Mertcan Bulak: For centuries, in Ireland and Britain (as now in Frisia and Germany), Latin had been a language learned from books. It was a perfect language because it was a perfectly dead language. It was spoken with a fixed pronunciation which even learned Continental persons from former Latin-speaking areas would have found hard to follow. When persons such as Alcuin came to areas of “Roman” speech on the Continent, the Latin he encountered struck him as “barbarous.” But this was not because it was written by “barbarians.” The exact opposite was the case. This was Latin written by persons who thought of themselves as, in some way, still “Romans.” They thought that they were writing Latin when, in fact, they were already writing proto-French. They had not noticed the hiatus between their own, sub-Latin “Roman” language and the “correct” Latin which was to be found in ancient texts.

For centuries, in Ireland and Britain (as now in Frisia and Germany), Latin had been a language learned from books. It was a perfect language because it was a perfectly dead language. It was spoken with a fixed pronunciation which even learned Continental persons from former Latin-speaking areas would have found hard to follow. When persons such as Alcuin came to areas of “Roman” speech on the Continent, the Latin he encountered struck him as “barbarous.” But this was not because it was written by “barbarians.” The exact opposite was the case. This was Latin written by persons who thought of themselves as, in some way, still “Romans.” They thought that they were writing Latin when, in fact, they were already writing proto-French. They had not noticed the hiatus between their own, sub-Latin “Roman” language and the “correct” Latin which was to be found in ancient texts.

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