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

linguistic consciousness of the variant nature between the spoken and written registers of
Latin could have occurred hundreds of years earlier than Wright‟s hypothesis. Importantly,
even when it did occur, it does not necessarily imply that the listener would presume that they
no longer spoke Latin, no more so that the modern reader of Shakespeare would presume that
they no longer spoke English.
A fourth problem is that if Latin and Romance are not the same language, then there is
incongruity in the suggestion that an audience or reader could simply make relatively easy
changes to Latin elements in order to make them into Romance because there are some Latin
forms that are too distanced from their Romance counterparts in order to make that change
with any ease or without training. Where there exists such morphological incongruity, as is
the case of deponents and the synthetic passive, Wright would have a speaker either
analogically level a deponent verb into an active form, or else replace completely the passive
form with a Romance periphrasis, perhaps having to use a different verb. This might have
been possible for some readers who were educated to a relatively high level, as some of them
must have been. Nevertheless, it cannot be taken for granted that all readers would have
possessed such abilities. Of course, all of the monastic rules refer to the literate abilities of
monks; even if only one in ten monks could read, this presumably means for adherents of the
Wright thesis that one in ten monks would be able to gloss the forms, which would perhaps
be sufficient for when they were being read out loud. However, the difficulty of such a task
should not be underestimated, and the ability to carry it out would require a considerably high
reading confidence.
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