364 THE STUDY OF FRENCH IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. 



the dark, for all the various and not unfrequently contradictory 

 Syntactical phenomena — to trace for each of these its origin and 

 its age, to recount moreover the history of their development and 

 successive alterations, their external and internal evolution — that 

 is the task every philologist and every professor of French has 

 to accomplish. It would take me too long to expand here upon 

 the part which psychology, physiology (experimental phonetics), * 

 sociology and even physics have come to play of late in linguistics, 

 which at the present day has grown almost into a kind of uni- 

 versal science. A wonderful and admirable book has been written 

 on this subject by a fellow-countryman of mine,f a book that no 

 philologist will henceforward be able to do without. 



This historical method has been universally adopted in foreign 

 universities. In Holland it was introduced and most admirably 

 inaugurated by Professor Dr. A. G. van Hamel, a romanist of 

 well-nigh European fame, one of the most elegant, if not the 

 most elegant, scholar Holland has ever possessed, and whose 

 sudden and untimely death in 1907 has left a most regrettable 

 void in the ranks of Dutch linguists, critics, and historians ; a 

 man of letters besides, whose every sentence that dropped from 

 his pen, whether in Dutch or in French, was of the most exqui- 

 site symmetry and finish. To his valuable, delightful, and instruc- 

 tive writings I am gratefully indebted for the staple of the 

 information and data wanted for this lecture. One of my 

 sincerest regrets is that it has not been my privilege and good 

 fortune to be more than an indirect pupil of his. For a romancist 

 in general and for a professor of French in particular, the his- 

 torical method is comparatively simple, in its application. He 

 has a firm basis to stand upon and an historical starting-point to 

 go ahead from, viz., Latin. Not so much classical Latin, the 

 so-called sermo eruditus or perpohtus, the written language of 

 the Romans and the language of Cicero, but popular Latin, the 

 lingua rustica, or sermo plcbcjus, pedcstris, cottidianus, castrcn- 

 sis, the spoken language of the Roman people, a language as old 

 as the " lingua latina" but living alongside of her dignified and 

 stately sister as the usual, spoken idiom, the every-day colloquial 

 parlance, the speech which the Roman legions, the representatives 

 of government from the metropolis, and the numerous colonists 

 gradually spread broadcast throughout the provinces of the 

 Empire. 



In several of these provinces as, for instance, Italy and Sicily, 

 Gaul, Iberia, Retia, Dacia, this popular idiom has gradually evolved 

 the Romance dialects, from which have sprung, via numerous suc- 

 cessive alterations, the Italian, French, Provencal, Catalonian, 

 Spanish, Portuguese, and Roumanian languages and the Reto- 

 romanic dialects. In fact, all these neo-latin languages are 

 nothing else but popular Latin differently pronounced. It is a 



* Abbe Rousselot : L'enseignement de la prononciation par la vue (La 

 Parole 1901-1903). Zund-Burguet : Mcthodc pratique, physiologique et 

 tomparee di pr&n one k> Hon francaise. Paris 1902. 



fj. van Ginniken S.I.: Principes de linguistique psychologique. 



