A PRIMEVAL MOTHER TONGUE 



just alike throughout the empire. A Spaniard's 

 local peculiarities of utterance and phraseology 

 were distinguishable from those of a Rhsetian, 

 though both talked Latin and could understand 

 each other. 



Now as every language changes more or less 

 from age to age, so the speech of the Romans 

 in the fourth century after Christ had come to 

 differ in many respects from the speech of their 

 forefathers who, six hundred years earlier, had 

 fought against Hannibal. But up to this time 

 the intercourse between the various parts of the 

 Roman world had been so close and continuous 

 that the capital still furnished the standard of 

 discourse for the whole empire. During the 

 next six centuries a different set of circumstances 

 was at work. For a second time the Latin lan- 

 guage was learned by scores of barbarous tribes, 

 but this time it was no longer Rome that set 

 the fashion and maintained the standard. In in- 

 numerable provincial towns and barbaric assem- 

 blies new standards of speaking were gradually 

 established. The lines of connection, adminis- 

 trative and commercial, which had formerly been 

 kept up, were in many cases severed, and each 

 little tract of country led a more sequestered life 

 than before. Many new expressions came into 

 use, Teutonic in Gaul and Italy, Arabic in 

 Spain, Slavic in Rumania ; and local idioms and 

 peculiarities of accent multiplied, in the absence 

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