PRESENT PROBLEMS OF ROMANCE PHILOLOGY 259 



which it is our object to consider. Without making the fruitless 

 attempt to define with precision the point at which Latin philology 

 ends and Romance philology begins, and without stopping to 

 emphasize the exceeding importance to the Romance scholar of 

 keeping in touch with the methods and results of the older science 

 and of bearing constantly in mind the unity and continuity of the 

 Roman tradition, it must be said that notwithstanding the great 

 amount of careful work bestowed on it alike by Latinists and Ro- 

 mance investigators, the underlying question of quantity and quality 

 in the folk-Latin vowel-system still presents a number of baffling 

 enigmas. It is true that the prevailing belief at present is that 

 differences of quantity in the Latin vowels were primitive and in- 

 herent, and that only later did qualitative differences so develop 

 in the folk-speech that the long vowels became close and the short 

 vowels open. But various modifications of this conservative opinion 

 are conceivably correct, such for example as that the vowels of the 

 Latin system had become very anciently open and close without 

 appreciable or characteristic quantitative distinction, and that the 

 Latin poets and prosodists, in order to conform their versification 

 to the quantitative system of their Greek models and masters, 

 conventionally treated and came to regard their close vowels as long 

 and their open vowels as short ; while the folk-speech, being unaffected 

 by the tenets and practice of the grammarians, continued the pre- 

 vious conditions of the Latin vocalism. At least a curious sidelight 

 on such a possibility, as exhibited in the influence of the Greek on 

 the Latin grammarians, is thrown by the fact, which has long been 

 known to the initiated, that the practice of the Latin grammarians 

 of calling a vowel followed by two consonants "long by position," 

 was due to their misapprehension of the Greek nomenclature, which, 

 inasmuch as the syllable was long in which stood a vowel so situated, 

 naturally designated its doubtful vowel as long foo-et, that is, "by 

 hypothesis," or, in the equivalent Latin phraseology, "by suppos- 

 ition." Thus the early Roman grammarians, by their misunder- 

 standing and mistranslation of a Greek technical term, introduced an 

 erroneous conception* of Latin quantity, for the correction of which 

 the Latin grammarians of the present generation are chiefly indebted 

 to the new science of Romance philology, a science which, by 

 demonstrating that the number of consonants following a Latin 

 vowel affected not its actual but only its "supposititious" quantity, 

 effected for Latin scholarship the signal service of setting on its feet 

 the highly important and zealously cultivated doctrine of "hidden 

 quantities." 



Whether or not it will be possible for the future to establish with 

 certainty the chronology and the mutual relations of quantity and 

 quality in early Romanic speech, may be doubted. Indeed, our 



