In wordless speech there is no word-for-word reproduction of meaning. Writing had fixed neither the language frontier nor the monolingual dependence on translation.
One often forgets that the translator is a frontiersman in more than one sense: He creates the very frontier over which he brings his booty. He is like a ferryman whose boat turns the wild beyond of the barbarous babble into the “other” bank. The translator does not exist in orality. In that world there is neither the dragoman, who hangs about the offices of the Turkish Khadi, nor the Dolmetscher, who sees to it that two texts correspond, nor the “simultaneous parrot” at the United Nations. All these are artisans of the text. They start from the assumption that a person who speaks is, by implication, dictating. It is immaterial whether that dictation is then written down or not because the product of it is in any case a “text” Translation today means turning one text into another. The notion that lies behind it is that texts have a content that is capable of being poured from one vessel—with its own lexical, grammatical, phonetic, and contextual peculiarities—into another.
NE OBSTACLE most modern readers face when they want to study the history of “language” is their belief in monolingual man. From Saussure to Chomsky, “homo monolinguis” is posited as the man who uses language—the man who speaks. This idea had no place in early Greece, or in the Middle Ages; even today it is alien to many people. In their daily life in Java or in the Sahel, a great number of people still feel at home in several kinds of discourse, each of which, to the modern perception, is conducted in a distinct language. But those other people—the Javanese—perceive things differently. They still say “I cannot understand you,” rather than “I do not know your language.” They are concerned with grasping what the other person has to say by explanation, gesture, or summary; they do not want a translation of that person’s statements. As in early Greece, the borders between these cultures, which we moderns are taught to see as “languages,” have remained fluid. The idea of “translation” has not yet erected those frontiers that the translator, and only the translator, may bridge.
The eleventh-century cleric who takes down the witness’s testimony in the language of the court—who, for example, writes in Latin what the witness says in Swabian—is a scribe. He has no intention to translate. Neither is the bishop translating who reads out the homily in accordance with the rules of the Council of Tours: He teaches by announcing the word of God and interpreting it. He is helping people understand. But that is a long way from translating.
Even today, we often say: “Help me, would you—I’d like to understand what the old man or the scientist is saying.” Surely, we are not seeking a translator, but someone to help us understand—an interpreter. We rely on the intermediary who understands the mutterings of an old woman, the dialect of Lower Bavaria, scientific language, or Chinese. The question “What did he say?” contains the request “Tell me what he is trying to tell me.” We do not even expect our companion to have understood word for word; we only want to understand what he has understood. This understanding of explanations, coupled with the ability to explain what one has understood, is basic to oral discourse.
For the idealistic language inmate of a language prison this type of intercourse has become either inconceivable or irritating. He finds it hard to accept that the phenomenon to which he refers by the term “language” has a history—that it was once socially created and may also pass away. Just as the word assumed its present form through writing, so did “language” assume its present form through the translation of texts.
According to George Steiner, translation did not become an issue in the period before Christ. The few literate people were usually bilingual, and for the others, what was said in one language could be retold, summed up, reported, or commented on in the other. Cicero and Horace were among the first to refer to translation as an art. The Greek work was not to be turned into Latin verbum pro verbo. Instead, the meaning was to be detached from the words of one language and made to reappear in another; content, stripped of its form, was to be preserved. Theories about translation changed very little—translation was described as an attempt to divulge the secrets of one language into another—until the hermeneutics of the 1950s. Only then did the study of translation as applied linguistic theory become separated from literary theory. In the end, we would agree with Borges: “Ninguna problema tan consustancial con los letras y con su modesto misterio como el que propone una traduccion” (Translation reflects what is most uncanny about literacy).
The absence of theory did not hamper the Middle Ages from growing into an age of translation. The age of transiation begins, not only with the Christian desire to preach the Gospel to all people, but to appropriate its Hebrew and Greek books into the culture of late Antiquity, which, in the West with Augustine, became monolingual. Saint Jerome defined his activity as translator in an image to which the monks of Reichenau made allusion: “Quasi captivos sensus in suam linguam victoris iure transposuit” (“As the victor deports his prisoners under the rule of war, so (the translator] carries meaning over into his own language”). And precisely because Jerome was aware of the violence done to the text by translation, he called for limits to be set to the process. He preferred to tolerate meaningless sequences of words in his Latin Bible than have what he regarded as something inexpressible obscured by interpretation: “Alioquin et multa alia quae ineffabilia sunt, et humanus animus capere non potest, hac licentia delebuntur.”
