Thread by @azforeman

A harder question to answer is "when did people start believing that Romance wasn't a single language but multiple different languages?"

Now we get into some real murky business. What I give in this thread is my opinion. I agree w/ people like Roger Wright on this

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Apart from Romanian and other Eastern Romance varieties, that process may — in my view — not have been complete until the early 13th century.

Until then, most or many people in the West don't seem to have though of the Romance of other regions as foreign in anything but a geographic sense.

Even in the late 1100s, you have people portraying the speech of different regions in a way that seems much more like somebody doing an impression of a different dialect than an attempt at multilingual performance.

It's just that a lot of these instances have been traditionally taken for multilingual or macaronic writing by scholars. An understandable mistake, since these texts were copied and re-copied by 14th century scribes who (again quite understandably) took them to be precisely that.

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This is not the standard story. The standard history — a product ultimately of the peculiarly nationalistic centuries during which Romance philology got going — would have it that these can be taken as separate languages from the moment of their textual attestation.

Thus, for example, the Eulalia Sequence (ca. 880) is already in a form of "French" whereas early poetic texts like the O Maria Deu Maire (ca. 1090) are already in a form "Occitan".

But it isn't even clear (to me) whether the author of the Eulalia Sequence simply thought he/she was simply transcribing vernacular Latin phonetically.

Apart from that, it is vanishingly unlikely that the authors of these texts would have thought that the vernaculars of Northern and Southern Gaul were separate languages.

All the way into the 12th century, speakers from both areas referred to their language as "Romantz" or "Romans", which appears to have meant "The Romance Language."

For the Troubadours there was a two-way contrast between "Romantz" (or "Lenga Romana") and "Latí" or ("Lenga Latina"), and they use the phrase "en plana lenga romana" in a way that appears to mean the same thing Anglophones mean by "in plain English."

The same is true of 12th century poetic texts which are retrospectively read "Old French." (As is the "Romana Lingua" of the Strasbourg Oaths, though again, at this early date, it's not clear to me that it shouldn't be taken as meaning something like "Common Latin".)

When two groups with related speech varieties have the same name for their language, and never give any indication that one perceives the other as "foreign", the sane inference is that they see themselves as belonging to a single linguistic community.

It also seems to me unlikely that Romance speakers in, say, Northern Italy or the Caliphate of Cordoba in the 11th century thought that people in Paris and Limoges spoke a foreign language, let alone two different foreign languages from each other.

A complicating factor is that people in much of the former Carolingian Empire were already using term Romantz/Romanç/Romans/Romanze at a time when not all Romance speakers had shifted from the word Latí/Ladí/Ladin/Ladino.

In the Alps, both terms survived to become names of what are now thought of as separate languages.
Another problem is that European scholars have not always been very savvy in interpreting the sources.

It is easy to assume that when someone uses an expression like "another language" (or "alia lingua" or "autre lenguatge") that they mean the same thing that 19th or 20th century Europeans would mean by such a phrase.

But when different regions have different but closely related vernaculars, people may refer to each other as speaking a "different language" rhetorically without actually meaning it literally.

For example, Arabs from the Middle East may refer to Moroccan Arabic as "a totally different language" or say that Moroccans "don't even speak Arabic" in characterizing the strangeness or unintelligibility of Moroccan speech, without ever meaning either of these things literally

It's not uncommon for Arabic speakers to talk about vernaculars in other ways that, to Euroglots, would be suggestive of separate languageness. For example "He's a native speaker of Moroccan, but he also speaks fluent Egyptian."

Someone who said this in Arabic would usually not be making a claim that the referent was bilingual in the "normal" sense of the word.

The period during which "Romance" was experienced as (something like) a single language, but (basically) separate from "Latin" must have been comparatively short.

Depending on whether one accepts an early or a late date for the Romance/Latin conceptual separation, it cannot have lasted much longer than two centuries or so.

