5:30pm (GMT)
Nora Berend (Cambridge)
How did people who spoke different languages talk to each other? My paper will examine the evidence of medieval texts, including stories of direct communication in the medieval kingdom of Hungary. My sources include travel accounts, chronicles, and vocabulary lists. These sources convey real and invented interaction and communication between various groups living in the kingdom. I will focus in particular on exchanges between Hungarian speakers and German speakers. How was communication represented in the texts and what can we learn from them about the mechanisms of real interactions? Did communication contribute to more friendly, or at least less hostile, relations?