Translation in the Middle Ages carried a unique significance because of the unique status of Latin—the only language used in writing. Latin became the only vessel out of which divine revelation could be drawn. By the time of Charlemagne, it had joined Greek and Hebrew as a holy language out of which translation could be made.
Monks in the ninth century began to fashion theotisc into a vessel into which they would dare to pour the content of Latin scripture. To enable translations to be made from the now holy Latin language, in Murbach and on the island of Reichenau, the shaping of the German language became an object of scholarly attention. Within less than a generation, these monks had fashioned a German vocabulary that bore comparison with that of Latin, in order to translate their Benedictine Rule. Glossaries were composed in order to find verbal counterparts for “the last filtration of Latin thought and literary discipline.” Through considered new coinings, through precise definition of new fields of meaning, through loan syntax or paronymous new coinings, something entirely new came into being: From German tongues there crystallized a German language that could be regarded as an equivalent of Latin.
From the middle of the ninth century, a single document written in the Romance language has come down to us, and it happens to be an oath. This Romance text is included in a chronicle written by Nithard in what for the period is unusually good Latin. Nithard, who succeeded his father as Abbot of St. Riquier, was a grandson of Charlemagne through his mother Berta. He served another grandson of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald. He wrote his chronicle at the age of nineteen—two years before his death in battle in 844. In lively terms he describes things that he himself experienced. He complains about the decline of the Holy Roman Empire and that particular year’s poor weather. We know from his chronicle that in 841 Charles the Bald and Louis the German conspired against their brother Lothar. Nithard wrote down the oaths of both the rulers and their men by which this conspiracy was effected. Each ruler took an oath on behalf of himself and his men in the other’s language.
Both vernacular oaths were based on an ingenious Latin original that may possibly have been drawn up by Nithard for his master and cousin, but that has not survived. These two versions, known as the Strasbourg Oaths, played crucial though very different roles in the history of the French and German languages.
The text in romana lingua is the earliest alphabetic representation of colloquial speech in France. For something like a thousand years a dialect had been spoken in France that lent itself perfectly to notation in Latin characters but was never written.
The “vulgar” living speech of tradesmen, craftsmen, women, and public officials that survived in France for thirty generations is unknown to us. Like Latin, it had come from Italy, but it took root earlier and remained far longer than Latin. However, as in Lombardy and on the Iberian Peninsula, it was neither distinguished from Latin as a separate “language,” nor was it ever written down.
Precise analysis of the Romance text of the Strasbourg Oaths shows beyond any doubt that Nithard’s text is not a transcription of a spoken language. It constitutes an attempt to take a carefully worked-out formula, written and conceived in Latin, and to adapt it phonetically and syntactically to the Alsatian mode of expression. The text is a remarkable example of an already developed juridical terminology in learned and complex syntax, with a stilted technical vocabulary, that corresponds exactly to the Latin oaths of Carolingian princes that have come down to us. The conspiracy of the Carolingian princes here became an opportunity to have an army solemnly repeat a text that had been read aloud to them in a facsimile of their own dialect.
The dialect was not a “Latin” dialect. Even by the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., the Romans were no longer speaking the way Latin was spelled. The volcanic ash preserved graffiti that people had daubed on the walls of their houses. The word structure of these uneducated scrawls shows signs of shifts that, up until recently, philologists assumed took place a thousand years later. In words ending with m, for instance, the final m is often dropped. Probably the m was either not pronounced at all or was fused with the preceding vowel to form a nasal—as occurs in present-day Portuguese. Many researchers believe that this gap between language as it was spoken and language as it was spelled was by no means confined to the poorer classes. The Classical poetry of the period takes on a fresh charm when the m is swallowed—as in Brazilian. And, in 841—seven hundred years after Vesuvius—the Romance spoken in Gaul, like that spoken in Iberia, had moved much farther away from Latin word structure. What was read approximated the local form of lingua romana. For the reader, word structure was determined by grammar, and pronunciation by the landscape. In many places, Latin pronunciation was probably as far removed from orthography as is modern English.
