How would someone learn a
foreign language in High Middle Ages?
enviado hace 6 años por
Perdoski
Specifically interested in the
Crusades (Northern and the ones for Jerusalem) and how crusaders interacted
with the local populace.
Basically the same way you’d
learn a language now - at school, reading texts in another language, studying
with tutors, and immersion in another culture. Opportunities were limited
though, and you’d probably have to be a priest or another member of the church,
so your interest in other languages would be mostly religious in nature. But in
places where more than one language/culture existed, it was much more likely
that more people would know two or more languages.
Studying different languages
goes all the way back to the late antique/early medieval period, but mostly for
religious purposes and only on a limited scale - so for example, Jerome learned
Hebrew and Greek in order to translate the Bible into Latin. Early medieval
monasteries also attempted to keep up the study of Hebrew and Greek. Greek
began to be studied again under the Carolingians when there was a bit more
contact with the Byzantine Empire, and then much later in the 14th and 15th
centuries when Greek scholars moved west after the fall of Constantinople.
For Arabic, the place to be
was Spain. As early as the tenth century, people went to Spain to study. One
notable example was Gerbert of Aurillac, who later became Pope Sylvester II. He
studied in both Christian and Muslim areas of Spain, and he may have even
introduced Arabic numerals to Europe
In the 12th century the centre
of Muslim and Christian education in Spain was Toledo, and there was a
translation school there translating Arabic texts into Latin. They mostly dealt
with mathematical and scientific stuff, but they also made the first Latin
translations of the Qur’an. Similarly there was a school of translators in medieval
Sicily, which had even more languages than Spain - Greek, Latin, Arabic, and
vernacular Sicilian and French.
I don’t know much about the
Baltic and the Northern Crusades, but I can go into a little more detail about
how different languages were taught/used in the crusader states in the Holy
Land. There was a famous incident on the First Crusade where a crusader named
Herluin acted as an interpreter between the Turks and the other crusaders at
Antioch. How did that guy know Turkish? We don’t know, but there were
apparently multilingual people early on.
In the crusader states, plenty
of languages were spoken there long before the crusaders arrived. The crusaders
observed that people spoke or read Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian,
Coptic, Aramaic, and then they added at least French and Italian to the list.
Most people probably didn’t learn numerous languages since each community
mostly kept to itself, but some crusaders did attempt to learn Arabic at least.
An example of Reginald of Sidon, who negotiated with Saladin for the surrender
of Sidon in 1187 - the story goes that he told his troops to surrender in Arabic,
so Saladin would understand him, but then told them in French to keep fighting.
But in another case, Reynald of Chatillon, who was captured and executed by
Saladin in 1187, needed an interpreter to communicate. Reynald had actually
been in prison for almost 20 years before that, and in all that time he never
bothered to learn any other language.
“Had we been given the chance
to walk through the bustling markets and streets of thirteenth-century Acre, we
would have been struck by the great variety of languages used. Other than
French, which was the dominant language spoken in the city, these would have
included Provençal, various Italian and German dialects, English, Arabic and
Greek…the composite character of the Latin East’s population and its mosaic-like
structure resulted in a plurilingual situation in which different linguistic
communities shared a given territory with only a small number of people serving
as intermediaries.” (Jonathan Rubin, Intellectual Activity and Intercultural
Exchanges in Frankish Acre (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pg. 62)
The network of intermediaries
was already pretty ancient when the crusaders arrived. The had a Latin word for
an interpreter, “interpres”, but they also borrowed an Arabic word that they
pronounced “dragoman”.
“This title is a corruption of
the Arabic tarjuman - or interpreter…From the first, the Frankish lords would
have needed interpreters to transmit their commands to their Arab villagers;
and there already existed an established officer, the mutarjim...” (Jonathan
Riley-Smith, “Some lesser officials in Latin Syria”, The English Historical
Review 87 (1972), pg. 15)
So it usually wasn’t necessary
for crusaders or anyone else to learn other languages, since there were already
so many interpreters who could speak for them.
In the 13th century and
afterwards there was a more concerted effort to learn Arabic and other
languages, both in Europe and the crusader states. This was mostly by the new
monastic order, the Dominicans, who wanted to learn languages in order to
preach to non-Christians. They were more like modern missionaries, learning
languages to preach and translate the Bible, etc. So they would learn Arabic,
for example, to argue about doctrine with Muslim scholars, but they also acted
as diplomats and ambassadors to people further away, like the Mongols, so they
were learning central Asian languages as well.
So learning languages was
largely a church initiative, for diplomatic and missionary purposes, unless you
were in a part of the medieval European world where many cultures were living
together, like Spain, Sicily, or the crusader states, where there would
probably be a small class of interpreters and maybe some schools working on
translating literature.
Some further reading:
Charles Burnett, Arabic into
Latin: The Translators and Their Intellectual and Social Context (Farnham,
2009).
Albrecht Classen,
Multilingualism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (De Gruyter, 2016)
Laura Morreale and Nicholas
Paul, The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading
Mediterranean (Fordham University Press, 2018)
Link
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cmskws/how_would_someone_learn_a_foreign_language_in/
