774 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 



ROMANCES 



Greek Church); Greece, about 12,000; Italy, 

 :n.7.'i7,OUO; the Netherlands, 1,596,000; Portugal, 

 6,049,000; European Russia, 8,300.000; Spain, 

 17,536,000; Sweden and Norway, 2400; Switzer- 

 land, 1,184,000; European Turkey, estimated at 

 1,000,000; total Roman Catholic population in Eu- 

 rope, approximately 153,130,000, while Mulhall s 

 Dtftumaryo/Statuttet(\S98) states it at 162.310,000. 

 The latter quotes the American Statistical Society '< 

 figures of Roman Ciitlu>lic |>opulation ( 1H93) of the 

 grand divisions, as follows: Euro)*!, 160,200,000; 

 America, 68,400,000; Asia, 3,010,000; Africa, 

 2,660.000; Oceania, 657,000; grand total. uUmt 

 225,000,000, a-s against the 240,000,000 estimated 

 in HaztlCt Annual for 1897. 



See Cardinal Manning's Temporal Minion of the Holy 

 Ohoit; Newman's Euay on Development of Doctrine; 

 Wiseman's Lecturet on the Catholic Church; Ward's 

 Eaayi on the Church'i Doctrinal Authority ; Murphy' 8 

 Chair of Peter (1888); Leibnitz's Syttem of Theology, 

 translated by Russell (1850); Catholic Directory (Burns 

 and Gates); Mittionet Catholicte (Propaganda Press, 

 Rome). The organisation and statistics of the Catholic 

 Church will be found in the relevant paragraphs on the 

 several Catholic countries. The more iin|K>rtant Catholic 

 doctrines and institutions are all dealt with in separate 

 articles in this work ; as are also the saints and thinkers. 

 See especially the articles : 



Romance Languages. a general name for 

 those modern languages that are the immediate 

 deHcendanU of the language of ancient Home. In 

 those parts of the empire in whirli tin; Roman 

 dominion and civil in-tit IHHM>- hail l>een most 

 completely established the native languages were 

 speedily and completely nppl*otd by i liai of the 

 conquerors the Latin. This wax the cose in Italy 

 itself, in the Spanish i>cmnsula, in Gaul or France, 

 including purls of Switzerland, and in Dacia. 

 When the Koman empire was broken up by the 

 irrnptioiiK of the northern nations (in the Mb anil 

 6th centuries) the ininnlin^ tribes stood to the 

 Romanised inhabitants in the relation of a ruling 

 caste to a subject population. The dominanl 

 Germans continued, when- established, for several 

 centuries to use their native tongue among them- 

 sel\iit; but from the first they seem to have 

 acknowledged the supremacy of the Latin for civil 

 and ecclesiastical purposes, and at last the lan- 

 guage of the rulers was merged in that of their 

 subjects ; not, however, without leaving decided 

 trace* of tho struggle traces chiefly visible in the 

 intrusion of numerous German words, ami in the 

 mutilation of the grammatical forms or inflections 

 of the ancient Latin, and the xnlmtitution therefor 

 of prc|H>sitions and auxiliary verlw. It is also to 

 he Imriie in nun. I that the language \ilm-li under- 

 went il,i, change was not the daica! Latin of 

 literature, but a popular Homan language (lingua 

 hi 



nixtirti ) which hail lieen used by the side 

 of the classical, and differed from it not to the 



extent of being radically and grammat ica 1 1 y aiiot her 

 tongue but chiefly by slovenly pronunciation, the 

 neglect or misuse of grammatical forms, and the 

 use of 'low' and unusual words and idiomx. As 

 distinguished from the ohl linijini l.ittiim, the lan- 

 guage of the church, the school, and the law, thi- 

 newly-formed language of ordinary intercourse, in 

 its various dialects, was known from aliout the 

 8th century as the linqun Koniana ; and fnuii this 

 name, through the adverb Komunirt, came the 

 term Homance, applied lioth to the language ami 

 to the popular poetry written in it, more especially 

 to the dialect and poems of the troubadours. The 

 Romance languages recognised by Diez are six 

 Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, I'mvencal, French, 

 and Roumanian. Ascoli ami newer investigators 

 treat the Romansch of the Grisons as a seventh 

 sister- tongue ; and each of these have more or leas 

 numerous dialects. 



According to the theory of Raynouard, the new 

 language that sprang out of the corruption of the 

 Latin was at first essentially the same over all the 

 countries in which Latin had Keen spoken, and is 

 preserved to us in a pure state in the Provencal, 

 or language of the troubadours; and it was from 

 tliis as a common ground, and not from the original 

 Latin, that the several Neo-Latin tongues diverged 

 into the different forms which they now present. 

 This theory U not accepted by recent inquirers ; 

 its groundlessness was demonstrated by Cornewall 

 Lewis. It is beyond doubt that the several 

 daughters of the mother Latin had their charac- 

 teristic differences from the very first, as, indeed, 

 was inevitable. The original Latin spoken in 

 the several provinces of the Roman empire must 

 have had very different degrees of purity, and 1 1 e 

 corruptions in one region must have differed 

 from those in another according to the nature of 

 the superseded tongues. To these differences in 

 the fundamental Latin must be added those of tlio 

 superadded German element, consisting chiefly it, 

 the variety of dialects spoken by the invading 

 nations and the different proportions of the con 

 quering population to the conquered. French, 8 

 was to be expected, is richer in German word/i 

 than any other mcml>er of the family, having 450 

 not found in the others. Italian is next to Frencii 

 in this respect, but on the whole is nearest to tin 

 mother Latin. Spanish and Portuguese have con' 

 siderable Arabic elements ; and Komnanian wa* 

 much modified by Slavic. The Romance tongue*, 

 further differ from the common parent in simplify- 

 ing or dropping the inflections of nouns, suhstitut 

 ing for these the use of prepositions, and simplify 

 ing the verbal forms by a free use of auxiliary 

 verbs. The six great Romance tongues and their 

 literatures are treated in the articles on Italy, 

 Spain, Portugal, Provencal, France, and Itoumania, 

 to which may be added the Roniaiisch. 



See Cornewall Lewis, On tht Origin and Formation of 

 the Romance Language* I 2 * 1 <"* 1862) ; Diez, Crammatik 

 der Komanuchen Spraelicn (1836-38; 4th ed. 1877), and 

 hid dictionary, the great Wlirterbuch (18A3; Eng. trans. 

 1H64); Paul Meyer, Rapport mr le I'roi.tret de la 

 Philolnjie Roniane (1874) ; works on Romance philology 

 by Kiirting ( 1884 ), Orober ( 1886), and Neumann ( 1 - 

 the magazine ' Romanische Studien ' ( 1871 et teg.), and 

 that of Uaston 1'aris, ' Romania ' ( 1873 et teg.). 



ltom;mr-s. Romance has long since lost its 

 original signification in even* country except Spain, 

 where it is Mill occasionally used in speaking of 

 the vernacular, as it was in the middle ages when 

 Latin was the language of the lettered classes and 

 of documents and writings of all kinds. Hut even 

 there its commoner application is, as elsewhere, 

 not to a language, but to a form of composition. 

 In English it has )>een almost invariably applied to 

 a certain sort of prose fiction, and, in a secondary 



