as monks. The monasteries evidently became very effective schools, as proficiency in Latin was maintained there at a very high level during the following centuries, when the ability to read and write became increasingly rare in most of the rest of Europe. The Irish obviously had to learn Latin as a completely foreign language, and they probably learnt to speak, read, and write all at once in the monastic schools. For them it was classical Latin from beginning to end. By contrast, on the Continent people thought that they were speaking Latin, but their spoken language was so different from the written language that they had great difficulty learning to write in the classical way even when they did manage to acquire some kind of schooling.
For several hundred years the Irish monks preserved proficiency in classical Latin better than anyone else, a fact which was to prove to be of great significance. They also became eager missionaries themselves. At first they turned their attention to England, where there had been Christians in the Roman period, but the Christian religion had disappeared almost entirely after the invasions of the Angles
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and the Saxons in the fifth century. However, about the year 600 the Irish started missionary work in the north-west, almost at the same time as a bishop sent out by the Pope from Rome started preaching in Canterbury in the south-east.
All England became Christian within a hundred years, and so Latin came back to the island again as an important foreign language. Monastic life and monastic schools flourished, and by the eighth century no one was better at Latin than the best of the English. The most important Latin writer of that century was Bede, who had the honorary name of venerábilis ‘the venerable’. Bede was a monk in a monastery close to what is now Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and dedicated himself with great energy to a life of writing. Most of what he produced was in the form of Bible commentary and other kinds of religious literature, but he is best known for his detailed history of England. His main goal is to describe how England was Christianized, but he also writes at length about the history of the island more generally, starting with Caesar’s landing in 59 BCE and coming right down to the year 731, when he himself stopped writing.
Bede wrote excellent Latin, for the most part in complete accordance with classical rules, although the language was obviously not his native tongue. He was an enthusiastic historian, whose writings hold the reader’s interest because of their many anecdotes about all kinds of people, often but not always with a moral to them. He made a lasting contribution to western history by consistently dating events from the birth of Christ. England at the time of Bede was a multilingual society. At the beginning of his history he establishes that there are five languages, Anglorum vidélicet, Brettonum, Scottorum, Pictorum et Latinorum ‘namely those of the Angles, the Britons, the Scots, the Picts and the Romans’. The language of the Angles was of course an early form of English, that of the Britons was what we call Welsh, the Scottish language was what we now call Gaelic, while the language of the Picts has entirely disappeared, and no one even knows which family of languages it belonged to. Latin is also mentioned, but Bede says that it is a language which everyone had in common through the study of the Scriptures. This is another
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way of saying that it was no one’s native language, and that the Christians used it as a learned language, which is the role that Latin had gradually acquired throughout western Europe.
Missionaries travelled from England to spread Christianity to the East.The most famous of these is a man from Wessex named Winfrith, but who called himself Bonifatius in Latin, a name which has in turn been anglicized as Boniface. He was a contemporary of Bede who, at the request of the Pope, preached among the Germans in many different areas from Frisia on the coast of the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria in the South.All these activities are documented in his extensive correspondence which has been preserved. He was finally murdered by pagans in Frisia, and as a martyr was of course made a saint. The mission in the east was connected to the fact that the empire of the Franks spread wider and wider in the eighth century, so that by the beginning of the ninth it included modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Northern Italy, Germany, Austria, and a great deal more.The man who accomplished this enormous expansion was Charlemagne, who also made a major contribution to the developments which resulted in Latin becoming the most important language in Europe for many centuries thereafter. This he did in two ways. First, he engaged in a war of conquest in the east which he combined with what one might benevolently call missionary zeal. This mostly meant that his soldiers killed anyone who was not prepared to accept Christianity. The survivors ended up belonging to a Church which possessed great resources, and which could also rely on the state’s intervention if it asked for it. This Church conducted all its business in Latin. In this way, Latin gained its position as the language of religion and administration in large swathes of central Europe.
Second, Charlemagne was an enthusiastic advocate of education. He focused a great deal of effort on raising the level of attainment and reforming the schools. In this he was helped by an Englishman named Alcuin, who did much to ensure that the future priests—for these were the people who went to school—learnt correct Latin according to classical rules. Alcuin was also a central figure among a whole circle of learned men who were anxious to revive the knowledge of antiquity
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and its literature.With some justice this movement is usually referred to as the Carolingian renaissance. The authors who belonged to this group obviously wrote in Latin, and frequently made great efforts to write according to ancient models. A well-known example is a biography of Charlemagne himself written by a man called Einhard. This is set out according to exactly the same schema as the great biographies of the Roman emperors which Suetonius had composed in the second century CE. Einhard tells us all sorts of things about the emperor Charlemagne, one thing being that he was eminenti statúra ‘of extraordinary height’. That is true. His preserved remains show that he was about six foot six inches tall. He was also in cibo et potu témperans ‘moderate in the consumption of food and drink’. The emperor knew Latin very well, and could speak it as fluently as his mother tongue, but curiously he never really learnt to write. He was not taught to do it as a child, and his attempts to do so as an adult were not very successful.
