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

sociolinguistic nature of the Latin-speaking community of western Europe in the period
between the Roman and Carolingian empires has recently been the subject of a remarkable
diversity of scholarly research and opinion. The most noticeable divide has been between the
textual historians and the Romance historical linguists, who have often preferred to ignore
each other”.
6.9.2 Political Decline and Simplification
Traditional approaches to the topic tended to view the loss of synthesis as being
synonymous with simplification, and in this way it was easy for scholars to correlate the
supposed decline and barbarity of the later Roman world with the supposed decline and
barbarity of its language. As one gentleman observer wrote in The Edinburgh Review (1848:
7): “The Latin language, after the fifth century, became more and more barbarous”. The idea
of decline continues to be true for non-specialists in the field, 570 who often perpetuate the
factoid. 571 There exists, of course, a difference between grammatical reduction and a loss of
structure: Romance obeys its own structural laws, just as Latin does. Nevertheless, the nexus
between perceived cultural superiority and linguistic prestige remains widespread, and has
570 It is sobering reading, for example, that the first entry for „Latin‟ in the index of the New
Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1, is “bastardised in Gaul/Francia” (Fouracre 2005: 947). The
problem continues in other works: “the further [a] text‟s grammar has travelled down the road from
classical to colloquial forms, the later it is likely to be, although the decline into vulgar Latin was not
linear” (Christys 2002: 86). Even a recent work on Late Antiquity was able to state that “the graffiti
found at Pompeii [...] suggest that in everyday usage Latin was already evolving into less
grammatically structured Romance” (Heather 2005:18). Of course, Heather‟s work is not a linguistic
one, and a historian cannot be expected to be an expert linguist as well. However, such a statement
continues the factoid of a decline to the non-specialist reader who does not know to question it.
571 Factoid is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus: “Something that becomes accepted as a
fact, although it is not (or may not be) true”. The term is therefore useful in describing many of the
theories associated with language change in the early medieval period.
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