64 ' BROOMALL : 



sist in the stability of a dead language. The living language 

 which a people inherit and speak is continually changing : 

 old words acquire new applications ; new words abridge the 

 province of old ; concrete terms rise to the abstract ; specific 

 terms become general ; and different lines and planes of 

 thought and action give different meanings to the same word. 

 While this renders a living language equal to any emergency 

 of thought among its speakers, moulding it to their peculiar 

 characteristics of mind as they advance or retrograde in civi- 

 lization, yet this very vitality makes it unsuitable for descrip- 

 tive and distinctive names to record and convey precise mean- 

 ings regardless of time and place. A dead language, with its 

 grammatical forms and the meanings of its roots and words 

 immutable, answers this requirement. And, moreover, for 

 this purpose, the I^atin, of all the dead languages known to 

 us, is eminently the best. We thoroughly understand its 

 grammar and we have much of its literature wherein the 

 meanings of its words and the construction of its sentence 

 are fully exemplified. And further, the course of events in 

 Europe for the last two thousand years has made the Latin 

 language the common heritage of the civilized world and a 

 medium of thought among students of every tongue. Its 

 succinct modes of expression are unrivaled, its letters are 

 familiar to our eye, and their sounds and combinations easily 

 accommodated to our system of phonetics. 



There is therefore enough Latin alive to-day to warrant 

 attention to its pronunciation from a practical point of view. 



Observation of P'rench, Spanish, Italian and German 

 scholars shows that each accommodates his pronunciation of 

 Latin somewhat to the phonetic peculiarities of his own 

 tongue. Kach has his own conception of the phonetic value 

 of the letters of the alphabet, based on their use in his own 

 language. Generally speaking, these phonetic values of the 

 letters are much alike in the European Continental languages, 

 as compared with their present sounds in luiglish, and are 

 closer to the old Latin sounds. The contrast, therefore, 