Among the aims of the Carolingian reform had been to have Latin read—and consequently also spoken—in a uniform manner throughout the empire. Charlemagne wished to match the existing unity of spelling with a unity of sound. Such an objective would today tend to be regarded as a call for mutual understanding. But such a change was certainly not necessary for mutual understanding at the time. Every monk learned the Latin pronunciation of his own monastery. If he walked from Subiaco to Fulda, his feet bore him no faster than his ear was able to adjust itself to new pronunciations, just as today’s Indian pilgrim still finds his ear adjusting to the landscape with every step he takes. Moreover, despite big differences in accents—today we should say languages—people’s readiness to listen and to understand is far greater in a traditional society than present-day schoolteachers imagine. For more than a thousand years, in some sense, Latin lived.
Charlemagne and his circle of educated monks—Peter the Grammarian, from whom the adult emperor would have liked to learn to write; Paulinus, whose hymns are today still sung in the chancel office; Paul the Deacon, the court historian; the Spaniard, West-Goth Theodolf, wit and art expert; the layman Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer—all of these men together had no less an aim than to mold all the peoples of the empire into a univocal congregation. Sovereignty was interpreted as a gift from God in the service of the Church. Visible unification and standardization of all spheres of life had a symbolic rather than a practical purpose: to correct ingrained habits according to the original text. Mythical “ur-texts” were sought for the Latin Bible, for canon law, for the liturgy, and for monastic life. The plan to standardize Latin pronunciation needs to be seen in the same context, that is to say, as a theologically motivated attempt to create a symbolically effective, uniform, imperial, dead “language”—not to improve a “means of communication.”
On the Continent, no one would have carried out such a plan. The idea that a uniform written language demanded a uniform pronunciation contradicted a basic belief of the Church. The Book of Revelation was one, and had to be understood by all people, each in his own tongue; in the daily performance of this feat, the miracle of Pentecost was constantly repeated. This “miracle” could be performed everywhere in England except in those areas where Romance had never been used as the vernacular, which made it possible for the “correct” pronunciation of written Latin to become a research subject in the eighth century. The Venerable Bede wrote a treatise on orthography. Alcuin the Scot—born in the year of Bede’s death (736) and raised among his pupils—was summoned to Charlemagne’s court as schoolmaster and placed in charge of the school in Tours. He came from a tradition in which Classical education was rooted, not in the continuity of the lingua romana, but in the continuity that stemmed from the systematic adoption of Latin in the monastery and in the liturgy.
Charlemagne relied on Alcuin to unify the pronunciation of Latin. Unlike his Continental brothers, when Alcuin read a text, he pronounced it as a dead language. He trained his pupils to read Latin the way he had learned to read it in York, with each letter being given its correct value—that is to say, pronounced with the same sound each time. This concern for uniform pronunciation was even reflected in the contractions that appeared in the new, standard Carolingian handwriting. Repeatedly, only that part of a word is written that the Franks would otherwise have stressed insufficiently or swallowed altogether. Forty years before the Strasbourg Oaths, then, Alcuin’s school was deliberately trying to make the “reading” of Latin incomprehensible to the vernacular ear. Only in this context can one understand how it could have occurred to Nithard to write lingua romana phonetically.
Alcuin’s phonetic reform was meant to breathe new life into Latin. The immediate consequence, however, was that Latin became incomprehensible to the listener when read aloud. The Carolingian renovatio constituted an obstacle to the Church’s preaching. A year before Charlemagne’s death the Church’s rejection of his unhistorical concept of correct pronunciation found expression at the Council of Tours—the very town in which Alcuin had taught only a few years before. It forbade priests to use the new way of reading during services. The Council enjoins the celebrant to read from this book written in Latin, but to strive in the process to speak in the Romance or theotisc vernacular. Priests in the province of Tours were to continue doing what they had always done without criticism. On the basis of the Latin texts, they were to read out what their congregations could understand.
The argument between advocates of a revived Latin and the Church’s priests hinged on the interpretation of what kind of activity “reading” should be—should it be the spelling out of the letters that correspond to the sounds of a long-dead language, or should it be the transformation of the lines into their own living speech? With this canon, the Council of Tours was reacting against putting a lower limit on standard literary language. Alcuin’s idea of Latin implied one formal set of phonetics for the entire Empire. That new phonetics posed a threat to the function of Latin writing, which was to serve all peoples (gentes).
