ABSTRACT
[255] Manuel DÍaz is a Latin specialist, but in practice many of his studies are important also within romance philology. Perhaps his most significant publications in this respect are his study of the Latin of the Hispanic liturgy and the lecture he gave in London in 1988 on the Latin of seventh-century Spain, concentrating on the Visigothic slates. 1 In these studies and others he has demonstrated both that the literate of that period used normal vernacular speech, and that the less educated had at the same time greater access to literate culture than they are usually given credit for. Indeed, after the studies of Manuel Díaz and other scholars, we can say that the Iberian Peninsula was in the year 700 (apart from the Basques) a monolingual Romance-speaking community, despite containing a wide range of geographical and stylistic variation. We can call this language “Early Romance”; but they continued to refer to it themselves with the word written latina and at that time pronounced [ladína]; to try and avoid confusing their monolingual language either with the Imperial Latin of the remote past or the Romance languages of the remote future, I refer to it here as ladino. Despite the variation which undoubtedly existed, it seems clear they they did not themselves draw a sharp dividing line either between educated and popular usages, or between geographically delimited dialects (at least, within the Peninsula). That is, there still existed a stylistic and sociolinguistic continuum, in addition to the geographical continuum, and it would merely confuse matters if our analysis were to erect conceptual frontiers that did not yet exist, between “Castilian” and “Leonese”, say, or “Romance” and “Latin”. The authoritative studies of Michel Banniard have shown that, within their 20stylistic continuum, most texts could still be understood when read aloud. Even Isidore of Seville expected that to be the case; this is how Visigothic society managed to function on a basis of written laws and documentation. 2
