engleski

Spoken and Written Narratives in the 10th and 11th Century Latin Documents of the Dalmatian City of Zadar

The subject of the paper is the relation between spoken and written narratives in the 10th and 11th century medieval Latin documents of the Dalmatian city of Zadar. Namely, Romance languages asserted themselves in the area of the former Western Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, while the continuity of Latin literacy was secured through the specific medieval Latin, which would be, starting from the Caroline period, subjected to the reform aimed towards approaching classical models. Dalmatoromance is one of the successors of Latin. Latinists have so far neglected documents from Dalmatian cities from the Early Middle Ages as texts written in „bad“ language. The paper will indicate that the consistencies in this narrative can be attributed to the influence of the vernacular of urban population on written medieval Latin and not to their unfamiliarity with Classic Latin narrative. Generally speaking, the morphology of the medieval Latin language in the period which precedes the affirmation of the reformed Latin in the Roman territories beyond the direct Carolingian influence (the second half of the XIth century) cannot be interpreted only with the low level of the Latin literacy, because of the great influence of the early Romance narrative. Its nominal system, as a result of the formal reduction and the functional reorganization of the old narrative, takes its basic outlines from VIIth till XIth century. The research that was carried out for this paper is a continuation of the scientific efforts mapped out by R. Katičić and N. Vuletić, prominent Croatian philologists, but is also in keeping with modern tendencies of Latinist-Romanist cooperation currently promoted in England, France and Spain. The research itself has been conducted on thirty legal documents from Zadar. Since these documents are rigorously structured, there is a notable difference between formal parts, such as invocation, datation, intitulation, sanction etc., and the disposition, which is a lot more dependant on subjective affinities of the person writing the charter. By comparing these documents it has been established that five of them show a pronounced spoken character of the Roman narrative, mostly and sometimes exclusively in the disposition. Also, it seems as if the subscription is having some sort of autonomy in the analyzed documents, showing many morphologic and syntactic elements of the Romance vernacular in the written medieval Latin. In conclusion, it can be said that the spoken Romance narrative is most strongly felt in disposition and subscription. The written medieval Latin and spoken early Romance are not perceived neither systematically nor functionally as two separate idioms, but as two registers of the same language. The sociolinguistic situation of this kind allows the two systems to be permeated in the written narrative, and the Romance morphologic and syntactic solutions to penetrate the written Latin. The result of it is a very noticeable influence of the spoken narrative on the written narrative.

Medieval Latin, spoken Romance, written Latin, Zadar, Dalmatia, Croatia

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