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CHAPTER 2
Latin and Romance in the
medieval period
A sociophilological approach
ROGER WRIGHT
2.1 Latin and Romance in
the Middle Ages
The ‘Middle Ages’ are a chronological concept and nothing
else, but even so they are not clearly defined. The phrase
comes from Renaissance scholars who saw the culture of
their own age as a high point, the first one since the
Classical period, with everything in between just being in
the middle, and by implication inferior. The adjective ‘medi-
eval’ is formed from the Latin phrase Medium Aevum (mean-
ing ‘middle age’). Where the Middle Ages end is not
generally agreed, although around 1500 might be the best
consensus. Hispanists have a convenient date for the end of
their Middle Ages: 1492, with Columbus’s first voyage and
the Christian capture of Muslim Granada. Italians see the
Renaissance as starting, and the Middle Ages as ending,
several decades earlier than that. Where they begin is
even more contentious. For present purposes, the early
Middle Ages will be taken to begin after the political and
military end of the western Roman empire in the early fifth
century; but since the following two centuries are often also
called ‘late antiquity’, there are scholars who date their
start to later than that.
The common language spoken in the Roman empire was
Latin. The official written language was also Latin, whose
use continued to be deemed official not only by the admin-
istrative classes but also in due course by the Christian
Church. The ‘Latin’ of the period between 400 and 800 AD is
best viewed, in the light of modern sociolinguistic advances
in the understanding of linguistically complex societies, as
a single but multivariable language. One of the most inter-
esting features of the following centuries is that it did not
stay a single language. This fragmentation was not inevit-
able; Greek, for example, is still thought of as being Greek,
even though the differences between ancient and modern
Greek are substantial. Yet by the late thirteenth century,
what had been one language had come to be thought of by
The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden (eds)
14 This chapter © Roger Wright 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
contemporaries as being more than one; what we now call
French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, and a number
of Italian dialects were conceptually separate in their
speakers’ minds, each with its own name, and endowed
with distinctive writing systems which reinforced their
independence (Romanian, further east, was in a separate
context). Medieval Latin also continued as yet another con-
ceptually distinct entity. There have been other cases of
fragmentation, notably as Indo-European split into many
languages over the prehistoric millennia, but the process of
such a break-up of one language into many still remains
rather mysterious, in particular as it was experienced by the
Romance speakers involved.
2.2 Sociophilology
Inevitably, the only direct evidence we have for these
developments is in written form. The scholarly analysis of
the available written evidence in the light of modern socio-
linguistic developments can be referred to as ‘sociophilol-
ogy’ (as in Wright 2003). Philology in the British tradition
involves the study of ancient texts for their linguistic evi-
dence, although in continental Europe the related terms,
such as Italian filologia, imply an interest in literary ques-
tions as well. Sociophilology studies texts from the past for
the evidence which they can shed on sociolinguistic ques-
tions of the age in which they were written; and it can also
operate in the other direction, making use of modern socio-
linguistic advances in the philological analysis of the texts.
That is, the two disciplines are able to help each other, and
help us understand what the writers, readers, and audiences
of individual documents were experiencing and trying to
achieve.
Already before the advent of sociolinguistics in the late
1960s, historical linguists had established the fact (which

may still seem counterintuitive to some) that languages are
always changing. Not necessarily changing in a dramatic
fashion, but there are always new pronunciations of words
turning up, new constructions, new words and affixes, and
new meanings for existing words. Sometimes the innov-
ations catch on, and spread from being the habits of an
individual or a minority group to becoming general features
of the language as a whole; sometimes they fall out of use
again. Often there already exists an older feature with a
similar function, with which the new one is initially in
competition, and if that older one eventually falls out of
use, then we can refer to the sequence of events as being ‘a
linguistic change’, in the singular; but we need to be aware
that at least two phenomena are involved in such a change,
the advent of the new and the loss of the old. Most changes
involve a period of variation between old and new, which
may sometimes be quite long, and need not necessarily end
at all. There is nothing sinister or undesirable about this;
linguistic variation is not a problem in itself, and provides
flexibility to a speaker. Grammarians, however, and
teachers, tend to dislike variation, and usually prefer to
decree that one variant is ‘correct’ and others ‘incorrect’
rather than simply telling their clients that there are two
(or more) ways of expressing a particular meaning.
In the early Medieval Latin and Romance case, we have a
huge amount of written evidence provided for us by those
who spoke the language we are investigating. But it is not a
straightforward matter to study it. One of the advances
made jointly by historical linguists and sociolinguists over
the last few decades has been to establish the great differ-
ences which there can be, and usually are, between spoken
and written usage, even of the same individual. Written
texts are not photographic evidence of the way their
authors speak. Indeed, it would be very difficult to write in
such a way, reproducing all the prosodic and phonetic
idiosyncrasies such as intonation, elisions, hesitations, san-
dhi effects, anacolutha, or relative loudness. And in practice
that is never what writers aim to do. They aim to commu-
nicate their meaning, not their phonetics.
2.3 Writing
Writing does not come naturally to a human being in the
way speech does; we are innately programmed to acquire
speech as we grow, but in order to write we have to be
taught. Somebody has to teach us, and our written habits
are inevitably affected by what our teacher wished us to do.
Unfortunately for the subsequent philologists, teachers
never teach their students to represent colloquial syntax
in phonetic transcription; they teach them what they
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LATIN AND ROMANCE IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
‘ought’ to write, according to established patterns of
orthography and perceived grammatical correctness. That
is, older and more formal features of a language are more
likely to appear in a text than the equivalent colloquial
variants, and the spellings used will not manifest attempts
to reproduce the phonetic features but the traditionally
required orthographic forms.