“Easdem omelias quisque aperte transferre studeat in rusticam romanam linguam aut theotiscam, quo facilius possint intellegere quae dicuntur,” proclaimed the bishops assembled at Tours. The council wished to hold the door open for congregations to understand the text (quo facilius possint intellegere). It therefore required the reader to take pains (studeat) to pronounce what he was reading (quae dicuntur) in such a way that the collection of Latin texts (omeliae) intended to help elucidate the scriptures came across in a manner people could understand (aperte transferre … in rusticam linguam), no matter if that “language” in which the Latin text is read out of is German or French. The emphasis here is on the rusticam: The reader was to do his reading in a vernacular, rustic manner. Two such tongues (linguae) are mentioned: romana and theotisca. Thus, by changing pronunciation (tongue), one could change the Latin, read aloud, into German or French.
Contemporary usage suggests an opposition between German and French because we think in terms of “languages” as self-contained systems of communication that may be compared one with another, but only in the context of their separateness. Neither this modern notion of a neatly defined language, nor that of equivalent language can be projected into a ninth-century text. The aut between romana and theotisca has much more to do with a polarity than with an either/or sense of exclusion. In the same way as the Council opposed the cultivation of a contradiction between the reading aloud of Latin and a generally comprehensible manner of speaking, this canon is talking, not about a translation process, but about a reading process. Reading aloud comprehensibly—however the book is written—is something different from translating Latin into Old French or Old High German.
This can be elucidated by considering the word theotisc. It was not until shortly before 800 that this word started to become remolded from “popular” to “of German origin,” and theotisca lingua from “people’s speech” to “Germanic.” The efforts of the monks at Reichenau, Fulda, and in Alsace to create the rudiments of a German language gave rise to the idea that theotisc was a language distinct from Latin, potentially equivalent to but heterogenous from it, out of and into which it was possible to translate. However, this idea had not yet won general acceptance. And vernacular languages were still far from being the separate and distinct cages in which we today think we are locked.
Up until the time of the earliest vernacular grammars—in other words, up until the late fifteenth century—lingua or tongue or habla was less like one drawer in a bureau than one color in a spectrum. The comprehensibility of speech was comparable to the intensity of a color. Just as one color may appear with greater or lesser intensity, may bleed into its neighbor, just as landscapes merge into one another, so it is with the Council’s aut in relation to romanam and theotiscam. Latin stands in contrast to both “tongues” because it is an orthographic “language.” But so long as there was no compulsion to read aloud in an orthophonetic manner, the reader was free to paint the meaning of what he was reading in any color of the rainbow. And it was on this Christian tradition of a logogrammatical reading of a text written in phonetic notation that the canons of Tours insisted.
By determining the nature of reading in this way, Christianity dissociated itself from the temple at an early stage. As reported by a first-century Jewish source—the Megillah Teanith (The Fasting Scroll)—three days of darkness came over the earth on the day the seventy wise Jews completed their Greek translation of the Torah, the Septuagint. Even today the Koran may not be translated from the Arabic. Christian preaching consists precisely of the fact that every foreigner in Jerusalem was able to hear the Hebrew message in his own native language. Public, vocal meditation during reading is of the essence to the Christian message. The modulation on each syllable that characterizes Gregorian plainchant and the vernacular annunciation of the Gospel are the two extreme forms. Without an appreciation for Mnemosyne it is impossible either to understand the Christian concepts of devout reading, or to grasp what it means that God became the Word that unfolds in Scripture. In the context of these multiple forms of reading, the doctrine of the four-fold interpretation of the sacred text reached its height.