The instability of the situation is understandable, given that a unifying supraregional high register which all parties could lay equal claim to (a role for which Latin, now reclassified as a separate language, was no longer available) was vacant.

Let me take Raimbaut de Vaqueiras' famous tenso

trobar.org/troubadours/ra…

It is written, at the very end of what I would call the period of Romance homoglossia, in alternating strophes of what are traditionally described in the philological literature as "Provençal" and "Italian"

i.e. the Troubadour Lyric register and a hyperstylized form of colloquial Genoese Romance. It contains distinctively Genoese traits such as "chu" for "plus", alongside the obviously non-genoese "plui". Forms like "gauzo" (Joy) are suspiciously Occitan.

The word "Latí" is a dead giveaway. Its phonological form without -n (confirmed by its use as a rhyme word) is distinctively Occitan, as is its apparent use in the sense "talk, utterance".

It is unlikely that any Romance-speaker, Genoese or otherwise, would have exhibited all the linguistic traits contained here.

This is not the behavior of someone who thinks they're composing in a different linguistic system. It's not "Bad Genoese", just as an Iraqi who has lived in Damascus for a couple years and has picked up an Iraqi-inflected version of the dialect is not speaking "Bad Damascene."

Behavior like that exhibited in this Tenso is not hard to come by in the Arab world today. The comedian Won-Ho Chung does a parody of a song by Nancy Ajram in which he farcically imitates Ajram's singing style.

Although Ajram is Lebanese, this song of hers is in Cairene. Won-Ho's parody of it contains Levantine verb forms, and a tell-tale phonological Jordanianism (wāgif for wā'if). Though it could probably still be described as "more or less" in Egyptian.
Back to Raimbaut.

In his Tenso, the lady is made to say that she does not understand the troubadour's speech anymore than she would a German, Sardinian or Berber ("Jujar, to provenzalesco .. no t'entend plui d'un Toesco, o Sardo o Barbarì").

But she obviously must understand it in any literal sense, (whether or not she could have understood Sardinian Romance as well). This seems to me to be humorously meant.

Modern Arabs hearing a dialect of their language which they find difficult to understand will often say things of this precise kind, particularly if it has low prestige in their eyes. Raimbaut would have performed both parts himself, in both dialects of Romance.

The poem was intended to amuse a patron, although the humor and the context appear to be lost on modern commentators like Louise Vasvari, Simon Gaunt and others who take this poem as a genuine attempt at seduction, or at least a genuine dialogue between two poets.

Gaunt, for example, justifies his claim that the Genoese parts are actually the work of an unidentified female composer by anachronistically insisting that "Occitan speakers are unlikely to have understood" the Genoese sections

and that "Italian-speaking audiences could easily have been offended by a foreigner attempting to appropriate their language in this way." Gaunt's argument IMO has been rather too uncritically accepted by those eager to give "medieval women's voices" their due.

Even if one assumes (again dubiously) that all or most Occitan speakers would have found this kind of stylized Genoese unintelligible, this poem was intended for a specific audience by definition more restricted than the set of all such speakers, however defined.

It was probably performed for Raimbaut's patron Obizzo II Malaspina, at whose court neither Genoese nor Lyric Occitan would have posed any intelligibility problems whatsoever.

In fact, any Occitan Romance speaker at a court at which Vaqueiras is likely to have later performed such a piece (e.g. that of the Marquis Boniface di Montferrat) would have been familiar with Italo-Romance shibboleths, and Genoese Romance would hardly have counted as obscure.

Apart from the dubious assumption that courtly audiences in a 12th century city-state would respond to "appropriation" in the way Gaunt seems to imagine, and begging the question of who or what exactly could possibly count as ethnically "Italian" in the 1190s...

...there is no reason to assume that anybody in Northern Italy thought of the Troubadour's performance dialect as foreign in any sense.

Actually let me rephrase that. It appears to have meant rather something like "common tongue".