The grammatical tradition taught to apprentice scribes in
the early Middle Ages took its morphological prescriptions
from Aelius Donatus’s mid-fourth-century Ars Minor, and its
spellings from the established tradition. Gradually, Donatus’
work developed from being seen as descriptive (describing
what had happened in written texts of the past) to being
thought of as prescriptive (telling us what we ought to do);
and several subsequent grammarians developed the
thoughts and attitudes of that grammar into a pedagogical
tradition, one of whose main effects has been to confuse the
evidence. This tradition did not include specific instructions
concerning syntax, and in fact during the earlier years of
the Middle Ages (as above defined) it seems that syntax did
not change as much as morphology, which was changing
markedly, particularly in nouns and adjectives; this may
explain why Donatus devoted most of his attention to mor-
phological details. Later, in the early sixth century, the
originally north African grammarian Priscian prepared a
serious and detailed account of Latin syntax for the benefit
of his Greek-speaking students in Constantinople, in effect
the first serious university-level account of Latin syntax
(whereas Greek had been studied that way for centuries
and provided Priscian with a number of models). When
the Carolingian scholars, at the end of the eighth century,
were establishing the syllabus for standard Christian edu-
cation they prescribed Donatus as the elementary primer
and Priscian for more advanced study. Never mind that by
then both authors’ works were notably out of date; their
authoritative nature was more important. This sophistica-
tion of the syllabus led to notably ‘better’ (i.e. more old-
fashioned) Latin in written texts in ninth-century France
than had been used in the previous period, but it also led to
an increasing separation of the formal educated register, in
both speech and writing, from the way in which everybody,
including the literate, actually spoke in real life when buy-
ing cabbages etc. The eventual conceptual split between
normal spoken usage and the formal register, often referred
to then as grammatica (as still by Dante in his De vulgari
eloquentia, five centuries later) and by us now as ‘Medieval
Latin’, grew in the general consciousness until it became felt
in due course to be a conceptual distinction between two
distinct languages, Latin and Romance. By then, some
scholars in a few enterprising intellectual centres had
developed alternative ways of writing which did not corres-
pond to the prescriptions of the grammarians and teachers,
15
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ROGER WRIGHT
and the two ways of writing came to seem to represent two
languages rather than two ways of writing the same lan-
guage. The word romanz (spelled in more than one way) was
first applied to the new written modes, and it seems more
feasible to see the development of these deliberately new
written modes as a prime cause of the conceptual split
between Latin and Romance (as the Swedish Latinist Tore
Janson believes; e.g. Janson 2002) than as the result of one
which had already happened (the view of the French Latin-
ist Michel Banniard; e.g. Banniard 1991a; 1992).
2.4 Writing Romance before written
Romance was invented
Until both the newly reformed Latin, advocated and largely
practised by the Carolingian scholars, and the newly
reformed Romance writing systems to which they inadvert-
ently led came to be the norm in a Romance-speaking
community, the writers of the early Middle Ages were in
the same position as English speakers are now when writing
their own language. In particular, there is not necessarily
any direct connection between the way we pronounce
words and the way we write them; that is, written forms
are not phonetic transcriptions of what words sound like. It
seems natural, within an alphabetic tradition, to feel that
the point of our system lies in a correlation between written
symbol and sound, but writers are aiming to convey mean-
ing, regardless of the phonetics. Even in an alphabetic trad-
ition such as ours, written symbols such as 60 (correlating to
Eng. [ˈsɪks.tɪ], Fr. [swa.sᾶt], etc), or the synonymous lx used
in the first millennium AD (correlating to original Lat. [sek.
sa.ˈgin.ta] and Romance in tenth-century Castile [se.sa.ˈen.
ta], etc), abbreviations such as Mrs (for [ˈmɪ.sɪz]), and silent
letters such as 50 per cent of those in my own surname
(Wright), etc., are taken in our stride when writing and
reading (including reading aloud), because we have been
taught to do so. In general, we can be trained to overcome
the problems caused by such asymmetries, and accept that
writing a letter p at the start of the words pneumonia and
psalm in England, or, in ancient Rome, writing a letter h at
the start of the word HOMINEM ‘man.ACC’, and an m at the end
of that same word, is as ‘correct’ as it would now be ‘incor-
rect’ to pronounce psalm as [psɑm] with [p] or, in Rome,
HOMINEM as [ˈho.mi.nem] with [h] and [m]. This lack of a
direct fit between letters and sounds is annoying for the
subsequent philologist, but we are not entitled to react as if
it were not the case; and if we have some understanding of
the social and pedagogical background of the writers we can
go a long way to working out what was happening.
16
First, though, we need to find another way of discovering
what the writers actually said—other, that is, than by inter-
preting texts as examples of phonetic script—for it some-
times seems as if investigators have chosen to decide that
texts were phonetic scripts (avant la lettre), in defiance of the
fact that Romance speakers probably would not have known
how to operate such a script even if they had conceived the
idea of attempting it. We can make some deductions from
spelling mistakes—although these need not have been
inspired by a desire for phonetic transcription either—and
occasionally from explicit comments made by grammarians
and other thoughtful intellectuals, although the Roman
grammarians were more concerned with writing than
with speaking. In the event, the main mechanism we have
available now for deciding how words were pronounced in
the past comes from the techniques of phonetic reconstruc-
tion. These were first developed by those hoping to recon-
struct the language which we now call Indo-European,
spoken by the distant ancestors of those speaking descend-
ant Indo-European languages which we know something
about. There is no direct way of knowing if such reconstruc-
tions really are valid representations of what was spoken
over 5,000 years ago, but they might well be, and there is no
better investigative method available. These techniques
have also been used to reconstruct the pronunciations of
the language from which the later Romance languages
derived, and again, probably with a great deal of accuracy.
