1890-91.] CELTIC, ROMAN AND GREEK TYPES. 185 



precipitately ; the noise alarmed those of the Chagan, who turned tail 

 also ; both armies thus ran away from each other. Perhaps the story is 

 intended to reflect discredit on Commentiolus, whom Gibbon describes 

 as " the object of satire or comedy rather than of serious history." 

 However, its interest for us at this moment is in the facts, first, that the 

 soldiery are said by the Greek historians to have spoken in the language 

 of their country, and second, that this language is no longer classic Latin 

 but Romance. In Latin, I need scarcely hint, there is no such word as 

 " Torna " or " Retorna " ; no such vocative as " fratre." 



Now Raynouard says,* adverting to the irruption of the barbarians, 

 " The admixture of those peoples, who gave up their barbarian speech 

 and adopted that of the conquered races, owing to the need of sharing 

 their religious, civil, and domestic relations, was necessarily fatal to the 

 Latin language, and its decadence was rapid." Raynouard is a great 

 authority, but the date of his work is 1816. Present views differ. Gaston 

 Paris,-f- for instance, says of the Romance tongues, " We speak Latin and 

 nothing but Latin." He even forbids our repeating '' The Romance 

 languages spring from Latin." For myself, I fail to see in those 

 Romance tongues which I have studied much barbarian influence. I 

 agree with Mr. Gaston Paris that the local forms of speech throughout 

 France shade insensibly into each other. I believe he might extend the 

 statement beyond the limits of France into Italy, Spain, Flanders and 

 Switzerland, and into all the past ages as far as that of Augustus. The 

 example we have in the Province of Quebec is very striking, where we 

 have a French with pronounced Norman characteristics, but the English, 

 Scottish, Jersey immigrants . . . what trace of their mother tongue 

 have they left to their descendants .? None ! The English words in use 

 in our sister Province have quite another origin and reason for existence. 

 I do not think the new speech of the western Roman Empire was a 

 degraded Latin — it was really a developed and developing language. 



By the time of Charlemagne, two centuries later than Maurice, Latin 

 had disappeared as a spoken language, and a new tongue, with a new 

 grammar, had taken its place. To express the relations of nouns, prepo- 

 sitions had replaced inflections — De for the genitive, Ad for the dative. 

 The rules of declensions were no longer followed, and the endings of 

 cases fell away as useless — Due for ducem ; veritat for veritatem : exil 

 for exilium ; Hom for Homo ; styl for stilus ; arbre for arborem. So 

 with adjectives — Just for Justus ; un for unus ; visible for visibilis. Also 



*Choix des Poesies originales des Troubadours — 1816. 

 t Les Parlers du France — 1888. 



