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

when people became conscious that the language they spoke was no longer Latin. However,
even this more holistic approach raises its own issues. First, linguistic awareness does not
correlate necessarily with linguistic fact, and even if Alcuin‟s reforms did create a sudden
awareness of extended diglossia, this reveals comparatively little about when it may actually
have occurred. Also, the diatopic and sociological variations of Latin as a spoken language
meant that its speakers were often aware of differences between speech registers and the
written language. This was shown in Chapter Five, in the discussion concerning Isidore‟s
linguistic register. The question could be asked, then: why would the reforms of Alcuin
create such an impact, when the idea of differences between the written and the spoken
language were perhaps already well established?
A second problem is that Wright would declare that in the period of the monastic
rules, people might have been writing in Latin, but they were reading in Romance. As such,
he denies the differentiation between Latin and Romance: “Proto-Romance was the speech of
all; it is unnecessary to postulate anything else” (1982: 44). The negation of any difference
between the two, whether linguistic or conceptual, is an important element of his thesis.
However, the problem with such an assertion is clearly that Latin and Romance are not the
same language, and there are many features that are typical of one but not shared with the
other; the synthetic passive and deponent verb forms are examples of such features. Wright
is overtly a scholar of Romance, not Latin, and despite his claim that Romance and Latin are
one and the same, such treatment would lead to the ignoring of many independent aspects of
the history of both Romance and Latin.
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