Byzantine Legal Llang=EN-US style='font-variant: normal !important;text-transform:uppercase'>anguage: Latin, Greek, and Greek
For several centuries, Byzantine legal language remained recognizably Roman. To be sure, the language was Greek, but its technical vocabulary was Latin.
Latin adages had been taken over unchanged, although their fate in the manuscripts shows that the scribes did not really understand the Latin they were copying. Linguistically more interesting are nouns, adjectives, and verbs: they were from Latin roots but given Greek endings, so that the words could be declined and conjugated as if they were Greek.1 Originally they were written with Latin letters, including their Greek endings. Traces of Latin script are found in carefully written legal manuscripts as late as the twelfth century and even beyond, although the scribes were understandably seduced by Greek endings to write these more or less frequently with Greek characters. In the latest modern edition of Theophilus’ Paraphrasis Institutionum the editors attempted to reconstruct the oldest attainable version: they interpreted the presence of ‘at least one Latin character in at least one manuscript at that specific place’ as grounds for printing an entire word or name in Latin script according to a ‘normalized’ orthography.17 Literally every page of the edition contains such words, which stand out immediately in this Greek environment through their small Latin capitals.The Latin vocabulary was eventually replaced by exellenismoi: translations into Greek. Two examples may suffice. The Latin emptio (purchase) is found in early Byzantine legal texts as emption, with the Greek feminine article and treated as a noun of the third declension according to the pattern of roots ending with -n. In later texts, and sometimes in ‘exhellenized’ versions of older ones, emption becomes agorasia. This should not be considered indicative of substantive change in the contract of sale.
More interesting is the Latin translatio (legatorum), which figures as translation. The Latin verb is transferre, but in Byzantine legal language the verb has been formed from the root translat- and becomes trans- lateuein. The later Greek translation of the noun, which replaces translation, is metathesis.The average Byzantine citizen will have been bewildered by this highly technical vocabulary. In Justinian’s Novels it is found only rarely, but their Greek is far from simple. If we leave the question of literacy on one side, the real problem for the average citizen must have been that of ‘diglossialang=EN-US style='font-size:11.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif'>’: on the one hand there was everyday spoken Greek, of which the Greek of the New Testament gives an impression but which of course developed over the centuries, and on the other hand the purist, atticizing, literary Greek of higher written expression. The two were increasingly divergent and must have already differed considerably by the sixth century, not to mention later times.1
So far as the Greek used in legal matters was concerned, there were at least three different forms. For legislation an ornate, sometimes very complicated language was preferred, which corresponded to the rhetorical conventions of literary Byzantine Greek. The written language the jurists employed in their translations, summaries, and commentaries made use of the technical vocabulary described above and also of a much simpler, clearer syntax. This is the language of Theophilus and other antecessores. These writings are the ones that are probably of the greatest interest to the Romanist. Contact between a lawyer and his client and between a judge and the parties would be in an entirely different spoken Greek, the contemporary everyday language. It would not be an exaggeration to imagine a difference similar to that between formal Latin and the emerging vernaculars of the early Middle Ages.
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More on the topic Byzantine Legal Llang=EN-US style='font-variant: normal !important;text-transform:uppercase'>anguage: Latin, Greek, and Greek:
- Johnson David (ed). The Cambridge companion to Roman Law. Cambridge University Press,2015. — 554 p., 2015
- The Medes: Greek Historiography and Assyrian-Babylonian Evidence