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

Maltby 2002; Velázquez Soriano 2003). Apart from local usage, Isidore also notes features
of language use outside of Iberia, pointing out accents and other linguistic habits. 434
As elsewhere in Europe, grammatical treatises also continued to be produced,
including, amongst other important works (Vineis & Maierù 1994), the Ars grammatica of
Julian of Toledo (Maestre Yenes 1973) and commentaries on Donatus, such as the
anonymous text written in Toledo in the late-seventh century (Collins 2004: 157). Although
the grammatical texts are heavily indebted to the Donatian tradition, Isidore in particular
demonstrates a much wider interest, aiming not for “novelty but authority, not originality but
accessibility, not augmenting but preserving and transmitting knowledge” (Barney 2006: 11).
As such, he shows a patent curiosity not only in linguistic factors shown in works such as his
Etymologies, but also in wider meta-linguistic aspects as shown in his Differentiae, or
collections of synonyms. Indeed, Iberia in the seventh century was particularly active in the
Latin-speaking west in its production of works concerned with language (Law 1982: 11-41).
5.3 Modern Definitions of the Language of the Monastic Rules
The first task is to determine what name should be given to the language in which the
monastic rules are written. This is an important process for the simple fact that nomenclature
matters, and it has arguably influenced modern historiography. Latin, with a written history
of over two-thousand years, is prone naturally to problems of linguistic and historical
typology, and its periodizations and typologies have attracted the attention not only of various
modern scholars, but have also been the subject of increasingly mature linguistic complexity
within recent decades (Lloyd 1991; Wright 2002a: 36-48). This is a problem that is also
434 For example, Etymologies 9.20, “Mozicia, quasi modicia, unde et modicum; Z pro D, sicut solent
Itali dicere ozie pro hodie‖.
172