Biblia

From: Julian Lord <jlord_at_free.fr>
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 23:37:56 +0200


Donald :

> I doubt that Latin was ever the language of most people in Western Europe.

I'm sorry, but it looks like you don't know your philology.

> For most of the Roman Empire

The relevant period is from the Roman Empire at about the time the Vulgate ("Popular Edition") was composed until the reign of Charlemagne.

> the language of Gaul, Britannia and Iberia
> would be a Celtic one.

The Brits never properly assimilated latin, granted.

But the Celtic dialects of Iberia and Gaul basically just _vanished_ after they were taken over by Rome. This is a highly astounding historical event : Gaulish vanished, as the accepted explanation goes, because Gaulish and Latin were so close to each other that Latin basically swallowed the other language, which therefore became a dialect of latin (gallo-roman).

The _complete_ disappearance of "Iberian Celtic" is more complex, but it seems that the aboriginal language of Iberia was phonetically similar to Latin, and that the indigenous peoples took to Latin in a way that they had never taken to the Celtic. It seems that there was a political aspect too, so that the old Celtic-speaking bosses were told to push off, and then basically just died out from the linguistic POV (in modern "Spain", anyway ; Portuguese and Galician retain some Celtic roots ; I don't know about the origins of Catalan).

> Educated and literate people
> would also know Latin but they were always a minority, often a small one.

That is the mediaeval situation, particularly the post-Charlemagne centuries.

Charlemagne is the one who severed ordinary people from an understanding of Latin, by decreeing that henceforth only classical forms would be used. Because of this decree, Latin suddenly stopped being the language of ordinary folk everywhere, and became an incomprehensible language of officialdom and clerics. That's when Vulgate latin ceased to exist, although it took an extra century to die out in Spain. Interestingly, Charlemagne's own command of latin was dismal.

This decree was of course an atrocious act of linguistic terrorism.

Previously, most people, especially when helped by their priests, could just about understand the Vulgate Bible. Subsequently, the Vulgate Bible was declared, despite its pretty explicit title, to be a classical text to be read and recited as such. Pitiful.

Julian Lord

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