M. Van Acker, R. Van Deyck, M. Van Uytfanghe, Latin écrit – Roman oral? (Serge Lusignan)
Maricke Van Acker, Rika
Van Deyck, Marc Van Uytfanghe (dir.),
Latin écrit – Roman oral? De la dichotomisation à la continuité,
Turnhout (Brepols) 2008, 296 p. (Corpus Christianorum. Lingua Patrum,
5), ISBN 978-2-503-52907-3, EUR 130,00.
rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par
Serge Lusignan, Montréal
This volume contains a series of essays discussing various aspects of linguistic change and linguistic shift which characterise the passage from Latin to Romance languages, especially French, during the crucial period which ranges from the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages to the 13th century. A special attention is paid to the relation between oral and written uses of language during this period. Major breakthrough in this field of research has occurred during the last twenty or thirty years. This is mainly due to new interpretations of already known sources, inspired by historical sociolinguistics and communication studies. Contributors to the book range from top names in the field to younger scholars; it offers a broad view of present state of research as well as of new paths which have just started to be explored. This is one of the great values of »Latin écrit – Roman oral?«.
Essays are grouped according to four angles of approach to explore the question of the transition from Latin to Romance languages. The first three contributions deal with methodological and theoretical problems related to this question. This section begins with Michel Banniard’s article »Paramètres imaginaires et paramètres réel en diachronie longue: entre typologie et probabilisme du latin au roman«. Taking the form of a detailed review of a recently published book by the Italian linguist Giampaolo Salvi, it shows the limits, if not the inadequacy, of generative grammar to develop a satisfying model to explain the dynamics of the linguistic shift from Latin to romance languages along centuries from the Antiquity to the Carolingian period. For Banniard, generative grammar is based on a too rigid model to explain the complexity of changes in language which often consist in variations of the frequency of the uses of one or another linguistic feature, over the time and according to the circumstances. He concludes that a probabilistic model of language rules would be much more efficient to explain such phenomenon than a linear one as proposed by generative grammar.
The next contribution by Peter Koch, »Le latin – une langue pas tout à fait comme les autres? Le problème de la diglossie en Gaule septentrionale« discusses the relevance of the concept of diglossia to study the relation between written and spoken Latin. The author agrees with Banniard that this notion is generally too rigid to conceptualise synchronic variations of Latin language as exemplified in the various registers of the language from oral and popular performances to written and learned ones, as well as its diachronic evolution. Nevertheless, Koch believes that the notion remains valid for a short period, during the second half of the 8th century, just before happened the clear-cut separation between Latin and Romance language in Northern France.
The last contribution in this section by Anthony Lodge is »The Sources of Standardisation in French – Written or Spoken?«. The author comes back to one of his favourite topics: the formation of Parisian French. This is a fundamental question in the history of French language since Parisian French is clearly the direct ancestor of modern French. Criticizing the old theory promoted by Gaston Paris to the effect that French language slowly standardised because of the expansion of the form of the language spoken in Paris. Lodge clearly demonstrates that medieval Parisian French was itself the result of contacts between varieties of French coming mostly from area located West, East and South West of Paris, sometimes located at a quite far distance from the capital. He reminds us of an important lesson of sociolinguistics: no language is free of external influence, particularly if it is used in places where there is a wide circulation of persons as it was the case in Paris during the Middle Ages, and after.
The second section of the book brings together three papers which concentrate on written representation of language. The first by Sylviane Lazard is »La scripta latine en Italie au Xe siècle: la recherche d’un compromis«. Her corpus for this study is formed of charters written in Latin by notaries in Ravenna, during the 10th century. She convincingly demonstrates that despite the use of the learned language, notaries were cautious in their choice of syntactic structures, words and orthography to make the documents easily understandable by Italian speaker ignorant of Latin. Their language is pure Latin, but a Latin in which bridges toward spoken Italian are multiplied.
The second paper, by Liselotte Biedermann-Paskes, is untitled »Matérialité des caractères, règles d’orthographe, théorie de l’écrit dans le ›Tractatus ortographie gallicane‹ (XIIIe et XIVe–XVe siècles)«. Her corpus is the treatises of French orthography written in England during the last centuries of Middle Ages. Through a careful analysis of rules they propose, the author shows that they all show a prejudice in favour of tradition instead of innovation. They are strong defenders of the etymological orthography for French instead of trying to narrow the gap between oral and written language.
The third paper closing the second section is »Latin and the Rise of Old Irish and Old Welsh«, by Michael Richter. It examines the sociolinguistic conditions which favoured the use of the Latin scripta to develop a written code for Celtic language. He compares two situations: Ireland and Wales. He concludes that a lesser degree of the penetration of the Latin culture in the first country can explain that writing vernacular language developed more easily there, than in Wales which was more profoundly romanised. Once again, Richter’s work illustrates to what point comparison between Ireland and Western Europe can be instructive for linguistic and cultural history of Early Middle Ages.