According to the evidence of the Strasbourg Oaths, however, ideogrammatical reading since the ninth century effected precisely the opposite result. The text that Nithard has preserved does not render what anyone had actually said. The work of a wily chaplain, this cunningly devised chunk of speech became the language in which the chancellory took possession of ancient forms of oath. Alliteration and strong words make the army pay due heed to an unaccustomed vow. Every fighting man was to repeat those sentences after a verbatim recital by a cleric. The sentence structure and phraseology of the Romance version show clearly that this intrusion of stilted Latin formulae into the Romance vernacular was not new in Nithard’s day; some set forms of its wording give the impression of having been already polished by chancery use. The oaths provide an example of the manner in which letters can shape people, not only before anyone can trace or decipher them, but before a single song or statement has been written in that people’s vernacular. The oath is just one of several ways in which the unwritten literature of popular culture was learned by heart. The memorization of prayers was probably much more effective. Even in the thirteenth century, confession still served as a means for the clergy to see if individuals knew the Pater and the Creed by heart.
The medieval clergy’s habit of taking depositions in the vernacular and writing them down in Latin, and reading Latin oaths, creeds, and statements by formulating them in vernacular utterances that the people had to repeat, throws light on why epic poetry so rarely came to be written down as it was sung. Unlike the Greek scribe who wrote down what he heard “Homer” sing, the Roman cleric wrote down in Latin what he had understood. And when, on occasion, he wrote it down in the vernacular, the literate scribe was trained to “improve” the version as he wrote it down.
Another landmark in the history of language occurred on August 18, 1492—just fifteen days after Columbus had set sail—when a Spaniard named Elio Antonio de Nebrija published the first grammar in any modern European language, the Gramática Castellana, which attempted to reduce a vernacular tongue to rules of grammar. Nebrija goes beyond the Carolingian scribe, who listened to Frankish depositions and wrote them down in Latin. He demands that Spanish be made into a language that is not spoken, but that serves to record speech.
The six-page introduction to the Gramática presents a concise and powerful argument why the new age, dawning when Columbus departed, called for the replacement of the vernacular speech of the people by a language—an “artifact”—that all people must henceforth be taught. At this time the Spanish monarchs were engaged in transforming the idea of government. They replaced the old aristocratic advisory bodies by organizations of well-lettered officials. Just recently, and only for a few years, the Crown had seized the Inquisition from the Church, thereby acquiring the power needed to dislodge the sword-carrying nobility who were to be replaced by men of the pen. The conception of government as the machinery that guarantees the execution of the monarch’s utterance was now reshaped into one that prepares texts for his signature. The state governed by the management of texts—that is, the modern bureaucratic state—was taking shape. And, under the Hapsburgs, in the late sixteenth century, the transformation became ritually visible. “Ministeriales,” high-level scribes, were assigned ritual roles in the court ceremonial of processions and liturgies, often outranking the men of the sword. Nebrija addresses this new secular balance between armas y letras. He argues with the queen for a new pact between sword and book and proposes a covenant between two spheres—both within the secular realm of the Crown—a covenant distinct from the medieval pact between Emperor and Pope, which had been a covenant bridging the secular and the sacred.
Very astutely, Nebrija reminds the queen that a new union of armas y letras, complementary to that of Church and State, was essential for gathering and joining the scattered pieces of Spain into a single absolute kingdom:
This unified and sovereign body will be of such shape and inner cohesion that centuries will be unable to undo it. Now that the Church has been purified, and we are thus reconciled to God, now that the enemies of the Faith have been subdued by our arms, now that just laws are being enforced, enabling us all to live as equals, what else remains but the flowering of the peaceful arts. And among the arts, foremost are those of language, which sets us apart from the wild animals; language, which is the unique distinction of man, the means for the kind of understanding which can be surpassed only by contemplation.
Continuing to develop his petition, Nebrija introduces the crucial element of his argument: La lengua suelta y fuera de regla—the unbound and ungoverned speech in which people actually live and manage their lives has become a challenge to the Crown. Nebrija thus interprets an unproblematic historical fact as a problem for the architects of a new kind of polity—the modern state:
Your majesty, it has been my constant desire to see our nation become great, and to provide the men of my tongue with books worthy of their leisure. Presently, they waste their time on novels and fancy stories full of lies.
