Language as a Means of and a Barrier to Communication

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Language as a Means of and a Barrier to Communication

Reading and Writing. The inability of most medieval people to read and write was more of an impediment than it appeared to be at the time. Indeed, society depended much more on oral than on written communication, and information certainly circulated by word of mouth in public announcements, sermons, and performances. Most medieval children were not schooled enough to read or write. Both were expensive activities: books were scarce; writing surfaces were costly; and to write one had to be equipped with basic writing tools, if not quills and ink. For most people, especially those of the laity, neither reading nor writing was seen to be a necessary part of life. Some females from noble families learned to write, but for most, writing was not deemed as useful as spinning. Writing, especially in the Latin shorthands that developed regionally, was, however, a useful skill for employment, and when taught, it was to boys, although exceptions to this pattern did exist. Kings’ courts and religious houses taught reading and writing to both sexes, as did nobles’ tutors.

Literacy. General reading and writing literacy rates for the Middle Ages are hard to estimate, since they varied widely according to place, socio-economic status, gender, religious or lay calling, and occupation. Towns had a higher number of literates than rural areas, and professional and wealthy people were generally more literate than poorer people. At no time in the Middle Ages did any laws require children to be taught to read. This situation, combined with the dearth of schools, made the population of the Middle Ages predominantly illiterate. While the literacy rate increased dramatically in certain areas and religious groups during the later Middle Ages, it did not reach the levels achieved during the Renaissance.

Dhouda. It is, however, extremely difficult to create firm generalizations for the Middle Ages, as the example of Dhouda, the laywoman who wrote during the ninth century, should help illustrate. Fully literate in Latin, she wrote Liber Manualis, a book she intended to give to her son William. In this manual Dhouda gives her son advice on how he should conduct his life. She says that he should obey and respect authority, worship God, and read. Dhouda stresses the importance of reading, suggesting that it should be like a game. The reader should study the work until he understands everything about it. In the initial epigram the first letters of the lines spell out in Latin the message, “Dhouda Greets Her Dear Son William. Read.”

Translation Necessity. Medieval literacy, no more than literacy today, did not give the reader access to all written works. A perceived need in the Middle Ages for translation was a clear indication that language then as now is both a means and a barrier to communication. Language, in the case of translations, is, on the one hand, the means of communication between peoples of different tongues; on the other hand, since it is the difference in languages that creates the need for translation at all, the lack of a lingua franca or shared language is in fact a barrier to communication.

For the most part, nonetheless, translation, or the ability to transfer meaning through languages from one to another people, is a means to greater communication. There are, however, two instances in which the move toward translation might be seen to be more of a catalyst to impeding communication than enhancing it. The first is that brief interval during which languages are beginning to evolve away from one another when, with effort and goodwill, it might still be possible to speak with one tongue rather than emphasize the lack of ability of parties to exchange in a shared language.

Adherence to One Tongue. The Oaths of Strasbourg of 842, as they came to be called, occurred just after such a transition point. Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald, both kings in the Carolingian dynasty, swore one oath in two languages in the presence of their troops, promising to unite their interests. The text of the Oaths is widely considered the first document in Old French and certainly the first in both Old French and Teutonic, or Old German. Each leader took the oath and communicated it to his soldiers in the language of the followers of the other—Ludwig the German in lingua romana and Charles the Bald in lingua teudisca—each presumably spoke both languages. The two languages have been considered a sure sign that some of the brothers’ troops did not understand both tongues. They reveal a moment of contact when the differences between the Frankish tongues of their subjects had evolved so far as to become unintelligible to the rank and file of the opposing sides. The warriors in the field might not have participated in the pact had they understood it. The evolution of the two languages as apparently mutually exclusive in the two portions of the empire, the Germany of Ludwig the German and the France of Charles the Bald, respectively, suggests that a fairly advanced stage of differentiation between the German and the French parts of the former Carolingian Empire had already been reached and that only for the brother kings would the use of two languages represent a means for communication rather than a barrier.

Yielding to Translation. The other instance in which the move toward translation might be seen to be an impediment to communication is when translation becomes a crutch for those who might otherwise learn to speak or at least read the language of the other land. During the Middle Ages there were repeated situations in which people who spoke different languages dealt with their communication problems. The first instance occurred long before the ninth century, but its legacy lived throughout the whole of the medieval period: the loss of a command of the Greek language. Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew were the earliest languages of the Christian faith, but Greek and its unique alphabet became the official language of the first uniligual versions of the Bible. It was the first religious language of pan-Christendom. The completion of an acceptable Latin Biblical translation went, however, hand in hand with a different tongue’s becoming officially adopted as the language of Western Christianity. With the Latin Bible as the language textbook of medieval rudimentary education, the study of Greek was virtually abandoned in Western Europe. The linguistic isolation of the West was profound, and the ensuing schism of the Western Church from the Eastern turned not in small part on their impasse in communication.

New Mind-Set. As translation was to reveal, Latin was the next universal tongue to be neglected in the medieval period. The process was a slow one, however, and Latin enjoyed being the language into which most works were translated throughout the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, the lingua franca of the Church was slowly being excluded as a potentially common language. Translations of works into vernacular languages tended to impose the dialect of a translation on wider areas than its oral use encompassed. Hence, the dialects of London, Paris, and Florence began to impose themselves on England, France, and Italy, respectively. Linguistic standards were also being set through the models of vernacular language in writing.

Limited Contact. The few scholars who fought to preserve language instruction were among the most highly educated in the Middle Ages. They, perhaps more than anyone, reflected on the extent to which ignorance of a language could be a barrier to communication. Direct understanding of Muslim culture and religion, for example, was impossible for those who did not read Arabic. The Muslims had founded great universities, especially in Egypt, Baghdad, and Spain. They had built many libraries and schools for the study of Islam. They had brought the use of zero and Arabic numerals, a notation adopted from India, to their empire and made advances in algebra and geometry. Their astronomers had kept lengthy records of the heavens. Arabic scientists had studied the properties of light. They had used chemicals to make medicines, had begun performing delicate surgeries, and had written medical textbooks, including the famous Book of Healing and the Canon of Medicine, two of more than two hundred works on diseases by the early-eleventh-century scholar Avicenna.

Science in Arabic. Translation into Latin was, however, the way in which most Arabic works were appreciated in western medieval Europe. Two Muslim studies on the eye were translated and remained in use as reference works until the eighteenth century. Due to the innovative content of many of the works, Latin words did not exist to convey accurate meaning. Arabic names therefore were often transliterated into Latin. Names of many stars, visible to the naked eye, and technical terms for astronomical configuration points, such as zenith and nadir, are examples. By 1202 Arabic numerals were adopted in Europe, whereupon despite some setbacks they slowly replaced the clumsy Roman numerals in use then.

Communicating between People. Despite what people today regard as a tremendous lack of technology, medieval people had the means to communicate and much substance to convey. While it may be misleading to speak of manuscripts in terms of books, since the medieval practice was to bind more than one work within a single volume and call that a book, libraries held books for the literate, and oral communication flourished in Church, countryside, and town. The unspoken languages of gestures, rituals, symbols, gifts, and artistic representations also provided many avenues of communication in the Middle Ages. It is, perhaps, the efforts of medieval Europeans to communicate that gave the greatest color to their culture in terms of written works, art, and music. Communication certainly was the catalyst to much of their local travel and even to some of their greatest explorations.