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

6.4 Latin / Romance and its Relevance to the Monastic Rules
It was stated above that this chapter will investigate and critique the Wright thesis.
The historical context of the Wright thesis places it in the Carolingian period, two or three
centuries after the composition of the Visigothic monastic rules. However, it is important to
this thesis for a variety of reasons. First, the Wright thesis is a way of explaining how and
when Latin became Romance, and the monastic rules were written and used in the period that
is seen as transitional in the context of this development. Second, although the Wright thesis
concentrates on the Carolingian period in particular, it has a diachronic implication because
the situation of „writing in Latin / reading in Romance‟ had presumably been occurring
before then, extending back arguably to the seventh century. It thus provides an important
insight into how Visigothic texts, and so the monastic rules, might have been used. Third, in
addition to language change, the Wright thesis attempts to explain how written texts
functioned in communities where the spoken and written languages were not necessarily the
same, and since the monastic rules were written in this transitionary period, they potentially
existed in the same context. Fourth, the Wright thesis is one of the most important of the
twentieth century with regard to early medieval linguistics, and for this reason alone deserves
to be appraised in light of the evidence offered by the Visigothic monastic rules.
6.4 The Importance of Synthetic Passive and Deponent Verbs and Their
Disappearance
A fundamental tenet in the linguistics of the Latin and Romance languages is the
dichotomy between the synthesis of the former and analysis of the latter. Whilst analytic
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