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

In its totality, then, the Wright thesis reveals only a few sides of the multifaceted story
of the Latin to Romance transition, principally that of pronunciation. What it does reveal,
however, it does so very well. It has also been extremely successful in forcing scholars to
question the relationship between spoken language and orthography. This author does not
have a problem with the idea that a Visigoth would read Latin with a regional accent, or even
incorporate features that were indicative of his spoken language whilst he was reading. In
fact, this seems entirely sensible. However, he would argue that, in a similar vein to Church
Slavonic (below), the audience of the monastic rules would not consider them to be written in
a language that was different from their own, merely perhaps bookish or archaic, but
nevertheless perfectly accessible. This agrees with Wright, who would say that a reader or
listener would consider themselves to be reading and speaking Latin; the difference is that
they were actually speaking Romance. However, this author would argue that they were
actually speaking in a language sufficiently similar to the written text to be the same
language: Latin, not Romance.
As one Galician scholar has stated: “o problema da aceptación das teses de Wright é
[...] mais de índole cuantitativa que cualitativa, dado que nos documentos compostos por e
para persoas máis iletradas [...] quedaran sen entender completamente” (López Silva 2000:
91). From the perspective of synthetic passives and deponents, then, the Banniard thesis
works better than that of Wright, and it seems likely that the written and spoken varieties
were still sufficiently homogenous in the seventh century to permit intelligibility.
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