THE STUDY OF FRENCH IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. 365 



great pity, indeed, that the forms of popular Latin, which have 

 come down to us through the intermediary of inscriptions, 

 ancient glossaries, and memorandums from grammarians, are so 

 limited in number. Nothing short of a comparative study of all 

 the Romance tongues will, in certain cases, enable the investigator 

 to retrace and reconstrue a phonema, a word, a grammatical 

 form, a syntactical phenomenon as they have actually lived in 

 the mouths of the ancient Romani. In such cases he has to draw 

 his conclusions as to the nature of the tree from the nature of 

 the fruit it has borne. But the monuments of classical Latin, 

 combined with the relics of Low Latin are a precious and mate- 

 rial help to the philologist in his studies and investigations. By 

 Low Latin we understand the result of attempts at writing classi- 

 cal Latin, made by illiterate scribes of post-classical times, who, 

 knowing popular Latin as thoroughly as they were ignorant of 

 the highly synthetic language of Cicero, repeatedly made slips, 

 behind which the lingua rustica peeped round the corner. A 

 great advantage, and one which is a distinctive feature of French 

 philological study, is the comparative oldness of the linguistic 

 and literary monuments of the language, the large number of 

 muniments and cartularies stored in the various archives, and 

 the motley profusion of mediaeval literary productions. Where- 

 as the oldest Provencal monument does not take us back further 

 than the nth century, whereas Italy and Spain have neither of 

 them anything to show as remote as even that, the oldest French 

 texts hail from the 9th century with the so-called Serments de 

 Strasbourg, from the 10th and the opening years of the nth 

 with the Cantilene de Sainte Eulalie, and the Pocmes de Clermont. 

 These dates must, of course, be still far in advance of the very 

 beginnings, the baby-prattle of the language, there is no doubt 

 about that ; but still these interesting landmarks, which put us 

 face to face with a few of the oldest instances of phonetic trans- 

 formation, enable us to form at least an approximate idea of 

 what there may have been before, when Old-French was no longer 

 popular Latin and popular Latin not yet Old-French. Making 

 popular Latin our basis to operate from, we shall have to investi- 

 gate the possible influence, exercised on primitive Romance by 

 the speech of those nations, into whose countries popular Latin 

 was imported or by the languages of the foreign tribes that after- 

 wards invaded the romanised provinces. We might, for instance, 

 ask the question : Was the influence of the language of ancient 

 Gaul, i.e., Celtic, a factor of any potency in the formation of 

 French ? Or : Of what nature were the Germanic influences that 

 manifested themselves after the Franks had invaded Gaul? These 

 two questions have been solved in a general way, since nowadays 

 it is a mere truism that, first, the hypothesis of those would-be 

 philologers of the 18th century, whom Voltaire sneeringly calls 

 " Celtomanes," was a mere delusion and a craze, and secondly, 

 that the vocabulary of French contains upwards of 800 words 

 of manifestly Teutonic, i.e., Germanic, origin. Still, it is not less 

 true that even in these two seemingly simple questions there are 



