240 ROMANCE LANGUAGES 



cautious man not given to generalities, a sagacious observer attent- 

 ive to details, a linguist skilled in grouping facts and in deducing 

 their consequences, carefully avoiding hazardous theories, and 

 preferring to treat only those problems whose solution he believed 

 he had found. His Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen, first 

 published in 1836-43, thoroughly revised in the second edition (1856- 

 60), and again improved in the third (1869-72), has been the found- 

 ation both of the general and of the special study of the Romance 

 languages. Standing at the entrance of the main avenues of Romance 

 philology, this work has been, to all those who have aimed to deal 

 thoroughly with any part of this science, the reliable guide who 

 starts you upon the right path, and who, if he does not accompany 

 you to the end of your journey, at least travels long enough at your 

 side to prevent you from going astray. Of course one cannot say 

 that Diez found a guide of this sort in Raynouard, but it is not a bold 

 supposition that the idea of a grammar of the Romance languages 

 was suggested to Diez by the essay imperfect as it is of his 

 predecessor. This conjecture finds additional support in the fact that 

 Diez's earlier works dealt chiefly with Provengal literature, and, in 

 those days, the almost unique source of Provencal studies was the 

 Choix des poesies originates des troubadours, the sixth and last volume 

 of which contained the Grammaire comparee des langues de I'Europe 

 latine. Moreover, Diez took pleasure in saying that he considered 

 himself the pupil of Raynouard. This was putting it rather strongly, 

 for to write successfully a grammar of the Romance languages, as 

 Diez understood the task, the author must needs be familiar with 

 ideas and methods which as yet were unknown outside of the small 

 circle of German philologists in which they had originated. In this 

 case other influences than those of Raynouard were needed, and, 

 although the subject was of special interest to the Latin peoples, it 

 was only in Germany that a work of this kind could have been 

 planned and executed. Comparative grammar is a science of German 

 origin, and one which remained for a long time the property of 

 German scholars. It was in 1816 that Bopp had given us the first 

 sketch of a work of this kind in his treatise on the Sanskrit con- 

 jugation system as compared with that of the Greek, Latin, Persian 

 and Germanic languages. The first edition of the Comparative 

 Grammar of the Indo-European languages, upon which in a way 

 Diez's work depended, had begun to appear hi 1833. Grimm's 

 German grammar, in which, for the first time, the phonology of 

 a group of related idioms was treated, dates from 1819. 



These works were little known outside of Germany. In France 

 there had been created in 1852, at the Paris Faculty of Letters, a 

 course in comparative grammar which was placed in charge of an 

 elderly Hellenist of German extraction. This course, which I myself 



