Se pareba boves alba pratalia araba et albo versorio teneba et negro semen seminaba He led oxen in front of him ploughed white fields And held a white plough And sowed black seed There are a few complications to the interpretation of the first line.

The translation above is based on assuming that ⟨pareba⟩ is a form of the verb parare 'lead', ⟨se⟩ is a reflexive pronoun (corresponding to Classical Latin sibi), and the subject of the sentence (which is left implicit) is the writer or scribe.

[3] The placement of the word ⟨se⟩ at the start of the sentence violates an observed generalization about the position of proclitic pronouns in medieval Romance languages, called the Tobler-Mussafia law.

It has been variously argued to be a Latin text with vernacular influence,[3] a conscious representation of a Veronese "volgare",[7] or a Latin-Romance hybrid (that is, a text written in a style that may have intentionally simplified or modified the conventions of written Latin to bring it closer to the spoken vernacular language).

[10] Though initially hailed as the earliest document in a vernacular of Italy in the first years following Schiapparelli's discovery, today the record has been disputed by many scholars from Bruno Migliorini to Cesare Segre and Francesco Bruni, who have placed it at the latest stage of Vulgar Latin, though this very term is far from being clear-cut, and Migliorini himself considers it dilapidated.