PROGRESS OF ROMANCE PHILOLOGY 245 



carry with it the use of Latin as the e very-day speech? And, within 

 these limits, in which countries was the language of the conquerors 

 the only language in use at the fall of the Empire? In what regions 

 did the aboriginal language persist, and to what extent? 



Again, taking our stand at the present day, let us draw a map of 

 the Romance world of Europe. Let us determine the frontiers which 

 separate it from Germanic, Slavic, and other languages. This can 

 certainly be done, as we are working with living idioms. But when 

 these limits are once drawn, in which countries may we say that 

 Latin has developed there in situ? In which territories has Romance 

 gained ground, and what circumstances have determined this gain? 

 What ground outside of these boundaries has been lost? For certain 

 territories, notably for those of the Roumanian language, these 

 investigations meet with serious difficulties; thanks to recent works, 

 however, these obstacles are in process of removal. 



These are some of the questions which Diez's grammar left un- 

 settled and which have been studied during the last forty years, 

 usually with success. We shall now take up these problems and see 

 what has been accomplished toward their solution. 



A knowledge of Vulgar Latin, the common source of the Romance 

 idioms, is of the greatest importance for Romance studies. But how 

 difficult it is to get together any certain facts about this unsettled 

 language, which differed less according to locality than according 

 to the persons speaking it ! We are compelled to scrutinize the testi- 

 mony often obscure of the Latin grammarians, of the inscrip- 

 tions, and of the writings of the early Middle Ages public and 

 private records, written laws of the Germanic invaders, formularies, 

 etc. There is no doubt that these texts contain numerous traces of 

 the vulgar tongue, but it is not an easy task to disentangle them. 

 Among the frequent barbarisms and solecisms met with, there are 

 many which are due only to the ignorance or inattention of the 

 copyists, and from which we can conclude nothing as to the vulgar 

 tongue of the period. The criterion by which we distinguish among 

 these errors those which are to be attributed to vulgar usage is of 

 course furnished us, on the one hand, by our knowledge of Classic 

 Latin, and, on the other, by what we know of Romance from the 

 early texts (and they are few!) of the ninth and tenth centuries. 

 But when we have assembled all that such documents can tell us 

 about Vulgar Latin, we note many gaps (for example, as to the 

 conjugation system), and these we are powerless to fill with anything 

 but more or less probable conjectures. 



This difficult study was first prosecuted with signal success by 

 a scholar then very young, but who more than any one else was 

 qualified to undertake it both by his scientific training (he was 

 a pupil of Diez and of Ritschl) and by the rare sagacity with which 



