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Fourth, medieval European writing is like a riddle

If you don't want to lie down and fall asleep after you've eaten and drunk, it seems like you should write a love letter to a noble lady or lady, or write a letter to your monarch with some advice, as is customary in fairy tales...... But the question is, what written language should you use to write?

In medieval Europe, the vast majority of knights, nobles and even kings were illiterate, and there were even many people who were superstitious about swords and despised shì culture, so that all kinds of knowledge inheritance were completely in the hands of the church. Children of the nobility who wanted to learn about culture usually had to go to the monasteries of the church. And, even if you've studied in a monastery, literacy isn't very useful for real long-distance communication.

You know, in medieval Europe, the written language of most countries was not standardized, and the words and grammar were spelled out in alphabets according to individual sounds. But the problem is that even in the same language area, each place has its own dialect, and the words spelled out in the alphabet are naturally different...... A look at the documents of medieval Europe, especially in the countries of Central Europe, shows that the same word in the same language can be written in many ways by different people - this is not a clerical error, but because there is no uniform standard!

In fact, at that time, people who wrote books or notes in their own language basically only had to ensure that they and their acquaintances could understand them, and as for the others, my book was not written for them anyway, so let them ponder it as if they were cracking a code!

In short, in view of the confusion of the languages of the peoples of medieval Europe, even the Bible could not be written in the native language, but in Greek and Latin, which the average person could not read at all, and had to be left to the casual words of the gods—in fact, in the remote areas outside of Italy, many of the low-ranking clergy recruited by the Church did not know the obscure Greek and Latin at all. With the deplorable conditions of transportation in the Middle Ages, it was impossible to organize them to go to Rome en masse for training. Therefore, the missionaries in the initial pioneering stage could only reluctantly pinch their noses and lower their standards, first establish their faith in God, and wait until the conditions are available to slowly demand the rest.

For example, in England, in the early Middle Ages, when Christianity had just been introduced, there was a simplified criterion for the lowest level of missionaries recruited from among the local believers who could recite the first three lines of the Bible in Latin, and they were left to make up the rest.

So, don't be surprised if you come across a crappy priest in the Middle Ages who told a bad biblical story.

In the Age of Discovery, European missionaries adhered to a similar "principle of success". As a result, due to the huge differences in linguistic and cultural backgrounds, a bunch of strange indigenous clergy were pulled out in the Americas, Africa, and Asia...... For example, in China, some people translate the Virgin Mary as Mary Guanyin; In African churches, there are black choirs beating cowhide war drums and shouting hymns that are out of tune......

-- If Hong Xiuquan's Taiping Rebellion had been more than 1,000 years earlier, it might not have been considered a heresy by the Holy See.

To get back to the point, Lu Xun's Kong Yiji said that "there are four ways to write the Chinese character", which is regarded by modern Chinese as cumbersome and pedantic. However, in the Holy Roman Empire in medieval Europe, there were more than 20 ways to write the same word in German (the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Switzerland and many other countries were still within the territory of Germany at that time), so that written information was always on a business trip in the process of transmission, and it was also a headache to write letters to others.

In order to avoid misunderstandings, the German princes could only communicate with each other in Latin. And the French side is not much better.

Therefore, in the context of the Middle Ages, it is important not to think that because we are all German or French, there is no language barrier - even in China, Cantonese and Shanghainese often speak with each other!

-- Imagine if someone spelled out a Cantonese or Hokkien dialect in pinyin (strictly following the local tone) and then showed it to a Beijinger or a Northeasterner and asked them to read it...... What a painful scene it should be!

Until the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Middle Ages had largely ended, Martin. It was only when Luther (not the black leader in the United States, but the German who founded Protestantism) made the first possible way to standardize the grammar of the German language and translated the Bible into German for the first time.

Due to the relatively good standardization of French, coupled with the strength of modern France and the cultural outranking of Europe, until the 19th century, French was the international lingua franca of European diplomatic circles, and it was not until the 2o century that it was gradually replaced by English.

To sum up, if you wrote in your own language in the Middle Ages, there is a high risk of misunderstanding among the recipients because there is no uniform standard for writing. If the letter is written in Latin, most people cannot read it, so they have to go to the cathedral to find a senior clergy to translate......

Of course, if you are Italian, you don't have this kind of trouble - this is one of the reasons why the Renaissance was born in Italy in the first place! Otherwise, if there is no uniform rule on words and grammar, how would writers write the Decameron and the Divine Comedy?

(-- Thanks to the linguists and rhetoricians of ancient Rome for their great contribution to the standardization of Latin.) ）

Okay, now let's summarize the disadvantages of life in medieval Europe: castles were uninhabitable, meals were not to be eaten, there was no uniform linguistic norms, and correspondence was difficult......

The last point is actually not a big deal, 99% of Europeans were illiterate at that time, and there was no one in a small town who could not find a literate person (the Lawrence in "The Wolf and the Spices" just helped the illiterate villagers read a contract and got a roast chicken as a reward, which shows the preciousness of intellectuals in those years).

In short, it's better to live in a modern remote mountain village, and it seems that you can barely bear it?

Hehe, boy, you are so naïve, the matter is not over, the horrors of daily life in medieval Europe can definitely make any normal modern person crazy, where is it so easy to fool around?