In July I set a camera up to test a dictation tool and needed something to read into it. What I wrote turned out to be the argument itself, so here it is in the words I said:

For 2000 years, if you wanted to talk to power, you learned Latin. The scribes had the syntax. Everyone else just had a voice. Code was the same deal — a priestly language, gatekept by semicolons. But something shifted: the machine learned our tongue before most of us learned its. Voice is vernacular now. I don’t translate myself into the computer’s language anymore. It translates itself into mine.

The gate was always the syntax

Start with the Latin. The claim is not a figure of speech. In most of European history, three things could change your life. All three ran in a tongue almost no one spoke at home. Worship ran in Latin. Learning ran in Latin. Law ran in Latin.

The law case is the sharpest. You can date it. In England, court cases could be argued aloud in English from 1362. But the written record stayed in Latin and Law French for another three and a half centuries. That is the writs, the pleadings, the judgments, the part that really binds you. English became the required language of the courts only when the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act took effect in 1733.1 For four hundred years, an English farmer could stand in an English court, speak English, and lose. He would never be able to read the sentence written against him.

The same law gives you the cleanest picture of what a syntax gate is worth. Under benefit of clergy, a man accused of a felony could escape the gallows. He had to prove he was a cleric. And over time the proof shrank into a reading test. Recite a passage of scripture, usually the opening of Psalm 51, in Latin.2 The Latin was not beside the point. It was the whole exam. Knowing one line of a dead language was, quite literally, the difference between hanging and not hanging. That is why it got the nickname the neck verse. People memorised it by sound without grasping a word. That tells you they understood the system perfectly.

Learning worked the same way. It held out longest. Newton published the Principia in 1687 in Latin. The first English translation did not appear until 1729, forty-two years later, two years after he was dead.3 The laws of motion existed in England for two generations before they existed in English.

Now put a number under it. In the diocese of Norwich in the late 1500s, about 61% of men could not write their own names. Among labourers, not being able to read stayed above 90% into the 1600s.4 That is plain English reading and writing, the low bar. Latin sat somewhere far below that. It lived inside a class of clerks, lawyers and priests. They read the official language on everyone else’s behalf.

That is the scribal class. And the key thing about it is that it was not a plot. Someone had to hold the syntax. The documents were real. The language was hard. Holding it was a full-time job. A scribal class forms wherever a needed language is costly to learn. It does not need bad intent to end up standing between you and the thing you need.

What “vernacular” actually meant

Today “vernacular” tends to mean casual, or slangy, or plain. In history it meant something much more exact. It meant the tongue you already had, when the official language shut you out. Not a cut-down Latin. Not a beginner’s version. The tongue you were already fluent in before anyone offered you a choice.

Dante is the founding case. And he is funny about it. Around 1304 he wrote De vulgari eloquentia, an argument that the Italian vernacular deserved the same standing as Latin. And he wrote that argument in Latin, because that was who he had to win over.5 Then he did the real thing. He wrote the Divine Comedy in Tuscan, the tongue spoken in the street. It was about God and hell and the shape of the universe. Until then those subjects belonged to the clerical language by default.

Two centuries later the same move came to scripture. This time the press was there. Luther’s German New Testament came out in September 1522, in a run of three to five thousand copies. It sold out fast enough that a second edition ran in December.6 His full German Bible came in 1534. By then more than two hundred thousand copies of the New Testament had gone out. In England the cost was higher. William Tyndale’s English New Testament was printed on the continent in 1526. It was smuggled in, hidden in bales of cloth. He was strangled and burned in 1536.7 Seventy-five years later, fifty-four scholars put together the King James Bible of 1611, with royal approval. And about 83% of its New Testament wording is Tyndale’s. The state killed the man and then took up his sentences.

The press is what made all of it cheap, not just brave. Book output in Europe had grown at about 1% a year for centuries as a hand-copying trade. After the middle of the 1400s it climbs steeply. And the cause historians point to is falling prices and rising literacy feeding each other.8 A vernacular Bible is worthless if a copy costs a year’s wages. Luther’s 1522 Testament cost one guilder. That is about two months’ pay for a schoolmaster. Brutal, and still perhaps a hundred times cheaper than what a scriptorium would have charged.

None of this killed Latin quickly. The Catholic mass was still said in Latin worldwide until 1963. That is when the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy opened the door to vernacular languages.9 That is four hundred and forty years after Luther. Gates close slowly.

The translation now runs the other way

Code is the same shape, squeezed into one lifetime. The ideas in most programs are not hard. Add these up. If this, then that. Send it there. What is hard is the syntax. The exact spelling, the brackets, the semicolon that must be there and the one that must not. Miss it and the machine does not do a worse job. It refuses. That is a gate made only of form. And it made a scribal class right on cue. There are about 47 million developers in the world,10 against roughly eight billion people. Under one percent of us hold the syntax.

People have been trying to widen that gate for seventy years. And they all pushed the same way. Grace Hopper’s FLOW-MATIC in the late 1950s, and COBOL after it, swapped maths symbols for English words on purpose. Business customers were not at ease with notation.11 It made code look like English. It did not stop being a syntax you had to learn exactly. Every step since has moved the gate a bit closer to you. And each one left it a gate. Friendlier languages. Better error messages. Visual editors.

What changed is direction, not distance. Natural-language models did not make code easier to learn. They made learning it a choice. The translation runs the other way now. The machine learned our tongue before most of us learned its.

