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08986_Field_TCGG T751.txt
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printed form of any language at all, namely the drive for fixity
of spelling and grammar.
Febvre and Martin devote a chapter of their L’Apparition
du livre to “Printing and Languages,” pointing to “the essential
role of print in the formation and fixation of languages. Until
the beginning of the sixteenth century,” the forms of written
discourse, Latin or vernacular, “had continued to evolve after
the pattern of the spoken language.” (p. 477) Manuscript
culture had no power to fix language or to transform a
vernacular into a mass medium of national unification.
Medievalists point to the impossibility of a Latin dictionary for
the Middle Ages, simply because a medieval author felt free to
define his terms progressively by the changing contexts of his
thought. The idea of a word having a definite meaning fixed by
some lexicon simply could not have occurred to him. In the