354 



LANGUAGES. 



William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, introduced it into England, just 

 as Eobert G-uiscard, his contemporary, did into Sicily and Naples. William 

 decreed that the laws of England should be written in French that is to say, 

 in Norman, which was merely a dialect of the Romance language and that 

 French should be taught in the schools before Latin. At Naples, according 

 to an historian of the time, whoever was ignorant of French was held in very 

 poor esteem at this essentially French court. One of the articles (No. 38) in 

 the Laws of William the Conqueror shows what progress had been made by 

 the Romance language at the end of the eleventh century to arrive at being 

 transformed into the Langue d'Oil: "Si home enpuisuned altre, seit occis, u 

 pennariablement essille. Jo jettai vos choses por cause de mort, et de 90 ne 

 me poez emplaider : car leist a faire damage a altres par pour de mort, quant 

 par el ne pot eschaper." 



The Romance, otherwise the Neo-Latin, languages are French, Provencal, 

 Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Roumanic. They were formed at the game 

 time, but under different influences with regard to pronunciation, and they 

 are, in truth, all of them Latin issuing from different throats and looked at 

 in different lights. It was poetry which, when emerging from the cradle of 

 chivalry, inaugurated the creation of modern languages, for grammarians and 

 rhetoricians do not make languages ; all they can do is to superintend the 

 best use of its wealth when a language has been enriched by the efforts of its 

 poets aad writers who employ it. Moreover, the two currents which carried 

 the national idiom, without resistance and without admixture, into its two 

 principal beds, the Oc language and the Oil language, had long been manifest. 

 The one was the language of the poets, the other that of the troubadours and 

 the trouveres, and the two languages, or rather the two dialects, both acquired 

 simultaneously their relative perfection. The first literary records of the 

 Provencal language are the poem of Boethius, " The Mystery of the Wise 

 and of the Foolish Virgins," and several other poems anterior to William IX., 

 Duke of Aquitaine (1071 1127), who has often been cited as the earliest of 

 the troubadours. The first memorials of the French language, after the oath 

 of 842 quoted above, are the Cantilena of St. Eulalie, the two poems in the 

 library of Clermont dedicated to St. Leger and to the Passion, and the " Life 

 of St. Alexis," which was composed about 1050. Next come the warlike 

 epodes, called chansons de gcste or romans de chevalerie, and it was in this way 

 that the Homeric epodc was one of the first inspirations of the Greek language. 



