A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin (review)

254 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Wright, Roger, A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 10), Turnhout, Brepols, 2002; cloth; pp. viii, 389; RRP EUR65.00; ISBN 2503513387. In 1982, Roger Wright published an important volume on the complex transition from spoken Latin to the Romance languages of southern Europe (Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France). In it, he argued that the former western provinces of the Roman empire continued to be a monolingual speech community long after the collapse of political unity. More-or-less standardised written Latin remained widely used and comprehensible, with much the same relationship to local variations of spoken Latin as modern written English has to its myriad of spoken accents, dialects, and creoles today. To Wright, the crucial period of transition from monolingualism (with variants) to a Latin/Romance dichotomy was the Carolingian ‘Renaissance’, and the prime agents of change were the Anglo-Saxon scholars at Charlemagne’s court. Alcuin and his ilk introduced a hyper-corrected form of spoken Latin which was quite at odds with Latin as it was still actually spoken on the Continent, not least in its practitioners’ insistence on full pronunciation of all written letters. Spread via the Carolingian educational reforms, this hyper-correction drove a wedge between the written and the spoken language. The latter, by the thirteenth century at the latest, had become a variety of vernaculars alienated from the written language; while written Latin had assumed that position we all know, of a ‘dead’ foreign language, universally available but possessed by none. The present volume further develops major aspects of Wright’s thesis. The book is a collection of articles (a fact unannounced on the cover blurb or advertising), most originally published within a few years either side of the millennium. The papers are mildly reworked (including translation of several from three Romance languages) in order to provide coherence, but the author’s clearly demarcated research interests provide a high degree of unity. The book is the third release in a potentially very interesting series on medieval literacy. The chapters are divided into six main themes: longitudinal overviews of relations between late and medieval Latin and the Romance languages; four sections on periods and regions which were either key points of linguistic development (Late Antiquity; the Carolingian period; and twelfth/thirteenth century Spain) or instructive isolates (tenth/eleventh century Italy and Spain); and methodological studies in ‘sociophilology.’ The latter term is the author’s coinage. It refers to a marriage between sociolinguistics (examining the social Reviews 255 Parergon 20.2 (2003) agenda of linguistic variation), historical linguistics (concerned with spoken language development in pre-literate groups), and the traditional, technical philology needed to be able to deal with such remote data. Wright is a vigorous and precise speaker, and his papers reflect the same forceful orderliness. The titles of his compact chapters declare a problem-solving directness: ‘How Latin Came to Be a Foreign Language for All’, ‘Why the Romance Languages Are Not All the Same’, ‘Why Judeo-Spanish Was Called “Ladino”’, ‘What Actually Changes During a “Sound Change”?’As subsidiaries to his main theme, Wright introduces a range of fascinating insights into cultural change and continuity in the early Middle Ages. One example which recurs several times throughout the book is Ladino, the language of the Mozarabic Christian community under Islamic rule in Córdoba, a fossil of what might be called Wright’s ‘prelapsarian ’common Latin, unaffected by Carolingian self-consciousness of ‘correct’ Latin and ‘non-Latinate’ Romance. But while the spoken form of Ladino continued to be used, by the tenth century its written counterpart had fallen into disuse. The Ladino-speaking community bowed to convenience, abandoned classicising Latin as a written mode, and adopted as their written language what was by now its second spoken tongue, Arabic (itself a highly standardised language). The papers on Spain in the central Middle Ages (section E) provide the most detailed arguments for the wave of conscious change in the introduction of Carolingian-style standardisation of Latin, relating changes in particular areas to the episcopates of individual bishops. There is significant overlap with manuscript studies in this section...