I want to take a second to recap. I don’t think I’ve done a sufficient job of telling you how the mechanized printing press, movable type, printed books and pamphlets changed everything in Western culture. For instance, the Protestant Reformation happened because of Martin Luther’s pamphlets. That’s just for starters.
Okay, maybe that’s not actually a line from Don Quixote…
The regional variations or dialects of Latin emerged as distinct languages because they’d been printed in those early books. Printing lent respectability to the romance languages. Before those early books were printed, you probably thought of yourself as some yokel grunting out the local version of Latin mixed with whatever backwoods patois (PA-twah) your great-grandparents spoke. After they were printed, suddenly you were speaking the language of Dante or Chaucer or Luther or Cervantes. If those big shots thought your language were good enough to use in a printed book, there must be something worthy about it.
Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.
Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.
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