IRISH monks discovered America. Irish monks taught the English to read. Now it has been discovered that Irish monks also invented written Latin - and that's not an Irish joke.
Romans may have created the language, but the unchanged written form underpinning European culture for a thousand years was devised on this island, according to Dr David Howlett, editor of the British Academy's dictionary of medieval Anglo-Latin. As a result, the Irish became cultural missionaries, wielding a European influence disproportionate to their numbers, Dr Howlett told The Irish Times.
"Colossal" is how he described its significance. "The Irish exhumed a dead language, and gave it to the world. It is as if the Indians stumbled on Chaucer and imposed Chaucerian English on the BBC."
The fact that Ireland was never in the Roman Empire - to our knowledge - and that the old Irish language was so different from the original Roman dialect is central to the thesis, Dr Howlett said. The spoken forms of developing Italian, French and Spanish interfered with, and deformed, the Latin written by continental Europeans.
Far from corrupting it, the Irish saved it by writing it with astonishing correctness, Dr Howlett told the annual Summer School of the Classical Association of Ireland last weekend in Blackrock, Co Dublin. In so doing, they devised the systematic use of rhythm and alliteration and invented a new script, new abbreviations and the convention of separating words by spaces on the page.
It was quite possible that St Brendan would have had Celtic Latin when he set sail in the sixth century across the Atlantic. Although the Book of Kells is a gospel, its illustrations are the "verbal equivalent" of a mathematically based composition which is even reflected in Celtic artwork and music, Dr Howlett said.
According to Dr Anthony Harvey of the Royal Irish Academy, who has been working with Dr Howlett and is currently preparing a Celtic Latin word list, the Irish taught this form of Latin to the English, and it spread through the schools of Charlemagne's empire, setting the standards that remained in force until the Renaissance and beyond.