Unfortunately, the practitioners of the method have
claimed to be reconstructing ‘proto-Romance’ (on the ana-
logy of ‘proto-Indo-European’), whereas in fact they were
simply discovering how Latin words were pronounced.
A problem with the method is the difficulty of locating the
results in real time, but we can take their discoveries to be
largely accurate for at least the later periods of Latin
speech, that is, the early Middle Ages.
Thus, as a result of their investigations, it can be gener-
ally agreed that, for example, the phonemic distinction
between long [aː] and short [a] had disappeared all over
the Romance-speaking world before the Middle Ages;
and that this was a phonetic change with morphological
consequences, given that (for example) the length of that
vowel distinguished nominative from ablative in the singu-
lar of first-declension nouns (e.g. NOM [ˈro.sa] ‘a rose’ vs ABL
[ˈro.saː], for use after relevant prepositions). The results are
not often the same all over the Latin-speaking communities,
in practice. For example, it can be agreed that words which
originally had a [k] before a front vowel came instead to
have a pronunciation with an affricate articulated further
forwards than a velar [k]; thus the initial sound of Latin
CAELUM ‘sky’ became at some point the [ʧ ] still to be heard
in It. cielo and the [ʦ] of OSp. cielo and OFr. ciel. Something
similar happened to the voiced velar [g] before a front vowel,

which generally (cf. though MAGISTRUM > It. maestro ‘master’)
became [ʤ] (as Lat. GEMELLUS > It. [ʤeˈmɛllo] ‘twin’).
In Latin texts, these changes necessitated no alterations
to spelling at all, and, being isolated changes which applied
in all circumstances, caused no great problems. Many
changes were conditioned changes, however, only operating
under certain conditions, and these could have been more
problematic. Apart from these cases just considered, where
a velar consonant preceded a front vowel, the words ini-
tially pronounced with intervocalic unvoiced plosive con-
sonants came to have voiced ones instead (other than in
central and southern Italy and the Balkans; cf. §25.2.5). For
example, in most areas the Latin word written as UITAM ‘life.
ACC’ came to be pronounced [ˈvi.da] (the same change as
English writer coming to be pronounced with [d] in the USA)
and LUPOS ‘wolves.ACC’ as [ˈlo.bos]. Conditioned changes such
as this one, which only applied between vowels inside a
word, are more awkward for us to analyse, since the pre-
scribed standard written form remained the same, as it
always will until somebody authoritative changes what
people are taught; but the combination of the knowledge
provided by reconstructions and that given by the texts leads
us to the sociophilological conclusion that after a while many
words written with a letter t between vowels corresponded to
voiced pronunciations of the word with a [d].
There was thus a letter, in this case t, with more than one
possible corresponding sound. Such variation is not difficult
for writers and readers to learn to take in their stride, but as
time goes by, this lack of direct correspondence became
more complicated. We can tell, for example, that in most
areas words which originally ended in -[t] came to be pro-
nounced without that final consonant (a change progressing
at different rhythms in different places, seeming to take
longest in France); but, particularly since the final letter t
was an integral part of a standard and common verbal affix,
teachers continued to train apprentice scribes to write that
letter at the end of forms such as SCRIBIT ‘writes’ or HABUIT
‘had’ long after there was any sound there for it to corres-
pond to. Meanwhile, it was probably still generally main-
tained by teachers that t corresponded to [t], since words
beginning with that sound and that letter saw no change in
the initial consonant, and the sounds and letters at the start
of a word are psychologically the most salient. Thus, in
much of early medieval western Romance, there came in
due course to be a situation where a letter t at the start of a
word usually corresponded to [t]-, whereas between vowels
mid-word it corresponded to [d], and at the end of a word
corresponded to no sound at all; in the Iberian Peninsula,
for example, tota was then the written form of [ˈto.da] ‘all’,
and tenet the written form of [ˈtje.ne] ‘holds’.
Because of phonetic developments, there were many such
cases in which the direct letter–sound correspondence
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which had inspired the initial alphabetical representation
of a word had lost its original directness and reliability.
Teachers may have reacted to the asymmetry as the
teachers of modern-English-speaking children have, by
teaching spelling one word at a time, in addition to some
basic principles. This possibility can complicate issues fur-
ther for modern analysts because, if a word is consistently
spelt in one way in a particular centre, that consistency may
simply reflect the fact that the teachers successfully man-
aged to persuade their pupils to write it that way, whatever
the phonetics. In tenth-century León, for example, the word
originally written ECCLESIA ‘church’ was regularly written
eglesia, despite apparently beginning with [i]- (Pensado
1991). Teachers were not necessarily all inclined to make
the same prescriptions; some, for example—particularly in
northern France, in much of which [ka]- became [ ʃa]- as in
CATTUM > Fr. chat ‘cat’—seem to have looked more kindly
than others on adopting the originally Greek letter k, to
represent [k] unambiguously. In the early Middle Ages, if
such an operationally practical procedure of teaching spell-
ing word by word was used, it would be likely to vary from
place to place precisely because the phonetics were increas-
ingly coming to vary from place to place as well. Recon-
struction is unable to locate developments precisely in time,
so we need to make chronological estimates for this vari-
ation which are compatible with the documentary evidence.
