The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[MarcoP]

The temptation to label as “errors” cultural expressions that are different from our modern point of view is always hard to resist. We are so used to Latin as a frozen, dead language, that we cannot imagine that in the middle ages it was still very much alive and subject to all the changes and individual variants that are typical of living languages.

Emphasis mine:

The most obvious difference in appearance between Medieval Latin and Classical Latin is in how words were spelled. Although Classical spellings were generally retained for inherited vocabulary, changes in pronunciation which had happened over the centuries — many the same as those which had led to the divergence of the everyday Romance languages from Latin and from each other — influenced the corresponding spelling of the words. Thus we often find ci before a vowel where the Classical spelling would have been ti (e.g racio for ratio), and the diphthongs ae and oe which had come to be pronounced the same as the simple e sound are often written e. (We also find as a result examples where ae or oe are written where the expected spelling would be just e.) Other alternations in spelling arising from changes in pronunciation are the interchange of b and v, the insertion or deletion of h, the use of single consonants for double ones (and vice versa), and the substitution of y for i. Sometimes spellings were also influenced by the pronunciation of a word in the everyday local language related to or derived from the Latin word (or thought to have been so).

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