Distant Power on French Language
The 11th century is the starting point for researching what is now comfortably termed French literature, if one has decided to conduct a study of it. It is from this or the following century that most of the texts one is going to discover will refer to. The French language of the time was anything but a pure form of the modern French – indicates French Translation to English of those texts. However, it will be right to claim that as early as the 12th century French, as a set of grammatical and lexical rules, had become a language of frequent and variable use. For many centuries previous to this, literature had been composed in France, or by natives of that country, using the term France in its full modern acceptation; but until the 9th century, if not later, the written language of France, so far as we know, was Latin; and despite the practice of not a few literary historians, it does not seem reasonable to notice Latin writings in a history of French literature. A version like this is probably interested in the relics of the French language when it used to be named Lingua Romana Rustica only much later it become independent enough to find its place as a language. A language bearing the name of Lingua Romana, which was different from Latin and Teutonic, appeared in the 7th century and lawyers would frequently use it from then on. More recently, these documents have been translated from Latin to French by a Legal Translation Service 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 oldest gives us the oaths interchanged at Strassburg in 842 between Charles the Bald and Louis the German.
As for the Germans they found themselves unable – compared to their Scandinavian neighbors, or their somewhat Latinized English cousins – to resist the literary and cultural influence that originated in France and Italy and invaded ruthlessly the whole of Europe. Rather, their literary history has been a struggle for independent expression, a constant warring against outside forces, even when the latter – like the influence of English literature in the 18th century and of Scandinavian at the close of the 19th – were hailed as friendly and not hostile. The Restoration highlights the most influential works in the literary history of Germany. Martin Luther, Germany’s greatest man in this age of intellectual new-birth, demands a larger share of attention in a survey of literature than his religious and ecclesiastical activity would in itself justify, if only because the literary activity of the age cannot be regarded apart from him. Instead of Latin Luther translated the Bible into German which influenced tremendously both the church and the whole German culture. Luther thoroughly realized that a German to English Translation of the Bible would earn him immortality so he made all possible effort so that he could produce an entirely German work. The Bible was translated into a German variant spoken at the Saxon chancellery and it was supposed to widely understood by the whole German nation. In this way the dialect Luther used for his translation of the Bible evolved into the modern German language known as Hochdeutsch.