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You wrote:

"My chronology was a bit skewed; I was thinking more in terms of surviving manuscripts. But my main point holds. That runic inscriptions existed, that Ulfilas translated the Bible into old Gothic etc. are exceptions that prove my rule. The Gothic of Ulfilas's Bible was no longer being spoken in the 8thc."

Do we know that? The Visigothic kingdom of Spain fell only in 711 for instance.

"In the situation that obtained in Charlemagne's empire in the late 8th, Latin simply was the only literary written language."

Yes, but EUROPE was not made up of only Charlemagne's empire.

"Of course people could write down what they heard in German, using Latin alphabet, mimicking strictly phonetically how the words sounded. But they did not employ the Germanic languages as written languages."

Then we are back to denying the existence of Beowulf?

"Did an orally composed poem get written down occasionally? Yes. But the "occasionally" part only shows that the literary written Language was Latin. Did some homilies preached orally get written down? Yes for preservation. Did they circulate as a means of putting them in the hands of non-Latin reading public? Absolutely not."

The only reason to preserve in the Middle Ages was "to use". If it was written in the native language then it was meant to be read by such readers. You seem to forget Alfred the Great and his translations. Again, you are essentially denying that any of that happened.

"When something was written down, like the Heliand, it was so that a Latin-literate priest or possibly a minimally Latin-literate nobleman could take it with him and "read" it, employing the literacy skills he had learned in Latin."

But that is irrelevant. Th epoint is that it was written in the vernacular for vernacular readers. The idea that it was written in the vernacular for people who didn't really read the vernacular but then could stumble through it because of their knowledge of Latin letters is simply a stretch to say the least.

"Ulfilas's Bible functioned in the same way. It was not a mass-market paperback Bible for the Gothic-reading public."

Uh, HELLO! NOTHING was really mass market in the fourth century. No one claimed it was. Now you are mischaracterizing what I said. Criticize me if you will, but at least criticize what I actually wrote.

"It was a text for preachers to employ as they, thinking in Greek, preached and evangelized among the Goth-speaking pagans."

I think that is essentially true, but then again I never brought up Ulfilias and you are ignoring what I did bring up.

"In short, no one able to read a Germanic written text (Anglo-Saxon, Saxon, Frankish) was able to read that text without first having learned to read in Latin."

And again, that is simply false. The Vikings are perfect proof of that -- before and after their conversion !

"Most people, having learned Latin, did their reading in Latin and that was that, translating as necessary into the vernacular. For some purposes, writing something down in the vernacular made sense and it was done, but it was done by those already literate in Latin."

Can you prove that the author of Beowulf knew Latin? And Ulfilas knew Greek and not Latin as far as we know. And how is it that we know of the southern French peasants who read books in the local dialects and were only shepherds with no formal schooling in the fifteenth century?

"This meant that for the most part, monks and clerics who knew Latin did what reading of such occasional vernacular texts as existed. Your average Joe German Peasant who was illiterate never learned solely to read German. This was true well into the high Middle Ages. In the 12th century things began to change. In the late Middle Ages, yes, direct vernacular reading was taught, beginning first with people engaged in commerce, for pragmatic reasons--not peasants."

And again, you are ignoring what we know from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

"You can see this in the vernacular manuscripts that have survived--they spell German words in phonetic ways that vary depending on the dialect. In Bavarian manuscripts what would be spelled Kirche in modern German might be spelled Kirchghe--the writer hears an intense guttural "ch" with his ear and mimics it with Latin letters. The same word in North Germany manuscript will be Kirk or perhaps Kirck" because the "ch" is pronounced in a clipped way there. This shows that people learned letters and thought letters with minds shaped and by Latin literacy."

Nice, but irrelevant. No one here was questioning the Latin influence. The problem is you are ignoring evidence -- completely ignoring evidence -- for the argument I actually made and are merely creating a strawman of what I didn't argue for.

"That's why those poets who began to write in English or Italian or German or French in the 12thc were significant. They were responding to a growing lay demand for literature in the vernacular. Lower nobles in most cases would not have been Latin literate though in the more established Gallo-Roman areas, many probably were. But no one was Frankish-literate without first having been literized via Latin."

Again, DUH! And now can you actually deal with what I said rather than ignore the argument?