- Latinum cedens: le français et le latin, langues de spécialité au Moyen Âge ed. by Stéphane Marcotte, Christine Silvi
For a thousand years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Latin continued to be the prime vehicle of communication across Europe in all of the high (H) domains of use, such as religion, government, law, education, and science. An essential part of the history of the European vernaculars in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance was the gradual ‘leakage of function’ from Latin to the vernaculars, whereby the various new standard languages replaced Latin in the performance of these H functions. In order to fulfil their new role, the emerging standard languages had, in their turn, to undergo functional elaboration through lexical and syntactic expansion. The book looks at the lexical expansion of French in the late Middle Ages as writers adapted the language to handle technical fields previously handled in Latin. After an extensive Introduction by the editors, the book offers eight forty-page (on average) studies dealing with theology, medicine, the physical sciences, and the law, and is rounded off by valuable indexes of ‘notions’ and individual words (Latin, Greek, and French) dealt with in the book. The chapters contributed by Sylvie Bazin (medical language) and Stéphane Marcotte (legal language) are particularly worthwhile. However, as is so often the case with the publication of conference papers, the authors of the eight chapters each take their own individual approach to the topic and make it difficult for the reader to discern overall patterns of development. The volume makes no attempt to step outside France to compare similar movements elsewhere, notably in Italy and Germany. It is quite likely that French was first off the mark in the displacement of Latin in the domains treated here, for the language gained unrivalled prestige in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, this question is not considered. The book concerns itself less with the sociolinguistics of functional change than with the language-internal questions of lexical innovation within cultivated French, normally through Latin borrowing. The underlying metaphor here is one of la guerre des langues, whereby one language ‘cedes ground’ to another as the invader ‘re-equips itself ’ to seize a new portion of territory, the assumption being that the French language could not have performed these new functions earlier, as it was not equipped to do so. It is preferable to start from the assumption that living languages are characterized by their infinite extensibility and that they can do anything speakers want them to do. Languages do not move into new domains of their own accord: it is speakers (and writers) who take them there, once they feel the need to do so.
