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

versions first): градъ – городъ, „town‟; свѣшта – свѣча, „candle‟; надежда – надежа,
„hope‟. Presumably, inferring the former forms if only the latter were generally used in
everyday speech would have been relatively easy and a similar situation could be
hypothesised for early medieval Latin (here, Latin and Spanish): ciuitas – ciudad; pietas –
piedad; murus – muro; niger – negro etc. This would have been the case even more so if a
single reader were able to orally adapt words to a Romance pronunciation. Church Slavonic
forms were also indicative of higher literary registers, a scenario again seen in literary and
spoken Latin: caput – testa; domus – casa; equus – caballus etc. Sometimes there also
existed semantic differences between these synonyms rather than solely one of register. In
the pair храмъ – хоромъ, „house‟, for example, the former is normally used to refer to a
church (i.e. God‟s house) and the latter to a house in general. Similarly, in the pair врагъ –
ворогъ, „devil‟, the former is only ever used to refer to the Antichrist, and the latter as an
insult to describe a person (Vinokur 1971: 63). This observation is similar to Politzer‟s
theory of synonymic doublets that was discussed in Chapter Three, whereby learned and
unlearned vocabulary was employed side by side.
The way in which these two registers might have interacted, then, can illuminate how
the situation might have been in early medieval written and spoken Latin. One of the most
important points is that the methodological problems in the Latin / Romance debate are in no
way confined to this language group and by casting a wider philological net, useful
comparisons can be drawn. Another crucial point, and one which lends support to the Wright
thesis, is that the case of Slavonic highlights well how diglossia, perhaps even that which is
now recognised as being extended diglossia, i.e. between two separate languages, by modern
linguists, can function without conscious recognition by its historical users. It also highlights
the processes through which two different registers of the same language can become two
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