The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

items borrowed from Latin into Romance at a later date, and not ones that remained in
contemporary speech. In essence then, Politzer argued that synonymic repetition, besides a
stylistic function, could also be a gloss, using Romance words to explain Latin words to an
uneducated audience.
Unfortunately, the argument is hampered by the lack of necessary linguistic
methodology, and the use of obscuring words such as „quasi-bilingualism‟ (Politzer 1961:
487) detracts from the argument. Concentration on Longobardic and Merovingian legal texts,
rather than literary pieces, means that the study is also confined to an area where such
repetition might be expected. What is more, glossing a word need not necessarily imply that
it is from a different language, but merely a different register of the same language. If a
modern English speaker, for example, needed „celestial‟ to be explained to him with the
synonym „heavenly‟, this is not to say that he cannot speak English.
The argument is, however, an interesting one. It is entirely possible that in some cases
an author may have chosen a word of a much lower register in order to help clarify a word
that may have been perceived as „difficult‟, especially in texts such as monastic rules that
were aimed at an audience that may have included uneducated monks. However, the position
is nevertheless very difficult to prove because it is very tenuous in many cases to decide
which words might have been considered „difficult‟ and which ones might have been
considered „easy‟. Also, the fact that so many synonymic pairs do not fit Politzer‟s model
means that it must otherwise be left to one side. Given the pragmatic and technical nature of
the texts, it is additionally hard to understand why an author would purposefully use a word
that he knew would be difficult for his listeners, only to have to gloss it subsequently with a
synonym.
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