Marginalia kot začetek pisane besede: Glosas Emilianenses

Abstract

The Glosas emilianenses are notes in Latin and in a Romance language dating from the eleventh century, written by an anonymous monk between the lines and in the margins of a Latin manuscript known as Codex Aemilianensis 60 to explicate syntactic, morphological, and semantic difficulties in understanding the original. The document was named after its place of origin, a monastery in the village of San Millan de la Cogolla, known as “the cradle of Castilian.” The non-Latin Romance glosses are believed to be the first written accounts of the language that later evolved into present-day Castilian or Spanish; they are therefore invaluable historical, linguistic, literary, and cultural material. The place and time of the origin of the glosses are not a coincidence, but a consequence of particular historical circumstances in the Iberian Peninsula. The Moorish invasion in 711 AD destroyed the Visigothic Kingdom and constrained the development of Christian culture, confining it to two independent cores in the north. The ninth century therefore saw the establishment of the County of Castile emerging from the two cores as the predecessor of the Kingdom of Castile (1065). Due to turbulent historical events, the place was populated by people from various adjacent and rather distant countries, thus making the spoken language a mixture of several varieties of Vulgar Latin, Mozarabic, and Navarrian (Basque) elements. All of these features are reflected in the glosses in the San Millan manuscript. Therefore, it is difficult for linguists to name the variant of the Romance language the glosses were written in: “the Riojan dialect,” “a vernacular Castilian-Riojan dialect of the second half of the eleventh century displaying tendencies towards learned Latin,” or “a Riojan dialect with elements more common to neighboring dialects (Aragon, Navarrian, Leon, and Mozarabic) than to Castilian.” However, because the San Millan glosses also include elements of Castilian (after all, they are “the first written account of something that is not Latin, but rather similar to Castilian”), and because they were produced in the area during the period formally established as Castilian, they became known as “the first written accounts of Castilian.” The Latin script in the glosses follows the manner of pronouncing the vernacular, but the written account is understandably inaccurate and inconsistent. In addition, there is insufficient material available to systematically identify the “Castilian” of the eleventh century. Nevertheless—or perhaps precisely for this reason—the glosses are a challenge for linguists, who still have not succeeded in working out all the lexical, phonetic, morphological, and syntactic issues raised by the text. This also applies to the longest and most informative gloss, number 89.