language: Europe 595 ble, known only through the Vulgate version translated by Saint Jerome (ca 347–419 or 420), was originally written in Latin Additionally, until the 16th century Renaissance Latin remained the learned language of schools and universities Scholars and students from every part of Europe could communicate in Latin—hence the name Latin Quarter given to the area around the Sorbonne, the Parisian university Philosophy, theology, and the sciences were expressed only in Latin; vernacular languages were not considered noble enough to address serious issues Translations of these texts from Latin were rare before the 14th century After the Great Schism of 1054, when the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church separated, access to and knowledge of Greek were very limited in western Europe; to some extent, philosophers like Plato (ca 428–347 or 348 b.c.e.) and Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) were rediscovered through Arabic translations during the 13th century, after the conquest of Constantinople by the crusaders and the contacts with the eastern world through the Crusades If there were debates about and comparisons of the three “philosophical” languages—Latin, Greek, and Arabic—they were reserved to some intellectual circles and did not have any influence on the evolution of languages in Western Europe The vernacular forms of language arose in varying manners The first languages of western Europe were of Celtic origin, but in part for religious reasons these languages were not written down In some remote regions of the empire Celtic languages, such as Gaelic and Welsh, survived Long before the fall of Rome a large movement of populations weakened the empire’s borders and brought inside the empire people who did not know Latin Pushed forward by the next wave of invaders, these people settled and founded kingdoms in regions that are now western Germany, France, Italy, Spain and North Africa The Visigoths occupied most of Aquitaine and the Iberian Peninsula, the Lombards occupied northern Italy, and the Franks occupied Belgium and northern France The Romanized populations considered these people barbarians, and the name of the society that crossed the Mediterranean to North Africa, Vandales, became synonymous with barbarian The newer populations spoke their own languages, which belonged mostly to the same subcategory of Indo-European, the Germanic languages There was relatively little interaction between these languages and Latin, although a few Germanic words entered the Latin lexicon, were given Latin declension or conjugation, and went back to enrich a new vernacular Eventually these Germanic languages and, to a lesser extent, the Scandinavian languages became dominant in Germany, most of the Netherlands and Belgium, northern Italy, and Great Britain In the fourth century the Angles and the Saxons started to push back the Celtic people toward the sea of Ireland, triggering a secondary migration wave to Ireland and Brittany These invaders spoke Germanic languages closely related to those of the Continent Indeed, Old English and Old High German are very similar France, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy had been more deeply Romanized than the rest of Europe There the basic language was Latin, not only among the elite classes but indeed throughout the whole population (Despite the Saracen presence in Spain and southern France, the Arabic influence on these areas’ languages was comparatively limited to a few hundred words at most.) This Latin, however, quickly evolved and differentiated into several languages, such as Castilian (the ancestor of Spanish), Catalan, Old French, Italian, and Old Provenỗal Old French was the name for the language spoken in France north of the Loire River; Old Provenỗal, closer to the Latin original, was spoken in the southern part of France; and between the two regions there was a so-called linguistic crescent where people spoke a mix of Old French and Old Provenỗal called Franco-Provenỗal These were the first Romance languages, so called because they stemmed from the Roman language, if not actually from Latin; Proto-Roman is the intermediary stage between Late Latin and the Romance languages of the first vernacular texts They were not unified languages but were composed of many dialects; to some extent they were closer to each other than to the modern languages that evolved Old French was especially fragmented The same could be said about the Germanic languages, where the distinction between High and Low German was mainly geographic Another twist in the repartition of European languages happened when William of Normandy became William I (r 1066–87), king of England, after winning the Battle of Hastings in 1066 The Normans were of Scandinavian origin but, having settled in Normandy during the 10th century, had adopted the local dialect of Old French They now transported it to England, and the resulting Anglo-Norman dialect was the language of the aristocracy for more than a century When English came to the fore again after a period of almost complete disappearance in written form, it was as Middle English, still a Germanic language but including a fair number of French words and Latin roots Around the 14th century dialectal differences started to fade The lexicon and morphological characteristics (inflection, for example) of the modern languages were mostly stabilized, and their syntax had grown more sophisticated, allowing them to translate nuances and complexities that until then had been better expressed in Latin Middle French and Italian, for instance, experienced an influx of Latinized forms even though the pre-Renaissance scholars tried to return to