A multilingual code in practice: a case study

The text in the Appendix concerns a neighbourly dispute, settled in court on 13 August 1459 and entered in James Young’s notarial protocol book.⁶⁴ The jury passed a verdict reconciling two parties: William Forton and his wife Margaret Nairn on the one hand, and Thomas Scot on the other hand.

The entry in the notarial protocol book starts and finishes in Latin, which by this token can be seen as the main language of the passage. After the details of the case are laid out in Latin, the verdict is recorded first in Latin and then in the vernacular, after an explicit flag in wlgari â€?in the local language’, which signals both the code-switch and the new discourse element (see â€?Legal register as a complex multilingual code’ section). The respective Latin and Scots parts are not, however, monolingual. In the Latin preamble, there are several kinds of borrowings from the Germanic languages as well as instances of lexical code-switching. The words burgensis â€?burgess’ or burgo â€?burgh, town’, for instance, are early Germanic loanwords. Even the Latin gabello, describing the part of the house which is being disputed, is etymologically linked to the Old Norse term gafl â€?a gable’. These lexical items have already been incorporated into the grammatical fabric of Latin, so they can be considered borrowings. But there are also items taken over wholesale from Scots, importantly people’s surnames and names of landmarks, in this case the name of the street leichwind. These are code-switches on the lexical level, since they had not been adjusted to the Latin grammar or spelling, as was sometimes the case with first names (see â€?The level of lexicon’ section). The choice on the part of the scribe to inflect and Latinise first names but leave the surnames in their vernacular form goes hand in hand with a characteristic practice in administrative Latin-based multilingualism (see â€?The level of morphology’ section).⁶⁵ This practice is perhaps taken for granted by those familiar with it, but it merits a separate reflection in another study.

In the Scots part, there are plentiful Romance borrowings, ultimately from Latin but mediated through Old French and incorporated into the grammatical system of Scots and its orthography, e.g. debat, oblist or decret. There are a few items in that section, however, whose form strongly resembles the preceding Latin part of the same text, as in arbitro(uris) & amicable (com)po(n)itovr(is), which corresponds with arbit(ri)cintor(um) siue amicabili(um) (com)po(n)itoru(m). It seems that the compiler of this text was switching back to his comfortable Latin subcode for these specific terms. The adaptation to the vernacular lies mainly in adding an abbreviated ending to the words, which in itself can be treated as a visual diamorph since the abbreviations could have had both a Latin and a native interpretation (see �The level of morphology’ section).

All in all, this entry in the protocol book is a good example of a complex multilingual code at work, in which the notary was clearly fluent. He used Latin to begin and close off the entry but sprinkled the Latin with indispensable local references. The repetition of the verdict in both languages may indicate that the notary was anxious about the transparency of the record and chose to write it down again in Scots for his intended audience. His Scots, however, was filled with Latinate borrowings and switches so the two (sub)codes of legal discourse could not be easily disentangled.