Charlemagne and the law of unintended consequences

History is littered with examples of top-down intervention in linguistic matters that have not had the desired effect, and there is none better than Charlemagne’s disastrous attempt to reintroduce classical Latin to the Carolingian Empire, over which he reigned from 800 to 814.

Following the fall of Rome, spoken Latin had fragmented quickly into what became known as Romance varieties. By the eighth century, many of these had diverged so far from classical Latin norms that the laity could no longer understand scripture. The problem was most acute in the north, where the priests’ tacit response had been to align their pronunciation as far as possible with local vernacular usage to ensure comprehensibility. Fearing dilution of the religious and linguistic unity of his empire, Charlemagne attempted to stamp out this practice, decreeing that the Mass must be delivered literaliter, i.e. according to classical Latin norms. These norms were not, however, well known in the Carolingian Empire, so Latin scholars, among them Alcuin of York (whose Latin had always been a foreign tongue and therefore unaffected by ongoing changes in Romance), were brought in from outside to school the clergy in classical Latin pronunciation.

The consequence was chaotic non-communication between clergy and laity. The crisis was partly resolved in 813 by a compromise reached at the Synod of Tours, which allowed sermons to be preached in local vernaculars while insisting that the liturgy itself be conducted in classical Latin. Charlemagne’s attempt to strengthen the position of classical Latin had had precisely the opposite effect: in historical terms the Synod of Tours compromise represented the thin end of an extremely long wedge. The diglossic relationship between Latin and the vernaculars had started to ‘leak’ in favor of the latter, with local vernaculars now fulfilling a function formerly reserved for Latin.

The retreat of Latin would continue remorselessly over the centuries, with one of these vernaculars, that of Paris, gradually usurping all its main functions. This variety, known as français, or French, became the official language of the French nation that would later emerge. In the nation states which developed elsewhere in the former Roman Empire, Latin would similarly be replaced in its High or H functions by standard varieties of other Romance languages: for example, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

While much medieval linguistic scholarship starts from the teaching of Latin, or bears the imprint of a Latin model, one twelfth-century work, which has become known as The First Grammatical Treatise, stands out for highlighting the inappropriateness of Latin as a model for other languages. The anonymous author (generally referred to as ‘The First Grammarian’) sets out a compelling case for spelling reform in Icelandic, for which, he argues, the Latin alphabet as it stands is ill-suited:

Striking about this work, which was unknown outside Scandinavia until the nineteenth century, are the First Grammarian’s detailed knowledge of early Icelandic phonetics and his grasp of phonological principles, which would not be fully developed until the twentieth century. He proposed the use of diacritics on Latin vowel symbols to mark contrastive features such as length and nasality, and noted the distinction in Icelandic between short and long (or geminate) consonants, suggesting the use of capital letters to mark the latter, for example P to represent /pp/. In its use of minimal pairs to determine phonemic oppositions, that is the substitution of different sounds in the same environment to produce words with different meaning:

His examples were often humorous and (for the twelfth century at least) occasionally racy:

‘Mjǫk eru þeir min frȧmėr, er eigi skammask at taka mina konu frȧ mér.’ (‘Those men are brazen, who are not ashamed to take my wife from me.’)

A similarly modern resonance is found in the work of the thirteenth and fourteenth century Modistae, or speculative grammarians, who began, as languages other than Greek and Latin were becoming better known in Europe, to question the philosophical basis of grammar. Roger Bacon and others argued that grammar was universal, and that differences between languages were merely superficial. The theme of universal grammar was developed further by Lancelot and Arnauld in their Port-Royal Grammar (Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l’art de parler, expliqués d’une manière claire et naturelle, ‘General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaking, explained in a clear and natural manner’) first published in 1660, which viewed grammar as the product of innate mental processes. This rationalist position was rejected by the British empiricist philosophers Locke, Hume and Berkeley, who denied the existence of innate ideas and held that knowledge was a product of sensory experience.

Drawing on examples from Latin, Greek, Hebrew and the modern vernacular languages of Europe (but not beyond) the Port-Royal Grammar presented the six-case structure of Latin noun declension as a universal framework, realized in a variety of ways by different languages (in the Romance languages, for example, much of the grammatical work which had been done by Latin case-endings was now performed by prepositions). The belief in language as a window to universal logic or laws of reason, exemplified by the Port-Royal Grammar, prompted a search for fundamental roots from which words are derived. This led in turn to some fanciful and often unsustainable etymologies, exemplified for example in the work of Horne Tooke, whose two-volume The Diversions of Purley was published in in 1786 and 1805. Culler (1976: 56) notes Tooke’s tenuous speculations on the nature of the word bar:

The belief that linguistic signs have a rational basis, obscured by phonetic change, is, as we have seen, an enduring one, but it became increasingly untenable as the diversity of human language became better understood. It was not, however, until the twentieth century and the work of Saussure that the essential arbitrariness of the sign finally became a central tenet in linguistic thought. The age-old conflict between empiricism and rationalism, however, has continued in different guises to this day, and finds new expression in the debate between proponents of universal grammar within the generative paradigm and their critics.