This is untrue -- the definition of a living language is that it is a) learnt as a mother tongue, and b) that it is evolving.
In Charlemagne's day, people were still learning Latin as their mother tongue, and it was a Latin that had evolved away from its 1st-5th century state (which was a perfectly normal evolutionary process).
> 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.
I would partially agree with that from what I know, but only partially.
The romance languages as such did not exist at the time, although the local dialects of late Vulgate Latin had certainly become somewhat independent of each other, in varying degrees. The Vulgate Latin dialects of the Iberian peninsula, and of Sardinia and Corsica, were for example far more conservative than other dialects, and indeed Sard to this day retains the Vulgate Latin case system (Nominative Accusative Genitive) for its proper nouns (although Genitive is pretty moribund in modern Sard, existing I believe only for some irregular nouns).
These dialects were mutually intelligible, although I would use that word cautiously, in that people could converse and understand each other, although it required some effort (and good will). It is true that Jerome's Latin texts had become hard to understand by many people, and that readers would routinely interpret the texts into local dialect, but again with some effort they (ie ordinary people not just scholars) could manage to do so. Nevertheless, the Latin that was spoken and taught by the Church prior to the reform was a more or less common language and a stabilising influence throughout the West -- even though, you're *perfectly* right, their rendering of it was somewhat odd and at variance to how it was spoken in the late "classical" period. Charlemagne's insistence that the *priests* must henceforth use a more educated Latin essentially removed that stabilising influence, so that the local dialects and parlances were then completely cut off from each other as a result -- whereas they had not been *completely* severed from their common root until that time.
The Romance languages are considered to come into being around a generation (or sometimes more, locally) *after* this event -- indeed the AD 842 text that you quote is considered to be the *earliest* French text in existence, and was written _precisely_ one generation after Charlemagne.
In Vulgate Latin btw the phrase would be rendered "in quantu Deus mi donauit sapentia et potentia" or something similar, and even in the classical period (from 1st century onwards) a proto-romance word order would have been used in most cases, ie in ordinary speech and circumstances, however classically correct or incorrect the grammar and spelling usage itself might have been.
In spoken language the word order "in quanto Deus sapientiam et potentiam mihi donabit" would actually be pre-classical, ie belonging to about 2nd century BC and earlier. The more likely (spoken) word order that would have been used even in 1st century AD Rome would be "in quantu Deus mi don-avit/-abit sapientiam et potentia" (modified to reflect pronunciation) (and the final m in sapientiam would hardly be pronounced even before that vowel).
The Latin of the Classical period was then spoken with basically the same rythms and emphases and word order as the early Romance languages -- of course, the phrase that you quote does NOT use the normal Romance word order, in order to place some stylistic emphasis on the words savir and podir.
And one should remember that even during the late Vulgate and proto-Romance period, writers would attempt to imitate the non-standard word order and poetical effects that are possible in literary Latin :-)
Cicero's spoken Latin appears btw to have covered the entire range between completely Vulgate forms and the most exquisite classical/literary ones, but then again he was the Master wasn't he ?
Anyway, whilst I disagree with you that Latin as such no longer existed, as there was still a core language with its various dialects as far as I know, there is still quite clearly debate over the various interrelated issues, given that we have precious few surviving texts to illustrate at all accurately what the various local parlances were actually like. You have presented another side of this debate :)
Julian Lord
Anyway, given the serious off-topicness here, any further posts by me on the subject go to the Immoderate list. The recreation of Hebrew in modern Israel, and the "classical" arabic (actually an artificial arabic) used in the Koran, are probably far better real world examples to use than Latin to imagine the linguistic effects that the Abiding Book may have had in the Gloranthan West.
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