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

sparse and remote desert region, is more synthetic than the Arabic of more urban Morocco.
In a similar vein, it has also been suggested that inflexions were lost in Old English due to the
problems of communication between Old English and Old Norse speakers (Townend 2002:
197).
The implications of such a proposal are interesting because if spoken Latin lost some of
its synthetic elements in the post-Roman world, then it certainly fits Kuster‟s hypothesis of
social factors. This was a time of population movements and widespread re-settling of ethnic
groups; it must be imagined that a great number of these people approached Latin as a second
language, perhaps speaking a form of Germanic as their native tongue. Whilst Classical
Latin still retained prestige, the spoken idiom was becoming increasingly distanced from this
and would have to wait another thousand years or so before it was even considered a
language worth writing literature in.
There are some wider methodological problems with this approach: if it were the case
that languages become more transparent under such social duress, then it follows that Latin
had been subject to such changes from the beginning of Rome‟s expansion. Presumably,
archaic Latin speakers in the late Iron Age used synthetic passives and deponents without
cause for concern, and problems only started following military expansion. In the thousand
or so years between that point and the post-Roman world, it seems that such social factors
had been prominent throughout, especially in the case of second-language learners. If this
were the case, then it is difficult to see why Latin would not have become more
grammatically transparent beforehand. In response to this, it is possible that the changes
were taking place, just rather slowly. It has already been noted that there was some apparent
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