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

Lower-registers of language were not permissible in religious works because it was
considered blasphemous, 583 and this was an issue that was further confounded by the
popularity of Hesychasm in medieval Rus‟, which advocated „pure‟ speech as being divine
(Sedlar 1994: 437-438). Nevertheless, nomenclature remained fluid and slovenskij (Slavonic)
was used interchangeably to refer to the spoken language, whilst the prosta mova („simple
language‟) could refer equally to the higher literary register (Uspensky 1984: 366). Even in a
society, then, where two languages were used that might now be considered linguistically as
different languages, this was not recognised as such at the time. Presumably, then, early
medieval Latin speakers need not necessarily have recognised their speech as being different
from the literary written language, even if modern historians speculate that it may very well
have been. 584
This is illuminating because Wright proposes that even if there were substantial
differences between a spoken „Romance‟ and written „Latin‟, there did not exist a conceptual
distinction in the minds of its speakers. Part of the reason for this must lie in the fact that the
583 Some medieval thinkers thought that the spoken language had become distanced from Church
Slavonic due to the influence of the Devil. Indeed, the Devil and demons were the only characters
presented as speaking in Russian rather than Church Slavonic in literature and the Devil was said to
have shirked at the Church Slavonic name bes and preferred the Russian ĉert (Uspensky 1984: 384).
584 Even today, the Slavonic languages continue to provide a unique example. Textbooks from the
period of the USSR, for example, are likely to talk about Eastern Slavonic languages (Ukrainian and
Belorussian) simply as dialects of Russian. Today, however, processes of language consciousness are
currently taking place that may be comparable to Latin speakers in the early middle Ages. Whilst
Belorussian is effectively in decline in the face of Russian, Ukrainian is undergoing resurgence in the
face of political independence from Russia. Nowadays, especially in Western Ukraine, Ukrainian has
become firmly established and consciously distinct from Russian. Hence, Ukrainian has transformed
from dialect to language in the minds of its speakers, despite minimal linguistic change and the
retention of a large degree of mutual intelligibility with Russian.
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