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

ecitation to make them comprehensible to a listening audience is relatively easy to fathom.
It is also clear that many Latin sentences would be fairly easy to read aloud as Romance
because they shared a virtually identical syntax, vocabulary and grammar. Such an assertion
poses few problems. Walsh (1992: 205-206) gives the following example from a mid-
eleventh-century document (his translation into Modern Spanish follows):
“Et quando dedit domno Migael Citiz illa casa ad illo abbate, ille jacente in suo lectu, uenit
filio de Rodrigo Moniiz et suo uassallo et prendiderunt suo clerigo ad sua uarua et souarunt
illum et jactarunt eum in terra ad te suos pedes de illo abbate”
“Y cuando dio dueño Miguel Cídez la casa al abad, él yacente en su lecho, vino el hijo de
Rodrigo Moniz y su vasallo y prendieron su clérigo a su barba y sobáronlo y echáronlo en
tierra ante [?] los pies del abad”.
In this instance, it would be relatively easy for any reader to gloss the text into a Romance
form, and Walsh‟s translation shows how close Latin can be to Modern Spanish.
However, this sentence works particularly well because of the use of pronouns and
other markers such as prepositions, which are absent in many earlier Latin texts. Where
features may be recognisable or easily assimilated, there is much to be said in favour of the
Wright thesis. However, the problem arises when forms appear that are not recognisable or
easily assimilated. Many sentences in the monastic rules, for example, would present much
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