What happens to the scribes

The prediction follows. It is worth saying flat out, not hinting at it. The scribal class loses its monopoly. Not its skill. Not its use. Its monopoly. That is the spot of being the only route between an ordinary person and a machine that does what they meant.

But be honest about the analogy. It cuts both ways. The printing press did not get rid of scribes. It moved them. In 1492 Johannes Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim, wrote De laude scriptorum, “In praise of scribes”. He defended hand-copying as holy work that printing could not replace. He had it printed, in 1494, because that was how you got read now.12 He also grew his monastery’s library from about 40 volumes to 2,000, most of them printed. He was not a fool fighting the future. He could see the craft being redrawn around him. He was arguing about which part of it was the point. The copying went away. But the editing stayed. So did the correcting, the choosing of what was worth copying at all, and the huge new trade of running presses. Those took in the people. What happened to any single scribe is a truly open question, and always was. Nobody gets to promise you that the new jobs land on the same people as the old ones.

The receiving end does the decoding

Here is why this belongs beside the anatomy and not in an essay of its own about computers.

Everything above in this piece has been about a channel. A voice is a pattern pressed into air by a shape you control. Every language, fast-sounding or slow, pushes about 39 bits per second through that channel.13 And prosody — pitch, timing, breath, hesitation — carries a second stream of information that text just drops on the floor.

For the whole history of computing, you did the encoding work. You took an inner state. You turned it into the machine’s syntax by hand. Then you typed it in a form the machine could parse with no effort at all. All the loss happened on your side of the wire.

Think of what became of travel adapters. Mains electricity comes in two rough families. One is around 100–127 volts. The other is around 220–240 volts. For decades, crossing between them meant carrying a converter. It was a heavy brick whose only job was to make you fit the wall.14 Then power supplies became universal input. The label on your charger says 100–240 V. The conversion happens inside the device. The mismatch did not go away. The work of settling it moved from the traveller to the receiver.

That is just what a voice interface is. The first time in this whole story that the receiving end does the decoding. That is what makes it vernacular in the precise historical sense. Not a simpler language offered to you. It is the one you already had, finally accepted.

The first sound you ever made was not chosen. It was the one your anatomy made easiest, a closed mouth and an open jaw, and the adults around you decided it meant them. Everything after that has been learning to shape air on purpose — vowels, then words, then a sung phrase held longer than felt possible, then, for a while, a language of brackets and semicolons that your body had no natural way to produce at all. The machine meeting you where your voice already was is not a new capability so much as the end of a long detour.

References

  1. Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730 (in force 25 March 1733), and the earlier Pleading in English Act 1362. Wikipedia

    “All writs, process, pleadings, rules, orders, indictments, records, judgments, and all proceedings whatsoever in any courts of justice within England… shall be in the English tongue and language only, and not in Latin or French.” ↩

  2. Benefit of clergy, Wikipedia — the Latin reading test, usually Psalm 51, that transferred a felony case from the secular courts to the ecclesiastical ones. The literacy test was abolished in 1706; the privilege itself survived until 1827. ↩

  3. Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), written in Latin; first English translation by Andrew Motte, 1729. Wikipedia ↩

  4. Historical literacy is usually measured by whether people could sign their names — a very low bar. In the diocese of Norwich in the late sixteenth century about 61% of men could not; among day labourers in northern England illiteracy remained above 90% around 1600. Our World in Data: Literacy ↩

  5. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1304–1307), written in Latin, arguing that the Italian vernacular deserved the dignity given to Latin. Left unfinished at one and a half books. Wikipedia ↩

  6. Luther Bible, Wikipedia. The September Testament of 1522 ran to roughly 3,000–5,000 copies at one guilder each, about two months’ salary for a schoolmaster; a second edition followed in December. The complete Bible was printed by Hans Lufft at Wittenberg in 1534, by which time over 200,000 copies of the New Testament had sold. ↩

  7. William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), Wikipedia — first English New Testament translated from the Greek, printed on the continent in 1526 and smuggled into England; strangled and burned as a heretic on 6 October 1536. Estimates put roughly 83% of the King James New Testament (1611) as Tyndale’s wording. ↩

  8. Eltjo Buringh & Jan Luiten van Zanden, Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries, The Journal of Economic History 69(2), 2009. Cambridge Core

    Book production grew at roughly one percent a year across the medieval period; the sharp rise after the mid-fifteenth century is attributed to lower book prices and rising literacy. ↩

  9. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, promulgated 4 December 1963, which extended the use of vernacular languages in Catholic worship. Wikipedia ↩

  10. SlashData, Global Developer Population Trends 2025 — an estimated 47.2 million developers worldwide, of whom about 36.5 million are professionals. SlashData ↩

  11. FLOW-MATIC, Wikipedia — developed under Grace Hopper at Remington Rand for the UNIVAC I between 1955 and 1959, the first programming language to express operations in English-like statements rather than mathematical symbols, and a direct ancestor of COBOL. ↩

  12. Johannes Trithemius, De laude scriptorum manualium (“In Praise of Scribes”), written 1492, printed 1494. As abbot of Sponheim he grew the monastery library from about 40 volumes to 2,000, many of them printed, and described printing itself as a marvellous art. Wikipedia · Internet Archive ↩

  13. Christophe Coupé, Yoon Mi Oh, Dan Dediu & François Pellegrino, Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche, Science Advances 5(9), 2019. DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

    “We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually.” ↩

  14. Mains electricity by country, Wikipedia. Mains supply splits into roughly 100–127 V and 220–240 V systems; modern switch-mode power supplies are rated for universal input across 100–240 V, so the conversion happens in the device rather than in a separate converter. ↩