[LFG] Medieval case study in LFG.

[Gerard Cheshire]

Dear LFG members,

I am writing to inform you about an interesting development in Romance linguistics that may be useful for your research into lexical functionality in linguistics.


In 2017 the writing system of a Medieval manuscript was revealed to be proto-Romance: i.e. the ancestor to the modern Romance languages. In addition, it is written with a proto-Italic alphabet. It is the only known document of this kind and therefore has considerable linguistic and historic value.

Two papers have been issued, which explain the writing system and translate a number of excerpts as examples. They can be freely downloaded from the LingBuzz website.

  1.  Linguistic Missing Links: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737
  2.  Linguistically Dating and Locating MS408: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808

The manuscript reveals that proto-Romance was a combination of simplified spoken Latin injected with words from foreign and local languages. It resulted from migration, trade, slavery, royal marriage and exchange of idea so that people had a common language for communication across the Mediterranean: a lingua franca. When the political map subsequently became more fixed proto-Romance then evolved into the modern Romance languages because different populations became relatively isolated.

Thus, proto-Romance was a highly dynamic language due to socio-ecological pressures resulting from a requirement to communicate. It would therefore have had variants across the Mediterranean depending on the different populations involved. The proto-Romance of the manuscript is very similar to Portuguese and Catalan, as it originated from the Crown of Aragon in the western part of the Mediterranean.

>From the point of view of LFG the language is an interesting case study in rapid transitional linguistics, as the lexical, syntactic and phonological elements are hybridised and formative. Anyone interested in the formation of the Romance languages should find the information useful for the scholarly study of language origins, interrelationships, evolution and functionality.

Regards,
G. E. Cheshire.

University of Bristol.
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