Foreign language

 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/

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