Unfortunately there is no modern scholarly consensus as to
when the speech of different areas began to diverge notice-
ably. The reconstruction specialists tend to argue for a
remarkably early date (BC, often), Latinists (e.g. Adams
2007) and many Romanists tend to prefer a date more like
AD 600; and if we accept that mutual intelligibility can often
apply even between speakers who do not speak in the same
way, as is the case in modern Britain, we can envisage the
Romance-speaking community as indeed having different
habits in different places but, even so, remaining largely
mutually intelligible until the ninth century or even later.
2.5 ‘Vulgar’ Latin
Spelling mistakes are good evidence, but it is not always
clear what they are evidence of. Errors in surviving epi-
graphic data, on tombstones and other inscriptions, have
been much discussed (e.g. by Herman 1990), but here too
contextual details, such as the itinerant nature of masons
and the practicalities of fitting messages into the space
available on the stone, can lead to uncertainty on our part
as to whether a non-standard form is just a quirk or evi-
dence of a feature in the speech of the mason or the
composer of the text. Inscriptions, however, are at the
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ROGER WRIGHT
best of times a formalized genre with its own particularities,
even within the written mode as a whole. A fair number of
people could read, and many of these could also write, to
judge, for example, by the evidence of the graffiti found at
Pompeii (datable to a period before AD 79); but most of the
surfaces they wrote on were biodegradable, such as
papyrus, which was used into the eighth century and even
beyond, or wax tablets, used in schools, or even tree bark.
But there is also evidence available in the shape of scribbles
on pottery, jewellery, wooden tablets, slates, and other
surfaces. The genres involved there tend not to be repre-
sentative of unmarked vernacular; perhaps the closest we
can come to direct written evidence for the speech of the
empire itself is in the letters discovered at Vindolanda (near
Hadrian’s Wall, but written before the wall was built), which
were written on wooden tablets and then thrown away, only
surviving by chance and difficult for all except a few experts
to decipher now. Slates with curses scratched on them have
been discovered at Bath in southern England, where they
were thrown into the hot springs in the hope that the gods
would carry out the wishes of the writer. Pottery has sur-
vived with writing added by bilingual Gaulish-Latin
speakers at La Graufesenque in France. The fifth-century
‘Albertini Tablets’ found in north Africa are intriguing for
several reasons, not least because they were written in a
rural and not obviously literate area. This kind of appar-
ently special case continues into the Middle Ages; the so-
called ‘Visigothic Slates’ with texts scratched on them in the
seventh century (which have nothing linguistically Visi-
gothic about them; edited by Velázquez Soriano 2000),
found in the provinces of Ávila and Salamanca in central
Spain where slate seems to have been more easily accessible
than papyrus or wax, demonstrate that even in areas far
from the main cultural centres, society still functioned on a
basis of written documentation which was expected to be
understood. The survival of such informal texts is due to the
permanent nature of the material on which they were writ-
ten, and it seems likely that very much more once existed on
other surfaces and has perished. Such non-standard evidence
has often been categorized as being in ‘Vulgar Latin’, a
venerable but unfortunate phrase which even the specialists
in the topic might well have preferred not to use (e.g.
Herman 2000; cf. also §1.2).
2.6 Reading aloud
The early Middle Ages were not an illiterate time. Literacy
in the modern sense was more restricted then than it is in
the modern world, but throughout the centuries written
laws and documents were the basis for regulating society.
18
Oral culture played a more prominent role then than now;
almost all texts were intended to be read aloud, and were
expected to be intelligible when so read (this expectation
was made clear by Michel Banniard’s 1992 book Viva Voce).
The same assumption also applied to sermons and hagiog-
raphy in church, and even to the main church offices. There
is nothing surprising about this; in the modern world also
written works are expected to be intelligible to the illiterate
when read aloud, as is the case with all books for young
children, for example. Not knowing how to read is in itself
no bar to understanding something when it is read aloud.
It also seems that it was a legal necessity in many early
medieval areas for some documents to be read aloud to the
interested parties, and for those parties to confirm that they
had heard and understood them, before the documents
became legally valid. This aspect of their society is highly
significant for the modern sociophilologist. It implies two
details in particular. First, that the phonetic form of the
words must have been sufficiently close to that of the
normal colloquial speech of the period for the uneducated
listener to recognize what the words were; there is no
problem about accepting this, because then and now the
normal practice, when reading aloud, is for the reader to
recognize each written word in sequence as a whole, to be
led from that information to the relevant part of their
mental lexicon, which among other information contains
the phonological representation of the word, and then to
move instantaneously from there to a normal phonetic
realization. The recognition of the lexical word is the crucial
factor for the reader, not the translation of individual let-
ters into individual sounds one at a time; they would, for
example, see the written form UITA ‘life’ and automatically
read it aloud as [ˈvi.da] with no problem; or now see Wright
and say [rajt]. Given what we saw above, that there is and
was no bar to having normal spoken forms whose standard
written counterpart is unlike a phonetic transcription of
their evolved pronunciation, there is nothing unreasonable
in the postulated scenario that in the early Middle Ages an
uneducated listener could usually be trusted to recognize
the words read aloud; the readers might naturally, as is
normal in a legal context, have a formal air about them as
they read, but they would not wish to baffle the audience. It
is noticeable that in the seventh century Isidore of Seville’s
instructions to lectores concentrated on their being prepared
and speaking clearly, but did not mention any detail which
we could call phonetic; he did not, for example, tell the
lectores to be sure not to pronounce the middle consonant
in UITA as [d], because both readers and listeners would
naturally operate with a [d] there anyway.
