Chapter 10

### Four, The Medieval European Script, Like a Riddle

After eating and drinking to one's heart's content, if one doesn't want to lie down and sleep, according to the conventions of fairy tales, it seems you should write a love letter to a noble lady or madam, or write to your sovereign with some advice... But the problem is, what written language should you use?

In medieval Europe, the vast majority of knights, nobles, and even kings were illiterate. Many even superstitiously believed in swords and despised culture, leaving the transmission of all knowledge in the hands of the Church. Noble children who wanted to learn cultural knowledge usually had to go to monasteries. Moreover, even if you had studied in a monastery, the usefulness of literacy for true long-distance communication was probably not significant.

In medieval Europe, most countries' written languages were not standardized. Words and grammar were entirely spelled out using letters based on individual pronunciation. However, even within the same language region, each place had its own dialect, and the words spelled out with letters naturally varied... A visit to a museum to see the documents from medieval Europe, especially from Central European countries, would reveal that the same word in the same language could have multiple spellings under different hands—this was not a matter of typographical errors, but rather the lack of a unified standard!

In fact, those who wrote books or notes in their native language at the time only needed to ensure that they and their acquaintances could understand them. As for others, well, since my book isn't written for them, let them decipher it like a code!

In summary, given the chaotic state of the written languages of medieval European ethnic groups, even the Bible could not be written in the local language but had to be in Greek and Latin, which ordinary people could not understand. They could only be at the mercy of the clergy's whims—indeed, in remote areas outside Italy, many low-level clergy recruited by the local churches also did not understand the obscure Greek and Latin. With the miserable transportation conditions of the Middle Ages, it was impossible to organize them for training in Rome. Therefore, the early missionaries had to lower their standards and first establish the faith in God among the people, leaving the strict requirements for later when conditions improved.

For example, in early medieval England, when Christianity had just been introduced, there was a simplified standard: the lowest-level missionaries recruited from local believers were considered qualified as long as they could recite the first three lines of the Bible in Latin, and the rest was left to their own imagination.

So, if you encounter a clumsy priest in the Middle Ages who tells the Bible stories in a muddled way, don't be surprised.

During the Age of Exploration, European missionaries also adhered to a similar "quick training principle." Due to the significant differences in language and cultural background, they once recruited a variety of bizarre indigenous clergy in America, Africa, and Asia... For example, in China, the Virgin Mary was translated as Guanyin Maria; in African churches, black choirs beat war drums and sang hymns with severe off-key notes...

—If the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement led by Hong Xiuquan had occurred a thousand years earlier, it might not have been considered heresy by the Roman Church.

Returning to the main point, when Lu Xun's Kong Yiji said, "The character for 'hui' has four ways to write it," modern Chinese people viewed it as cumbersome and pedantic. But in the Holy Roman Empire of medieval Europe, the same word in German probably had more than twenty ways to write it (at the time, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and many other countries were within the German territory), leading to frequent errors in the transmission of written information and making it very difficult to write letters to others.

To avoid misunderstandings, the German princes could only communicate in Latin. The situation in France was not much better.

Therefore, in the context of medieval Europe, do not assume that all Germans or all French people did not have language barriers—just as in China, Cantonese and Shanghainese often have difficulty understanding each other!

—Imagine if someone used pinyin to spell out the Cantonese or Fujianese dialects (strictly according to local tones) and then asked a Beijinger or Northeasterner to read it... What a headache-inducing scene that would be!

It wasn't until the mid-16th century, when the Middle Ages were basically over, that Martin Luther (not the American civil rights leader, but the German who founded Protestantism) began to standardize German grammar and translated the Bible into German for the first time.

Due to the better standardization of French and the strength and cultural dominance of France in the modern era, French remained the international language of European diplomacy until the 20th century, when it was gradually replaced by English.

In summary, if you wrote a letter in your native language in the Middle Ages, the recipient might misunderstand due to the lack of a unified writing standard. If you used Latin, most people wouldn't understand it, and you would have to find a high-ranking clergyman in a cathedral to translate it...

Of course, if you were Italian, you wouldn't have this problem—this was one of the reasons why the Renaissance began in Italy! Otherwise, how could writers have written "The Decameron" and "The Divine Comedy" without standardized words and grammar?

—Thank you to the ancient Roman linguists and rhetoricians for their great contributions to the standardization of Latin.

Well, let's summarize the drawbacks of life in medieval Europe: castles were unsuitable for living, the food didn't taste good, there were no unified language standards, and letter writing was very difficult...

The last point is not a major issue, as 99% of Europeans were illiterate in those days, and it was common for a small town to have no literate person (in "Wolf and Spice," Lawrence was given a roasted chicken as a reward for reading a contract to illiterate villagers, showing how valuable intellectuals were at the time). Instead of going through the trouble of writing a letter, it was better to find a good messenger to deliver the message directly.

In short, living in a remote mountain village in modern times might be barely tolerable?

Ha ha, young man, you are too naive. The horrors of daily life in medieval Europe would drive any normal modern person mad. It's not that easy to get away with it.

Mobile users, please visit http://m.piaotia.net

Page Flip AD Start

Page Flip AD End