> Church/Medieval Latin which was the result of a misguided attempt by
> Charlemagne and his Court to "purify" the Latin vernacular of the
> time, but in fact ruining Latin as a living language.
>From what I know:
Latin had stopped being a living language long before Charlemagne and Alcuin set to work. It had evolved into several different and mutually unintelligible living langauges by that time - but it was still written (by those who could read) as if it were classical Latin. In effect, Latin had almost become an ideogram-based rather than an alphabetic language.
So a sentence written as "in quanto Deus sapientiam et potentiam mihi donabit" ("Insofar as God gives me knowledge and power") would be read by a Frenchman to say "In quant Deus savir et podir me dunat", and by an Italian or a Spaniard in a totally different way. What Alcuin did was say "No, 'in quanto Deus sapientiam et potentiam mihi donabit' is a Latin sentence and should be pronounced the way Cicero would have done, and the language you're speaking now is *not* *Latin*. He was recognising an accomplished fact, not changing the language.
Stephen
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