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

world where language registers have become normalised and Austand-processes have
dichotomised between „right‟ and „wrong‟ ways of speaking and writing. In short, modern
linguistics has necessarily catalogued languages and their features in order to describe and
study them and these preoccupations and methods are naturally reflected in the study of
ancient languages, despite the fact that they were not necessarily reflected in the concerns of
the ancient societies.
5.6 The Context of Language Use and Language Change in the Seventh Century
Around the period in which the monastic rules were written, there had begun to
appear expression of a consciousness of language diversity that is not typical of earlier
Roman authors. The Anglo-Saxon monk Boniface, for example, is often cited in the mid-
eighth century for his discomfort at the disparity between his Latin, acquired as a learned
second language, and that spoken as a first language in Rome (Wright 2002), whilst the
Council of Tours in 813, in a phrase normally taken to be the first evidence of Romance, also
speaks of conversing in the „rustica romana lingua‟. 447
Although an established Christian topos (Curtius 1997: 79-105,) proclaiming to have
written in a lower register of language retained a practical use, since there existed a genuine
concern that some higher registers of Latin had become unintelligible to those who were not
educated. One of the most well-known examples, Gregory of Tours, noted famously:
“philosophantem rhetorem intellegunt pauci, loquentem rusticum multi”. 448 Indeed, Gregory
447 Thus Ewert (1935: 16): “the Strasburg Oaths represent the earliest extant piece of continuous prose
in the vernacular of Gaul, and, in fact, in any Romance vernacular”.
448 Historia Francorum preface.
185