An argument for standardized language is also made today, but the end is now different. Our contemporaries believe that standardized language is a necessary condition to teach people to read, indispensable for the distribution of printed books. Nebrija argues just the opposite: He was upset because people who spoke in dozens of distinct vernacular tongues in 1492 had become the victims of a reading epidemic. They wasted their leisure on books that circulated outside of any possible bureaucratic control. Manuscripts had been so rare and precious that authorities could often suppress the work of an author by literally seizing all the copies, burning them and extirpating the text. Not so books. Even with the small edition of two hundred to a thousand copies—typical for the first generation of print—it was never possible to confiscate an entire run. Printed books called for the exercise of censorship through an Index of Forbidden Books. Books could only be proscribed, not destroyed. But Nebrija’s proposal appeared more than fifty years before the first Index was published in 1599. And he wished to achieve control over the printed word on a much deeper level than that later attempted by the Church. He wanted to replace the people’s vernacular with the grammarian’s language. The humanist proposes the standardization of colloquial language to remove the new technology of printing from the vernacular domain—to prevent people from printing and reading in the various languages that, up to that time, they had only spoken. By this monopoly over an official and taught language, he proposes to suppress wild, untaught vernacular reading.
To grasp the full significance of Nebrija’s argument—that compulsory education in a standardized national mother tongue is necessary to prevent people from wanton, pleasureful reading—one must remember the status of print at that time. Nebrija was born before the appearance of moveable type. He was thirteen when the first moveable stock came into use. His conscious adult life coincides with the incunabula. When printing was in its twenty-fifth year, he published his Latin grammar; in its thirty-fifth, he published his Spanish grammar. Nebrija could recall the time before print—as many of us can recall the time before television. Nebrija’s text was by coincidence published the year William Caxton died.
The last paragraph of Nebrija’s introduction exudes eloquence. Evidently, the teacher of rhetoric knew what he taught. Nebrija has explained his project; given the queen logical reasons to accept it; frightened her with what would happen if she were not to heed him. Finally, like Columbus, he appeals to her sense of a manifest destiny:
Now, Your Majesty, let me come to the last advantage that you shall gain from my grammar. For the purpose, recall the time when I presented you with a draft of this book earlier this year in Salamanca. At this time, you asked me what end such a grammar could possibly serve. Upon this, the Bishop of Avila interrupted to answer in my stead. What he said was this: “Soon Your Majesty will have placed her yoke upon many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues. By this, your victory, these people shall stand in a new need; the need for the laws the victor owes to the vanquished, and the need for the language we shall bring with us.” My grammar shall serve to impart them the Castilian tongue, as we have used grammar to teach Latin to our young.
We can attempt a reconstruction of what happened at Salamanca when Nebrija handed the queen a draft of his forthcoming book. The queen praised the humanist for having provided the Castilian tongue with what had been reserved to the languages of Scripture, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. But while Isabella was able to grasp the achievement of her letrado—the description of a living tongue as rules of grammar—she was unable to see any practical use for such an undertaking. For her, grammar was an instrument designed solely for use by teachers. She believed, moreover, that the vernacular simply could not be taught. In her royal view of linguistics, every subject of her many kingdoms was so made by nature that during his lifetime he would reach perfect dominion over his own tongue on his own. In this version of “majestic linguistics” the vernacular is the subject’s domain. By the very nature of things, the vernacular is beyond the reach of the ruler’s authority.
Isabella’s initial rejection of Nebrija’s proposal underscores its originality. Nebrija argued against a traditional and typically Iberian prejudice of Isabella—the notion that the Crown cannot encroach on the variety of customs in the kingdoms—and called up the image of a new, universal mission for a modern Crown. Nebrija overcame Isabella’s prejudices by promising to serve her mystical mission. First, he argued that the vernacular must be replaced by an artificio to give the monarch’s power increased range and duration; then, to cultivate the arts by decision of the court; also to guard the established order against the threat presented by wanton reading and printing. But he concluded his petition with an appeal to the “Grace of Granada,” the queen’s destiny, not just to conquer, but to civilize the entire world.
Both Columbus and Nebrija offered their services to a new kind of empire builder. But Columbus proposed only to use the recently created caravels to the limit of their range for the expansion of royal power in what would become New Spain. Nebrija’s appeal was more basic—he argued the use of his grammar for the expansion of the Queen’s power in a totally new sphere that he proposed to create through the act of conquest itself. He intended the creation of the sphere of a taught mother tongue—the first invented part of universal education.
Columbus was to open the way to the New World; Nebrija devised a way to control Spanish subjects by providing a way to standardize their language.