Societal Power and its Effects French Language
We can trace the roots of what we properly term nowadays as French literature as far back as the end of the 10th century. It is from this or the following century that most of the texts one is going to discover will refer to. French to English Translation of these manuscripts has revealed that even then, the language was not pure French that we know today. Nevertheless, scholars are rather convinced that by the end of the 11th century, French being a well-structured unity of grammar and vocabulary was the language masses of people chose to speak. For many centuries previous to this, literature had been composed in France, or by natives of that country, using the term France in its full modern acceptation; but until the 9th century, if not later, the written language of France, so far as we know, was Latin; and despite the practice of not a few literary historians, it does not seem reasonable to notice Latin writings in a history of French literature. What historians find interesting is the phase in which the French language was known as Lingua Romana Rustica and at a much later stage it gain enough independence in order to be called a language. Not earlier than the 7th century, the so called Lingua Romana, which was not to be mistaken with Latin and Teutonic, is mentioned as a language used in court cases. More recently, these documents have been translated from Latin to French by a Legal Translator service. The first written scripts in the French language, as most literary critics would claim, date back to the 9th to the 11 century and range tremendously in character and content. One of them confirms how Louis the German allied himself with Charles the Bald exchanging the Oaths of Strassburg.
Probably the one nation that did not succeed in adjusting to the new literary and cultural norms introduced by Italy and France throughout Europe were the Germans. The same cannot be said about their neighbors – the Scandinavians and the Latin-influenced English. The foreign intervention in the German literature has always motivated the Germans’ struggle against its damaging effects. Nonetheless, the Scandinavian literature of the 19th century and the English literary tradition of the 18th century were significantly thought to have a healing effect on it. The Restoration highlights the most influential works in the literary history of Germany. We cannot but refer to Germany’s most prominent scholar of the time – Martin Luther. Both a priest and theology professor, his writings had a major impact both on the church and on the German culture – notably he served as a model for Protestants priests to have the right to marry. Instead of Latin Luther translated the Bible into German which influenced tremendously both the church and the whole German culture. A German Translation of the Bible meant that Luther would become an author of immense importance. This also sped up the development of the standard German language. The Bible was translated into a German variant spoken at the Saxon chancellery and it was supposed to widely understood by the whole German nation. Thus this type of dialect owing to Luther formed the basis what today is termed as High German (or Hochdeutsch in the original language).
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