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

trend within Indo-European languages, possibly due to underlying socio-historical factors;
second, that deponent verbs disappeared as a result of loss of analogy. It is important not to
treat the loss of synthetic elements in Romance in isolation. Many modern Indo-European
languages contain predominantly analytic grammatical features, despite the fact that some of
them are descended from languages that were once largely synthetic: “[proto-Indo-European]
had a relatively complicated morphological structure. The most commonly found change is
therefore that of the disappearance of morphological categories” (Beekes 1995: 90). This is
a situation that merits further exploration. An interesting comparison is that of Latin /
Romance with Old English / Middle English, where the English language seemed to have lost
many of its synthetic elements and changed more in the few centuries between, for example,
the Beowulf epic and Chaucer in the fourteenth century than it has in the almost six-hundred
or so years that separate the latter from today.
This is a perplexing situation, and one that has been approached by various scholars.
Clark (1957: 110-116; also Van Gelderen 2006: 91-154) devoted considerable space to the
problem. For him, the answer lies in the fact that Old English is a literary language, not
necessarily reflective of the much more analytic speech. The Norman Conquest and
subsequent domination of Anglo-Norman meant that English was no-longer used as a literary
language and so its development was not restrained by a written standard. When it came to
be used again by writers such as Chaucer, the written language was now based on spoken
norms, rather than that of an older standard. The appearance of a language quite changed
from Old English was therefore a direct result of 1066 and the subsequent disappearance of
an archaic and codified literary form. Interestingly, Pulgram (1975) proposed that the
influence of an external language, in this case Greek, could have contributed to a literary
language further removed from spoken speech: “I venture to suggest that the discovery of
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