258 ROMANCE LANGUAGES 



beau temps, the object of the transitive verb fait. As between lan- 

 guage-master and philologist, where lies, pedagogically, the truth? 

 Primarily with the language-master, and only remotely with the 

 philologist, whose complicated and unpractical business it will be 

 to explain the psychological process by which the historical truth 

 ceases to be the grammatical truth and an illogical transformation 

 occurs by which things are (instead of are not) what they seem; or, 

 otherwise expressed, it is not pedagogically sound for the philologist 

 to expect the language-master to begin his doctrine of the French 

 negation, for example, by setting forth the historic fact that je n'irai 

 pas means / shall not go a step. It is, on the contrary, no unimportant 

 task of the philologist to warn his incipient doctors of philosophy 

 against confusing the legitimate functions of language-teaching with 

 the historical elucidations of philology. 



Passing to the specific subject of the present paper the present 

 problems of Romance philology it is proper to premise that the 

 word problems used to indicate' the objects still to be accomplished 

 by Romance scholarship, after the extensive progress that has just 

 been so ably set forth by our honored guest, Professor Meyer, will 

 here be understood not so much in its philosophical as in its current 

 meaning. The philosophical problems of the study of language 

 the ultimate problem of the origin of human speech, together with 

 the various subsidiary problems affecting, for example, the relations 

 of language to thought or the burning question whether the laws 

 of speech-development are irrefragable the question of the Jung- 

 grammatiker belong to the domain of general linguistic science, 

 while the problems pertaining distinctively to the domain of Ro- 

 mance studies, and still remaining to be solved, are rather of the 

 nature of what the Germans call Aufgaben tasks to be accom- 

 plished by patient research and skilled investigation. Such a view 

 of the situation naturally takes for granted that the fundamental 

 problem of Romance linguistics, that of the origin of the Romance 

 languages, has already been conclusively resolved. However persist- 

 ent and elaborate may be the endeavors of sciolists continued 

 down even to our own days to prove that, in their origin and 

 make-up the Romance languages are predominatingly Celtic, or 

 Greek, or Basque, or Heaven-knows- what, and however skeptical, 

 antecedently, may be the natural attitude of the serious beginner 

 in Romance philology whose preliminary studies have been conducted 

 by over-credulous and incredible etymologizers, no demonstration 

 of linguistic origins has ever been more complete and beautiful than 

 that of the unbroken development of the Romance idioms from the 

 Latin folk-speech. 



From this starting-point of the Latin folk-speech it is natural 

 to begin the survey of those practical problems of Romance philology 



