252 ROMANCE LANGUAGES 



I mean Prof. Ascoli. I need not repeat what I have already said 

 of him. In Switzerland that is, in Romance Switzerland, for in 

 German Switzerland the work is already nearly completed the 

 exploration of the local dialects is going on methodically and per- 

 sistently under the direction of competent men. 1 In Belgium the same 

 labor is well under way. 2 In Spain, and especially in Portugal, there 

 are some active workers, but they are few in number. 3 In France 

 laborers are not wanting: it has been a long time since we began to 

 collect information on the folk-dialects. The earliest patois diction- 

 aries date from the eighteenth century, but many of these works 

 exhibit more zeal than method. Too much time was lost in etymo- 

 logical researches which were premature, and in the pursuit of imag- 

 inary dialectic boundaries, instead of concentrating effort upon the 

 collection and exact notation of linguistic facts. However, progress 

 has been made in the last twelve years. Some excellent works have 

 been published, among which it will be sufficient to cite those 

 of M. Joret on the Norman patois, of Abbe" Devaux on those of 

 northern Dauphine", of Abbe Rousselot on a patois of the Charente, 

 of M. Gillie'ron on the patois of France in general. 4 This branch 

 of Romance studies has grown some offshoots even beyond the 

 Atlantic: we have not forgotten the work of Prof. A. Marshall 

 Elliott, of Johns Hopkins University, on Canadian French. Only 

 recently a society was founded at Quebec to promote the same 

 studies. 



Sciences originally foreign to each other often have unforeseen 

 points of contact, and may at times exercise a mutually favorable 

 influence by lending each other their particular methods. Thus it 

 is that the branch of Romance philology which deals with the patois 

 has greatly profited, and will profit still more in the future, by the 

 ; progress made in a science somewhat new, general phonology or 

 general phonetics, a science which in America as well as in Europe 

 has zealous advocates. Here it will be enough to mention the names 

 of A. Melville Bell in America, Prof. Sweet in England, Profs. 

 Sievers and Victor in Germany, Abbe* Rousselot and M. Paul Passy 

 in France. The phonologist or phonetician differs from the linguist in 

 that he does not concern himself either with the origin of languages 

 or with their history : he works with the idiom spoken at the present 



1 See the annual reports (1899 and following years) of the committee appointed 

 to compile a glossary of the patois of Romance-speaking Switzerland, and the 

 Bulletin du glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande, edited by the members 

 (Messrs. Gauchat, Jeanjaquet, Tappolet) of that committee. 



2 The Soctete licgeoise de litterature wallonne is preparing a dictionary of the 

 Wallonian dialect. 



3 Gongalves Vianna, author of several essays on Portuguese phonetics, and 

 Leite de Vasconcellos, the editor of the Revista Lusitana, deserve special men- 

 tion. 



4 See the Bibliographie des patois gallo-romans, by D. Behrens, 2d ed. Berlin, 

 1893. 