The third section of »Latin écrit – Roman oral?« deals with the question of how far and with what methodological precaution can we say something about oral performance when dealing with written documents. The first two contributions come from highly respected scholars in the field whereas the other two illustrate the work of the new generation. Marc Van Uytfanghe is the author of the first paper »La communication verticale latine en Italie (VIe–VIIIe siècle)«. One of the main issues discussed over the last two decades concerns the period during which occurred the break of the vertical oral communication in Latin between literate clerks and the rest of the population in romance languages area. On the basis of testimonies found in hagiographical literature, deeply and soundly analysed, he concludes that by 800, in Italy, no problems at all were encountered in vertical communication, whereas in Northern France at the same period, this communication was fragilised to a point close to the rupture. This explains that we find in Italy no ecclesiastical recommendation that sermons should be delivered in rusticam Romanam as it was the case at the council of Tours, in 813.
The second paper »The Monolingual Latin Glossaries of the Iberian Peninsula: can they help the Romanist?« is due to Roger Wright. This paper offers a good lesson of methodology. Very often, peculiar orthography of certain words in Medieval Latin glossaries serves as a basis to extrapolate about vernacular pronunciation, or about the quality of the competence of their author in Latin. By a careful analysis of many examples, on the basis of palaeographical considerations as well as on his vast knowledge and experience in Latin and Romance philology, Wright illustrates traps and snares in which one can be easily caught in pursuing this kind of analysis. He nevertheless concludes to the importance of this kind of sources provide that they are treated with care and competence.
The next two papers by younger scholars open the way to what seems to me new approaches to oral performance of Latin during the early medieval period. The now accepted conclusion is that, at that time, literate persons had a way of pronouncing simple Latin which makes it understandable to lay people. Thomas Finbow’s paper »Inter- and Intra-word Spacing Conventions in Early Medieval Iberian Texts – the Implications for Reading and Writing Strategies« discusses this question under the light of Paul Seanger works about the impact of word spacing in older manuscripts on the way they were read. Looking at Iberian manuscripts of this period, Finbow tries to decipher the preparatory work that has to be done by the readers before public oral delivery of texts. From that, he tries to evaluate the degree of liberty that the reader did have toward written text. This approach seems to me new and fruitful to understand the question of oral vertical communication.
The last article of this section is »Orientations de recherche pour l’étude évolutive de structures intonatives« by Rikke Schultz. This essay represents probably the most ambitious essay to reconstruct the reality of oral delivery of texts in Early Middle Ages. Inspired by studies on modern languages intonation, the author discusses methodological problems raised when one tries to apply the same approach to a former period for which we have no direct testimonies about oral performance of the language. She is still at the beginning of her research but despite of the difficulties rose by her approach, I think that this paper opens a new important perspective to research.
The last section contains four papers having in common a purely linguistic approach to linguistic changes. The first one by Paolo Greco is untitled »Progression through Accumulation in a Late Latin and in a Romance Text«. It shows that despite linguistic shift from Latin to medieval Italian, some specific syntactic structures remain stable. He carefully studies one of them, the apposition of many participial and gerundive phrases in the same sentence. He shows that this pattern is frequently used in two texts chronologically and linguistically very far one from the other: Gregory of Tours’ »Historia Francorum« and the late 13th century Italian version of Tristan’s story »Tristano Ricardiano«.
The next two contributions study the evolution of aspects of the noun morphology in the transition from Latin to French. In »Syntactic Conditioning of Case Marking Loss: A Long Term Factor between Latin and Romance?« Rosanna Sornicola studies the morpho-syntactical question of noun declensions in the evolution from Latin to Old French. She shows to what extent syntactical context had an influence on the disintegration of case markers in Old French.
For their part, Rika Van Deyck and Marieke Van Acker present us with a remarkable study about the lost of neutral gender in Old French in their article: »Comment la morho-syntaxe romane a-t-elle remplacé la flexion casuelle du latin? Le cas du neutre«. They take as a point of departure Latin hagiographical texts of the Merovingian period to measure to what point neutral gender mostly disappears in the early Old French texts. Their study is illuminating and convincing because it is supported by a clear and well formulated model of the linguistic change. It shows that a slight weakening of neutral gender already exists in texts written in simple Latin intended to be understandable when orally read to laymen. This research shows that a linguistic continuum exists between Late Latin and Early French. It confirms recent interpretation that certain texts dating from the 7th and 8th centuries written in a Latin scripta are de facto proto-romance documents, and that a text like the »Serment de Strasbourg« may be a graphic representation of the way popular Latin was pronounced. It proves that there exists quite a long period during which distinction between Latin and French was really blurred. It stresses the continuity that exists in the evolution from Latin to French.
The last paper of the book is by Benjamín García-Hernádez, »Notas y correspondencia de Coseriu sobre spatvla ›omóplato‹: Un préstamo griego, también de contenido«. It shows the relevance of lexicological method to study linguistic evolution from Latin to Romance languages. His sources are the working papers and notes left by the famous linguist Eugenion Coseriu. It follows in detail the evolution of the word spatula.
On the whole, »Latin écrit – Roman oral?« offers a wide range of perspectives on the transition between Latin to Romance languages. It is highly instructive by its content as well as by the numerous methodological suggestions scattered in the different contributions. If I would express only one critic about this book, it would be about its price, but we cannot blame for that the editors Maricke Van Acker, Rika Van Deyck, Marc Van Uytfanghe who have done a remarkable and useful work in publishing this book.
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