246 ROMANCE LANGUAGES 



he was endowed. The work of Hugo Schuchardt on the Vokalismus 

 des Vulgdrlateins (1866-68) is perhaps the work most original in plan 

 and most fruitful in results that has appeared since Diez's grammar. 

 The extent of the author's researches was far greater than the title 

 promises, for one may find in these three volumes not a few facts 

 and views which deal not only with the vowels but also with the con- 

 sonants, and even with certain general characteristics of the Romance 

 languages. This is not apparent at first, for the work is extremely 

 rich in content and the exposition is at times intricate. The result 

 is that more than once ideas have been put forward as new that one 

 may find presented at some length in this work. The necessity of 

 referring constantly to the third volume, which is the complement 

 of the first two, is burdensome. These unimportant defects might 

 easily be removed in a second edition, a revision which has been 

 awaited for a long time, but which the author, absorbed in linguistic 

 explorations of the widest range, seems very little inclined to give 

 us. Since the publication of the Vokalismus, various essays on 

 Vulgar Latin have appeared, and the materials which enable us to 

 study this intermediate phase between Classic Latin and the Romance 

 languages have accumulated. It is a question, however, whether 

 many well-demonstrated facts have been added to those which Prof. 

 Schuchardt collected some forty years ago. 



Our present knowledge enables us to be clear on at least one point, 

 namely, that we find in rudiment in Vulgar Latin most of the main 

 features which distinguish the Romance languages from the Classic 

 Latin: the simplification of the declensions and conjugations, the 

 almost complete suppression of the neuter gender, the tendency to 

 drop the first post-tonic vowel in certain proparoxytones, the exten- 

 sion of various forms by analogy, the generalization of several suf- 

 fixes, various new combinations of words, the simplification of the 

 syntax, the impoverishment of the vocabulary, the development of 

 new sounds, etc. One result of these facts is that the hypothesis 

 according to which the greatest changes occurred at the time of the 

 invasions of the fifth century falls to the ground. We may readily 

 concede that changes are oftenest observable at that period, but they 

 were in existence long before. In fact, many years before Schuch- 

 ardt, August Fuchs, a philologist who died prematurely in 1867, 

 had demonstrated in the clearest manner that the formation of the 

 Romance languages was in no way the result of accident, but that 

 between them and Latin there was no solution of continuity, and 

 that the transition was supplied by the Vulgar Latin of which they 

 are the continuation. These ideas are now of course commonplace. 

 It has been known for a long time that while the barbarian invasion 

 introduced into the Romance vocabulary a large number of foreign 

 terms, it exercised no appreciable influence on Romance grammar. 



