DIVERGENCE OF THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES

The final section introduces a few of the earliest texts preserved in each of the languages, and there it stops; to go beyond would be to write the separate histories of French, Italian, and Spanish. The early documents enlighten our understanding in two ways: they illustrate through concrete, textual instances the changes described in the previous section, and at the same time they reveal the individual characteristics that have already emerged in the nascent languages. They make clear, that is, both the features that the three languages share and the ways in which they were already diverging from one another.

The texts I've chosen are far from being dreary embodiments of historical changes. They are flesh-and-blood documents of human life, varied in nature and intrinsically interesting, each with its own special story and particular setting – oaths exchanged between royal brothers, a hymn to a virgin martyr, legal proceedings over land ownership, a confessional formula, a song in praise of Creation, a primitive dictionary, a stirring epic poem. One particular source of interest is the creativity displayed by several of the writers as they struggle with the problem of representing novel sounds by means of the Latin alphabet they have inherited.

Now that the similarities among the languages have been sketched, it is the turn of the differences to stand in the spotlight. Several questions force themselves upon our attention. Why didn't Latin remain the same?