The second implication of the ability of illiterate listeners
to understand texts read aloud to them is that the morph-
ology and the syntax used in the detailed sections of

documents (as opposed to the legal formulaic clichés) were
also largely intelligible, whether or not the listener used
that morphology and syntax in their own speech. This
grammatical conclusion is not surprising either, once we
look at some of the texts, because, outside the legal formu-
laic sections, the morphology and syntax used in those parts
of a document which had to be prepared specifically for the
occasion nearly always correspond to our reconstructions of
the features of the time. For example, if we are investigating
a tenth-century document from the Iberian Peninsula, we
will not be surprised to note that (apart, perhaps, from a few
set phrases) ablative case forms are largely absent and
genitive case forms are rare, being replaced by prepos-
itional phrases with the same function. We can reconstruct
that the value of ‘of ’, for example, was usually expressed in
speech with the word de (which had originally meant ‘down
from’), and it often is in documentation as well (cf. §56.3.2).
2.7 Written and spoken grammar
Many of the morphosyntactic developments of early
Romance involved the increasing use of existing words
with grammatical functions which they had not had earlier,
or had had only rarely (cf. §46.3); not just the common use
of DE ‘of ’ to express a possessive meaning previously the
domain of the genitive, and AD ‘to’ to express the meanings
previously allotted to the dative, but also the use of origin-
ally demonstrative ILLE ‘that’ in what we would now think of
as a definite article function (‘the’), the use of UNUS as an
indefinite article (‘a’, rather than a numeral meaning ‘one’).
Other examples are the use of HABERE (originally ‘to have’) as
an auxiliary verb in perfect and future tense formations, the
extended use of ESSE ‘to be’ as a passive auxiliary in combin-
ations where the tense of that auxiliary determined the
tense of the whole compound (which had not been the
case previously, when the sense of present or past was
determined by the accompanying participle; thus during
the first millenniumAD AMATA EST (lit. ‘loved.FSG is’) changed
from meaning ‘she was/has been loved’ to meaning ‘she is
loved’), and the use of the reflexive pronoun SE ‘-self ’ as a
means of expressing a passive meaning without implying
the existence of an agent (a usage which had occasionally
occurred earlier, but eventually came to be a normal con-
struction for such a purpose, particularly but not only in
Spain (cf. §60.4.1); e.g. ModSp. se habla inglés lit. ‘self= speaks
English (= English is spoken)’). These developments all
involved the grammatical extension and semantic weaken-
ing of words which already existed. Since, therefore, these
words already had a canonical written form, there was no
problem involved in putting these newer constructions
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down on the page, since the writers could spell the words
the traditional way whatever they had come to mean.
Syntax was not taught in the early medieval curriculum
before the Carolingians recommended the study of Priscian’s
Institutiones; even then, it was only for advanced students.
This wide lack of syntactic self-awareness has the great
advantage for us that, for example, the word order found
in documentation was as a result usually closer to that of
contemporary real life than to that of older ‘Classical’ lit-
erature. Strikingly, the main detail about ‘Classical’ Latin
syntax which seems to be well known nowadays is that the
verb usually came at the end of a sentence. This was largely
true of subordinate clauses, and it could have been true of
main clauses as well at an earlier stage, but Donatus never
tells his readers this. Donatus had little, if any, interest in
syntax, and one consequence of this insouciance was that
even those writers in subsequent centuries who were taking
care to follow his prescriptions as regards morphology felt
no qualms about presenting the normal word order of their
own early Romance on the written page. Thus in early
medieval texts verbs sometimes come at the end, some-
times in the middle, and sometimes at the start of the
sentence, in a distribution similar to that found much
later in the first texts in written Romance, whose writers
also to a large extent wanted to reproduce their own natural
order of the words.
