Ninth-century Christian youths abandoned Latin for elegant Arabic letters
Evidence
The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or Apostles? Alas! all talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 501
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Echoes the lexicostatistics/elite language replacement dynamics seen in chapters on Syria and Mesopotamia — a numerical claim (a thousand-to-one) doing rhetorical work.
- SEED: Angle: language loyalty as elite-status marker — the exact same ‘a thousand fluent in the prestige tongue for every one in the ancestral one’ pattern as a metric of cultural dominance, applied to modern diaspora or colonial contexts.
- ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘Grafting & Growth’ in that it shows a culture’s prestige literature absorbing and surpassing influence — but more directly parallels the immodesty piece’s theme of cultural anxiety channeled into complaints about others’ self-indulgence.