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

them. 458 It would be misguided, therefore, to take these two adjectives in their literal sense,
and rather a phrase such as „in plain and simple language‟ or „without literary adornment‟
would suffice better.
It is possible that in using the term sermo, which is by this period associated
particularly with Christian usage (Burton 2007: 27), Isidore was referring to the idea of
„speech‟ rather than „language‟; that is, the quotidian spoken and conversational idiom rather
than the institutionalised, principally written, lingua. That the two differ is a mainstay of
modern linguistics, whereby speech is equivalent with spoken language as opposed to
language, which is the written form (Trask 1999: 284). This is a dichotomy that is also
reflected in the vocabulary of many other languages. 459
However, in Classical Latin, there existed many forms to denote „speech‟, including the
nouns lingua, sermo and oratio, and the verbs loquor, dico, aio, to name the most obvious.
The semantic realities in Latin were not so simple that sermo referred to the spoken language
in contrast to other nouns, which referred to the written language. Examples from later Latin
in particular show that the use of the word lingua, in phrases such as the lingua rustica or its
variants, was employed frequently to refer to what could be classed as a lower register
standard of spoken language. The Strasbourg Oaths, for example, differentiate between
romana lingua and lingua rustica / uulgaris / inerudita (Lawrence & Edwards 1927), and yet
458 For example, the Glasgow „patter‟ is famously incomprehensible to outsiders, a fact played on in
the BBC comedy series Rab C Nesbitt, whose comedic value often stemmed from the fact that the
lead characters were purposefully unintelligible to audiences.
459 For example, German Sprache and Rede; Spanish lengua and habla; Polish mowa and język,
Basque hizkuntza and mintzaldi.
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