460 NUMBER OF EXTINCT AND LIVING LANGUAGES. chap, xxiii. 



convey a distinct meaning to any but the learned in these 

 two countries. So also in Italy the modern Italian cannot 

 be traced back much beyond the time of Dante, or some six 

 centuries before our time. Even in Rome, where there had 

 been no permanent intrusion of foreigners, such as the Lom- 

 bard settlers of CTcrman origin in the plains of the Po, the 

 common people of the year 1000 spoke quite a distinct 

 language from that of their Roman ancestors or their Italian 

 descendants, as is shown by the celebrated chronicle of the 

 monk Benedict, of the convent of St. Andrea on Mount 

 Soracte, written in such barbarous Latin, and with such 

 strange grammatical forms, that it requires a profoundly 

 skilled linguist to decipher it.* 



Having thus established the preliminary flict that none of 

 the tongues now spoken were in existence ten centuries ago, 

 and that the ancient languages have passed through many a 

 transitional dialect before they settled into the forms now in 

 use, the philologist might bring forward proofs of the great 

 numbers both of lost and living forms of speech. 



Strabo informs us that in his time, in the Caucasus alone 

 (a chain of mountains not longer than the Aljjs, and much 

 narrower), there were spoken at least seventy languages. 

 At the present period the number, it is said, would be still 

 greater, if all the distinct dialects of those mountains were 

 reckoned. Several of these Caucasian tongues admit of no 

 comparison with any known living or lost Asiatic or European 

 language. Others which are not peculiar are obsolete forms 

 of known languages, such as the Georgian, Mongolian, Per- 

 sian, Arabic, and Tartarian. It seems that as often as con- 

 quering hordes swept over that part of Asia, alwa^'s coming 

 from the north and east, they drove before them the inha- 

 bitants of the plains, who took refuge in some of the retired 



* See G. Pertz, Blonumcnta Gormanica, vol. iii. 



