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June 21, 2006
More and more about less and less
I'm excited! Nicholas Everett's Literacy in Lombard Italy, c 568-774 just came for me through Interlibrary loan! I know what I'm doing all afternoon!*
Why do I care?
1. I think about inscriptions on buildings - public writing.
2. If no one much could read, medieval inscriptions were mere decoration, a superficial revival of antique models.
3. If people could read,** inscriptions conveyed information and therefore my project has much implications for a much broader audience.
*oooooh - and in my cool new prescription (progressive bifocal) Maui Jims.
**don't get me started on reading silently vs. reading aloud unless you have a while to listen.
further Argh! I just deleted a real comment on this post in the midst of a pile of spam and now I discover that the BACK button won't recover it. I juat caught a bit of text about language as I hit "despam."
Language - what language did people speak, what language people did people read? Most of my dissertation is about Francia (the Frankish Kingdom, but in Italy that's no problem at all. In the 6th and 7th centuries the vast majority of the population (all the non-Lombards other than some Greek speakers in Naples and South Italy) would be speaking Late Latin -- it's not even Proto-Romance at this point. If there were someone to read Latin out loud to them, they'd understand it, at least in the simplest sense of "understand," and I agree that there are a lot of senses there! Here's a way of thinking about chronology and linguistic register: How well do people really understand the King James Version or Shakespeare or the 1928 Prayer Book read aloud and at regular speed? That might have been what the Aeneid sounded like by 568. Remember, though, that Jerome's translation/version, the Vulgate, was in a much more everyday and modern Latin - barely 150 years old. More like hearing the Good News Version, I'd guess.
In Germanic speaking areas, things would have been different. The number of Lombards in Italy, though, was always relatively less in proportion to the population than Franks north of the Loire, we think. Visigoths in Spain? Also probably a fairly neglibigle proportion -- there may have been more people in Spain still speaking various Celtic languages than there were Visigoths.
The linguistic research of the last 30 years has pushed the dividing line between Proto-Romance and Late Latin (the point at which two people would no longer have understood each other) forward into the 9th century. The historical research (like the book I just got) has revealed a larger (though in absolute numbers still quite small) number of literate persons. The combination means that reading aloud would have reached an audience. That's the new consensus of the early 21st century.
Whoever it was, come back and re-comment! Sorry! I'll address anything else! --MCT
Posted by CrankyProfessor at June 21, 2006 12:04 PM