| Oaths Of Strasbourg |
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The Oaths of Strasbourg ( by Louis The German , son of Louis The Pious , and ruler of the eastern Frankish kingdom, and with his brother, Charles The Bald , ruler of the western Frankish kingdom, at Strasbourg . As well as their allegiance, Louis and Charles pledged their opposition to the Emperor, their elder brother Lothair . According to our chief source for the meeting, Nithard 's ''Life of Louis the Pious'', each king swore the Oath in the vernacular of the other's kingdom. Historians have long used this passage to illustrate the theory that, by 842, Carolingian society had begun to split into separate proto-countries with different languages and customs. Philologists are more interested in the texts of the oaths themselves; in a version of old Gallo-Romance , they are one of the first texts we have written in a Romance Language clearly distinct from Latin . In recent years, however, another theory has come to the fore: the Frankish Kingdom comprised several ''regna'' (loosely translated as ''kingdoms'') that had always maintained different customs and dialects. In support of this theory is the fact that both Charlemagne and Louis the Pious sent their sons to be raised in the ''regna'' they were meant to inherit as their primary territory, in order to guarantee the support of the people by being familiar with them and their customs. THE TEXT The full text with English translation ;Colour-coding: Below, the text in Latin is marked in red; the Romance text, in blue; the Germanic text, in green. English is in the default black. The transcriptions are slightly corrected, with abbreviations written out. The image to the right is a scan of the original text. In the transcription below, two asterisks mark the beginning and end of the text visible in this scan. In detail Let's focus on an important part of the text: Louis's oath in Romance. A continuum can be observed: Classical Latin → Late Latin → Mediaeval Romance → Modern French and Occitan. |
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