Morphology was different, in that most of Donatus’ Ars
Minor, the standard textbook, was concerned with it. The
fact that this fourth-century handbook concentrated so
much on this aspect suggests that the old systems were
breaking down already by then, such that students of the
written language needed to be told details explicitly. The
paradigms concerned continued to be taught and learnt,
and the word endings to be used in writing must have
come to dominate much scribal pedagogy. Most verbal
inflections continued into Romance, although naturally in
evolved phonetic forms. While the nominal inflections still
survived to some extent in speech, learning and using them
in new written texts would not have been too demanding;
but there came a time when, in much of the western
Romance-speaking area, only one ending for the singular
and another for the plural of most nouns, and also of most
adjectives in addition to the gender distinctions, survived in
speech (cf. §27.2). This was usually a form deriving from the
original accusative (although both the accusative and nom-
inative cases survived in the oldest northern French). The
distinctions between nominative, accusative, and dative still
survive, however, in some pronouns, such as, in the central
Iberian Peninsula, él < ILLE ‘he’, lo < ILLUM ‘him’, and le < ILLI
‘to him’, and in some areas the third-person genitive plural
survives as well, e.g. ILLORUM > It./Fr. loro/leur ‘their’; these
have since become possessive adjectives, and also both
19
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ROGER WRIGHT
function as the dative third-person plural pronoun, so the
semantics of the nominal endings would not have been
totally inaccessible to the intuitions of the trainee early
medieval scribe. Even so, all over the Romance world we
find some early medieval texts in which the writer seems to
have learnt what the nominal endings were (morphology)
but occasionally to have little idea of when to use which one
(syntax). Only rarely would this have led to actual unintel-
ligibility, and even then in context a sentence containing
inappropriate inflections, when read aloud, would almost
certainly have been made clearer in some other way; for
example, in many areas, the subject and the object came
increasingly to be tied to a particular position in the sen-
tence relative to the verb. Often, in a particular context,
only one interpretation of an ostensibly ambiguous sen-
tence could have come to a listener’s mind, for, as the
sociolinguists say, every text has a context, and sociophilol-
ogists are allowed to say that too. As regards the oblique
nominal case forms, uncertainty caused by inexpert use of
the endings was compensated for by an increased use in
writing of the prepositions, such as DE ‘of, from’ and AD ‘to’,
which were coming to express the same meaning as had
earlier been expressed by the nominal inflections; since the
meaning thereby resided in the preposition rather than in
the ending, it came to be of no practical significance if the
inflection of the noun governed by the preposition was not
the one that would be expected by a grammarian. In some
texts it seems that every preposition governs an accusative
form of the noun, but that is to overdetermine the point of
the inflection; what had once been the specifically accusa-
tive direct object form was becoming the normal caseless
citation form available to be used in any grammatical cir-
cumstance, as would be normal in Romance. Conversely, the
writers of some texts seem to be so chary of using preposi-
tions even when an old Latin text would have been crying
out for them that we can probably deduce that their
teachers had specifically given instructions not to use
them because they were thought stylistically undesirable.
2.8 Words
Vocabulary comes and goes in any language, but there
needs to be a special context for a word to exist in a text
when it does not exist in normal speech. Unfortunately, in
the Latin and Romance case such special contexts are com-
mon in the surviving written evidence. For example, the
legal texts which are our main evidence for the age natur-
ally include legal terminology of a kind which laymen do
not regularly use. We should not deduce from the existence
of such words that seventh-century Italian peasants merrily
20
swapped legalisms over their ploughs; a legal register is
always a legal register. But it would not have been difficult
for Romance-speaking lawyers to learn the usual profes-
sional terminology (as English lawyers can easily learn to
use such terms as notwithstanding), and theirs still remains a
register of the same language; similarly, modern English
lawyers use a special kind of English in their work, not a
different language entirely, and they too use normal
vocabulary when buying cabbages. In the Middle Ages, how-
ever, among the hyperliterate and erudite few, antiquarian-
ism was often fashionable. This could take several forms.
Hymn writers often used lines copied from other hymns of
the past, deliberately wishing to sound archaic; historians
attempted at times to imitate ancient historians as models;
Isidore of Seville often preferred the relatively recherché
lexical resources of his own highly educated idiolect; a
number of writers such as Avitus of Vienne, and some of
the Visigoths, even seem sometimes to have preferred con-
voluted imitations of the past to contemporary comprehen-
sibility. Modern Latinists are tempted to call such
manifestations of righteous energy ‘good Latin’, but to
most people at the time it might well have seemed merely
odd, rather than good. A little sociophilologically inclined
thought will tell us that writers who skilfully made them-
selves intelligible, while of necessity respecting most of the
orthographical and morphological rules of the tradition
which they had been taught, do not deserve to be criticized,
as they often have been by modern scholars, for writing ‘bad
Latin’, ‘barbarous Latin’, ‘corrupt Latin’, ‘decadent Latin’,
etc.; they were successfully writing the early Romance of
their age, for practical purposes, and no more attempting to
reproduce bygone features of previous centuries than we
now aim to write like Chaucer.1
2.9 The Carolingian reforms
This peaceful coexistence, within the one language, of
evolving speech and a practical approach to the traditional
rules of writing was rudely shattered by the reforms of the
end of the eighth century, as a sociophilological look at
the Carolingian texts confirms. The scholars at the court
of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne (Charles the Great)
felt that they were creating a renewal of Christian life and
Latin culture; they called it a renovatio, but it is usually
referred to now in English as the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.
As explained above, this had a linguistic aspect, significantly
1
The Portuguese scholar António Emiliano has written many studies
emphasizing this point, with particular reference to texts from Portugal but
relevance to the whole Romance area, e.g. Emiliano (2005).

impelled by the rediscovery of Priscian’s huge Institutiones.
The result was a marked conceptual and practical split
between the grammatica of the educated (which we now
call ‘medieval Latin’) and normal everyday speech.
