The Literary and Cultural Start of French With Respect to Latin
We can trace the roots of what we properly term nowadays as French literature as far back as the end of the 10th century. The written documents a researcher is going to unearth will more or less date back to this or the succeeding century. The French language of the time was anything but a pure form of the modern French – indicates French Translation to English of those texts. 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. The term France in its modern meaning was appropriated by denizens of the land who for centuries had been composing a range of literary forms; but ironically as far back as the 9th century or even later the language of the court was Latin as most literary historians suggest. In spite of this fact though, placing such great importance in the Latin impact on the French language would be too bold. 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. As early as the 7th century, the Lingua Romana, as distinguished from Latin and from Teutonic dialects, is mentioned and this Lingua Romana would be of necessity used for legal proceedings. It was recently when these documents were translated from Latin into French by a Legal Document Translation service. A few written signs have remained from the time when French was a young language. They can be traced back to the period between the 9th and 11th centuries and are of various nature. The first such documents accounts for an alliance called the Oaths of Strassburg between Louis the German and Charles the Bald.
Speaking about the Germans, they unfortunately failed to become accustomed – in comparison to their Scandinavian neighbors and their English cousins who were heavily influenced by Latin – to the new literary order imposed by France and Italy on Europe. The aspiration to stay clean from alien influences wrongly accused of being harmful underlies the German literary tradition. Despite this, 18th century English literature and early 20th century Scandinavian literature which were also thought to have a negative effect on the German tradition were greeted as entirely positive. The Reformation is perhaps one of the most important periods in German literary history. Germany’s most famous man of letters in his time was Martin Luther. His work necessitates more research than anyone else’s activity not only in terms of literary achievement, but also for his religious enlightenment because the intellectual capacity of the time was unthinkable without him. The work that Luther should be most closely associated with is the Bible – its translation changed completely the German language and culture. With his German Translation of the Bible Martin Luther added new principles to the art of translation and encourage its translation into English of the King James Bible. It was important that the dialect into which the Bible was translated should be comprehensible over as wide an area as possible of the German-speaking world. The language of the Saxon chancery thus became, thanks to Luther’s initiative, the basis of the modern High German literary language.