PROGRESS OF ROMANCE PHILOLOGY 251 



sounds, for which he used the terms "wide," or "open" (larc) and 

 "narrow," or "close" (estreit). The same differences are found in 

 nearly all the Romance idioms; they are distinguished with more 

 or less uniformity in modern orthography, but not so in the ancient 

 documents. Diez, who had studied phonology from the written texts, 

 paid little attention to these differences. He always speaks of the 

 letters as if the signs which we employ to represent pronunciation, 

 unsatisfactory as they are, oftener than not, had a constant and 

 well-determined value. The study of patois has accustomed philolo- 

 gists to trust to the ear more than to the eye, and to note variations 

 which formerly were passed over. To this new method of investiga- 

 tion and to the study of the patois themselves we owe an immense 

 progress in the study of languages in their early periods. We have be- 

 come more exacting in the definition of phonological facts. We are 

 no longer satisfied with the often vague and uncertain information 

 furnished by the spelling, but try to determine as accurately as 

 possible the sounds that the spelling aimed to represent. Very 

 frequently the answers to such inquiries are to be found in the patois, 

 while as to the vocabulary, it is the patois alone which enable us to 

 fix the meaning of a great many words. Moreover, we have gained 

 from this method a more correct estimate of the enormous variety of 

 Romance speech. In many regions the local idiom has never been 

 written down, or, at least, it is inaccessible in its earlier forms be- 

 cause of lack of documents. This statement applies to a large part 

 of Romance Switzerland and to important regions in Italy, France, 

 and the Spanish peninsula, without mentioning the Roumanians of 

 Macedonia. In a word, the specimens of ancient Romance supplied 

 us by the texts are few and far between. The stages intermediate 

 between different varieties are missing, and, as a whole, the older 

 forms of Romance are accessible to us in only a fragmentary way. 

 The patois alone enable us to fill these gaps. Of course some discre- 

 tion is needed here, and we must not imagine, as some philologists 

 of our day have fancied, that all the phonetic facts observed in the 

 patois are of equally ancient date. Quite to the contrary, a large 

 number of these phenomena are modern: new facts appear with 

 each generation, and it is the function of criticism to distinguish the 

 old from the new. Here is a great field of research in need of explor- 

 ation, and the need is all the more urgent in the case of the patois 

 because they are subject to rapid change and are gradually disap- 

 pearing under the pressure of the official languages. 



In Italy this branch of study has been pushed farther than else- 

 where, not only because, for historical reasons, the Italian patois 

 have shown a remarkable vitality, and hence lend themselves 

 more readily to investigation, but also because there was at Milan 

 a scholar who gave this kind of linguistic research a vigorous impulse 