The leader of the educational reforms was the English
churchman Alcuin of York. He, and the many other scholars
of Germanic native speech at Charlemagne’s court, was used
to pronouncing Latin words with the same technique which
we use now, but which no native speaker would ever have
done previously: that is, allotting a specified sound to each
written letter, as if all speech were reading aloud. This
method of pronouncing the words, making no allowances
for any silent letters, in which e.g. every written t gave rise
to a spoken [t], was usually unlike the vernacular pronun-
ciation of the same words—which was probably the main
reason why Alcuin was horrified at the way his rustic
neighbours in Tours spoke. In any event, the Carolingian
scholars required all students educated by the Church to use
that kind of pronunciation when reading aloud in an eccle-
siastical context. This made the readings hard for the con-
gregation to follow, so in due course the authorities partly
relented, allowing the sermons to be delivered in intelligible
mode again, as they had been before; we know this from the
famous Council of Tours edict 17, of 813, which was repeated
at the Council of Mainz in 847 under the aegis of Alcuin’s
star pupil Rhabanus Maurus. But, outside the sermons, this
ecclesiastical combination of the unnatural spelling–
pronunciation and the antiquated grammar now instilled
during the pedagogical process led increasingly to a feeling
that what existed was in effect two languages, rather than,
as before, two modalities of the same language (see Wright
1982). Shortly after that, when some enterprising scribes
began to experiment with new ways of writing designed to
inspire an intelligible vernacular reading aloud, rather than
a Latinate one which would have pleased Alcuin, the pres-
ence of such unusual texts as the Strasbourg Oaths (842) and
the Sequence of Eulalia, written towards the end of the
ninth century, a presence gradually increasing over the
next two centuries, reinforced the idea that Latin and
Romance were two separate languages. The new methods
of writing come under the heading of what Romanists call a
new scripta, which did not involve any new symbols but did
use the existing ones to create new written forms for words
which approximated to phonetic transcriptions of their
normal spoken form (as was normal practice by now in
the new Medieval Latin). Thus the word previously written
UIRGINEM (‘maiden, virgin’; as used e.g. by Gregory of Tours in
the late sixth century), and pronounced in the vernacular
something like [ˈvjer.ʤ‰], could in the new scripta be writ-
ten as vierge, and when a reader or singer came across this
written form their knowledge of the Latin letter–sound
correspondences would help them (if they needed help) to
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LATIN AND ROMANCE IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
pronounce it in the vernacular way. This need to know the
Latin letter–sound correlations for the new Romance spel-
lings to work as intended helps explain why all the early
written Romance texts, in every area, were elaborated in
centres of expert Latinity. The new Romance texts cannot
have been designed for illiterates, since those who could not
read at all could not read Romance any more than they
could read Latin.
The new written modes, at least at the start, were
designed to inspire a particular reading aloud, rather than
to reproduce an oral event which the writer had already
heard. In particular, as historians will confirm, the text of all
the Strasbourg Oaths must have been fixed carefully in
advance, for legal reasons, rather than being a subsequent
recollection of something said spontaneously, as several
handbooks have implied. They too were in the legal register.
The new genre of the Sequence, where each syllable of the
words had to correspond to one note of the pre-existing
music, also needed careful advance planning; and when the
genre was extended from Medieval Latin to Romance the
result was the written Romance text which has happened to
survive of the late ninth-century Sequence (Cantilène) of
Eulalia from St Amand. It is probably no coincidence that
the choir at St Amand and the German king who read the
Romance Oaths at Strasbourg were primarily German-
speaking; as such, they would have needed more guidance
on how to pronounce their text intelligibly as Romance, as
was required in the sociophilological context, than would a
native speaker.
The determination to make written works and spoken
performances in Latin more like those of the Roman empire
(or, at least, what the scholars of the Carolingian age
thought they had been like) can be seen in the elaboration
of new versions of previously existing texts, such as some of
the saints’ lives. The Belgian scholar Marieke Van Acker in
particular (e.g. Van Acker 2007) has analysed in detail the
differences there are in such redactions of different periods,
showing how the ninth-century increase in linguistic simi-
larity to ancient texts was bought at the price of a decrease
in intelligibility. This had its effect in the liturgy as well,
where the congregations became spectators rather than
participants. The new grammatica (Medieval Latin) had the
sociolinguistic prestige, naturally, and the relative sociolin-
guistic inferiority of written Romance was to continue for a
thousand years or so; even after it had been invented,
written Romance was at first confined to relatively unim-
portant genres such as poetry, and it was only in the
thirteenth century that most serious genres began to be
prepared with the new Romance systems.
The elaboration of both Medieval Latin, as a new separate
entity from normal usage, and written Romance, as a delib-
erate way of writing which could approximate a phonetic
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ROGER WRIGHT
transcription of the vernacular, were at first the property of
the Carolingian empire; that covered a large area, including
northern France, the Languedoc, much of northern Italy,
and Catalonia. Other areas managed to cope successfully
with the inherited traditional modes for many decades
yet. The papacy, for example, was not affected by these
reforms at the time. But during the eleventh century, we
can see both the spread of a higher-style written Latin and
the first glimpses of a local written Romance in other areas;
in the peninsular kingdoms of Aragon, Navarre, León, Cas-
tilla, Galicia, and Portugal from the 1080s, but never in
Romance-speaking communities in Muslim Spain, where
Church Latin was not required; and in many Italian areas,
north and south, including Sardinia. The main stimuli for
the definitive dissociation of the two as independent separ-
ate languages were the intellectual movements which we
sometimes refer to collectively as ‘the Twelfth-Century
Renaissance’; if the Carolingian Renaissance marks the end
of the early Middle Ages in France, the twelfth-century
counterpart marks their end in Romance Europe as a whole.