As a result of Charlemagne’s efforts, by the beginning of the ninth century almost the whole of western and central Europe had acquired a unified Church with priests who were relatively well educated in Latin. Hardly anyone else had any education at all. This was the beginning of a period which lasted for something like half a millennium in which Latin was completely dominant as the written language in Europe, and furthermore was used as a spoken language among the educated. The Carolingian empire soon fell apart again, and Europe underwent many political changes in the centuries that followed, but Latin continued to expand into new areas for several hundred years. To illustrate the role that the language assumed, let us have a look at what happened in Britain.
Latin in Britain
In the eighth century, England was the area where education and scholarship in Latin were most advanced. We have already discussed
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Bede and his history of the Christian Church in the island, and the missionary work of Boniface. An even more renowned Latinist was Alcuin from York, who as we have seen also emigrated to the Continent and became closely associated with Charlemagne. Alcuin was a famous teacher, and his role was something like a minister of education for the new empire.
While Alcuin was very energetically furthering Latin studies on the Continent, serious trouble started in his home island. Alcuin died in 804, and a few years before that, in 793, the Vikings had made their first, terrifying raid against the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumberland. In the ninth and the tenth centuries there were many more attacks and indeed large-scale invasions by Scandinavian warriors. The monasteries and the churches were favourite targets. This meant, among other things, that most of the places where Latin was taught and written ceased to exist. The great tradition of learning disappeared almost without trace. A century later, it seems that few people knew Latin at all. Alfred the Great, who ruled from 871 to 899, wrote that there were very few people south of the Humber who could translate a Latin letter into English, and not many north of the river either.
But Alfred himself did much to improve the situation. In the first place, he took important steps toward the unification of all England under one ruler, thereby ending a long period of political disorder. Secondly, he believed in education and did whatever he could to advance knowledge in his kingdom. It is true that he chose to propagate English as a written language rather than Latin, but his main achievement was to translate important works from Latin, especially handbooks for the use of the clergy. The reason he did so was not that he did not want the men of the Church to read Latin; it was just that he realized that they could not do it. At the same time, of course, the English language entered a new domain in written form.
Almost a hundred years later, towards the end of the tenth century, the English Church was reached by a reform movement that had its roots in Cluny, in France; the main protagonist in Britain was Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury and later declared a saint.
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Religious reform also meant more study, and so more Latin. The language reclaimed much of the territory it had lost in the centuries of disorder.
After 1066, the linguistic situation of Britain changed drastically. Before that year, English was used in writing as well as orally, and its sole competitor was Latin. Afterwards, English was relegated to the role of spoken language of the underprivileged. The ruling class spoke French. In writing, Latin became the completely dominant language, although French was also used. English in practice ceased to be a written language for a couple of hundred years.
The two centuries after the Norman Conquest were a period of rapid economic and cultural development in Britain (as well as in much of western Europe), and Latin became the written language in almost all areas of society.The famous texts from this period are composed in the language. As early as 1085, William the Conqueror ordered a general census of people and land. This was recorded in the very important Domesday Book, which contains invaluable detailed information about the economic and social situation in early medieval England.
Another well-known document is the Magna Charta, the Great Charter, promulgated by King John in 1215 under pressure from those opposed to his autocratic rule. The precise significance of the document has been much discussed. However that may be, the king made important concessions to the citizens, as can be seen from this phrase at the beginning:
Concessimus etiam ómnibus líberis homínibus regni nostri, pro nobis et herédibus nostris in perpétuum, omnes libertates subscriptas.
We have also granted to all free men of our kingdom, on behalf of us and our heirs forever, all the liberties written below.
Naturally, Latin returned to its previous status as the only language of the Church. In general, the level of education rose rapidly, and in the twelfth century several good Latin authors emerged.
One of them was the prolific and very learned John of Salisbury. After a good basic training in England he went to Paris, and then to
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Chartres, to study under the most famous teachers of the time, among them the philosopher Peter Abelard. When he finally returned to England in 1138, in his late thirties, he became secretary to the archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald, and then to his successor, Thomas Becket. He was sent on many diplomatic missions by the archbishop and by the king, Henry II, especially to Rome but also elsewhere. Eventually, he became an archbishop himself, in Chartres. In spite of all these activities, he found time to write several important works, among them the Policraticus, which deals with the moral principles underlying good government, and the Metalogicus, which tackles some basic philosophical questions.
John was a leading European intellectual, an Englishman who had been trained in France. As far as language is concerned, he wrote only in Latin, and probably spoke that language in many contexts: in church services, of course, but also in learned discussions and in his diplomatic activities. While he was unusually brilliant, he was by no means the only one of his kind. For example, Thomas Becket himself, the archbishop who was murdered in 1170, conducted his correspondence in very elegant Latin. There were several more ecclesiastical authors, as well as historians, philosophers, and others. Britain at this time could compete with France as the leading nation in education and learning.
In the thirteenth century, Latin was still completely dominant. This was the time when large institutions for higher education became established in Europe. The University of Oxford was one of the first, and one of the most important. Naturally the language of the university was Latin, both in speech and in writing, and it remained so for a long time. It must have seemed that Latin would be the language of the educated forever. But in the following century, things began to change. English as a written language came back with a vengeance in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. It was used by authors of fiction, such as Chaucer, but it was also introduced in official administration, in business, and in other fields. At the same time, French disappeared completely both as a spoken language and as an official written language in Britain, though, as we shall see, it had left an indelible mark on the English language which survived it.
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