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

entity as understood from a modern perspective, and there is little contextual study of its
history and development into Romance. On the other hand, Adams (2007) places Latin in its
wider context as both a historical literary language and a spoken language that constituted
dialect continua. Nevertheless, if works on the history of Latin are guilty of teleology, this is
reflected amply in most works on the linguistic histories of vernacular languages. Indeed,
most usually begin with the first evidence for a language, and perhaps with an introductory
paragraph or two to its Latin origins before that, but normally little else.
In this respect it is important to highlight initially that there are numerous instances
where the Latinity of the monastic rules both differs and is similar to that typical of Classical
Latin. It is not the intention here to provide a complete catalogue of such features; fuller
investigations for other texts of the same period are available, which share similar features
(for example: Garvin (1946); van Uytfanghe (1976); Rose (2004)). However, a brief review
of some of the most interesting features will be useful. It is important to express that the
presence of these features in the Latin of the monastic rules does not suggest that they are
specific features of later Latin. The problem of the „Classical gap‟ should always be
accounted for, as well as the fact that the often archaic and codified Latin of classical authors
means that features that may have been common in the spoken language were masked in the
written language.
There is also no discussion here of phonological features. There are two reasons for
this. First, such a study is done best through manuscript analysis, and this could be arguably
an entirely new thesis in itself in order to do such a study justice. Second, phonological
analyses are complex and it is very difficult to ascertain how reflective features of later
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