2.10 Glossaries and glosses
Scholars and intellectuals of the early Middle Ages had an
interest in language, but this was usually in the written
sacred languages, not in their own vernacular. Grammar-
ians mostly followed established traditions. One genre, how-
ever, was specifically designed for readers of the time with
linguistic interests, and yet it has hardly been exploited at
all by Romanists: the monolingual glossaries. The bilingual
glossaries featuring Latin words and their equivalents in
other languages can tell us a great deal about those other
languages and the bilingual communities which they
belonged to, but for present purposes it is the copious
monolingual Latin–Latin glossary tradition which fascinates
and intrigues as much as it baffles. These monolingual
glossaries are word-lists which originated in particular cir-
cumstances, such as providing useful terminology for
apprentice notaries, or in lists of glosses that had been
earlier added to texts of all kinds. And as more material
accrued to them, the glossaries grew in size. They were not
in any sense Latin–Romance dictionaries, as the most curs-
ory of sociophilological investigations can confirm. The
huge early eighth-century compendium the Liber Glossarum,
which developed out of the seventh-century Hispanic ‘Visi-
gothic’ context and which now survives in two manuscripts
in Paris and the Vatican, has never been fully edited, nor
examined in depth by a linguist. Each word has its own
history in that tradition, but given an understanding of
the social and historical context, such an analysis could
22
one day be highly instructive for our view of the socio-
philological phenomena of the age. It failed to receive
such an analysis from the British Latinist Wallace
M. Lindsay, who devoted most of his eccentric edition
(Lindsay 1926) merely to seeking out the classical sources
of several of the entries; in fact it is those details with no
obvious source other than the compiler’s own resources
that will be the most revealing of the sociolinguistic cir-
cumstances of the time.
These glossaries are not to be confused with glosses.
Some of the earliest written evidence for the evolution of
Romance comes in the form of individual glosses added in
the margin or between the lines of Latin manuscripts, in an
attempt to elucidate the old text; most such glosses are in
recognizable orthography, but there comes a time when
some are deliberately written in a non-standard manner—
for example, in eleventh-century La Rioja. An understand-
ing of the social context, allied to philological analysis,
suggests that these non-standard glosses usually come into
the category of a different way of writing the same language
rather than representing an early attempt to create the
fully independent Romance writing systems which we see
in later contexts.
2.11 Sociophilology and politics
The question of why anybody bothered to invent new writ-
ing systems at all does seem to be initially answered with
reference to the advent of the spoken distinction between
grammatica and vernacular. Such inventions were not inev-
itable, at any rate. Writers could have continued to operate
with the systems they had inherited, as modern English has,
and as modern Chinese has, despite the great evolutions
there have been since these writing systems were invented;
but in the Latin–Romance case, once the inherited trad-
itional written mode became closely associated with the
new spelling–pronunciation system and had established
itself in the basic educational curriculum, any written text
which the writer wished to be given a vernacular reading
aloud was going to need the updated system. Oaths in a
judicial court, sequences and sermons in church, hagiog-
raphy at saints’ festivals, and poems designed for entertain-
ment were thus among the first genres to be adapted this
way. And as the idea of a possible new written mode spread
out from France, so did the realization that different areas,
with different linguistic features, would need different spel-
lings for the same words. Thus the new idea of written
‘Romance’ as being a separate language rather than just a
separate writing system preceded (but only by a couple of
generations) the idea that speakers in different geographical

areas had different Romance languages needing different
ways of writing.
This latter idea was taken up by politicians who felt that
each kingdom deserved its own written language, an idea
which is still powerful in regions of Spain and Italy. Thus it
is probably no accident that the Catalans, who seem to have
been happy to use the written Romance modes developed
for Occitan during the second half of the twelfth century,
when the two areas were both ruled from Barcelona, devel-
oped their own distinctive writing system shortly after the
battle of Muret (1213) which led to the political separation
of the two areas. Similarly, the idea that Portuguese was a
separate language from Galician, needing a distinctive writ-
ten form, followed the late twelfth-century political inde-
pendence of Portugal from Galicia. Conversely, the idea that
Leonese was a separate language from Castilian, deserving
its own writing system and social identity, did not last long
after the political union of the two areas under Fernando III
in 1230. Italian linguistic politics were, as ever, more com-
plicated in that there were a large number of politically
independent units and fewer centralizing and standardizing
tendencies until the very end of the Middle Ages. Broadly
speaking, though, it was the combination of the fashion for
new writing systems and political nationalism which led to
the general adoption, all over western Europe, including
French-speaking England and the Low Countries, of a locally
elaborated vernacular writing mode rather than Latin for
practical and administrative purposes. (The sociophilologi-
cal background to the emergence of written Romanian is a
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LATIN AND ROMANCE IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
separate and much later issue, not involving a co-existing
Latinate guise.) Thus the important Treaty of Cabreros of
1206, which established the political relationship between
Castile and León for ever after, was the first such treaty
anywhere to be written in Romance vernacular (edited in
Wright 2000); half a century later, King Alfonso X’s Fuero
Real of 1256, the collective law code of his expanding Cas-
tilian kingdom, established the written vernacular as having
full legal validity. Philological analysis on its own would not
reveal what was going on; historical and social analysis would
not get much further without the philology; it has been the
sociophilological combination of the two which has led to our
current understanding of how and why the invention and
then the use of Romance writing spread as it did.
Once almost all texts were written in Romance, by the
late thirteenth century, the philologist’s analyses become
more straightforward. There were still some aspects of
standardization which meant that the written text was not
a direct photographic representation of a spoken counter-
part, but standardization in medieval Romance languages
was never as strict as it was in Latin, despite the gradual
spread of the Paris-based scripta in France and the Castilian-
based scripta in the Kingdom of Castile. Latin was taken to be
the language that had grammar. The growth in the gram-
matical study of the vernacular began in Italy in the fif-
teenth century, and was given much impetus by Nebrija at
the court of Ferdinand and Isabel, but these figures are part
of the intellectual atmosphere that mark the end of the
Middle Ages, beyond the remit of the present chapter.
23