34 .6 LANGUAGES. 



language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord 

 scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth : and they 

 left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel ; because 

 the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth " (Fig. 294). 



In the beginning of the fifth century the empire of the Caesars had 

 become, like Babel, a vast ruin ; the Latin tongue, which since the Roman 

 conquest and occupation had been the legal, religious, civil, and administrative 

 language of nearly all Europe, was invaded by the barbarian tongues, as the 

 soil was by the savage hordes which, from the heart of Asia, the extremities 

 of German}', and the unknown regions of the North, poured in upon the 

 Roman world. From this epoch dates the origin of the languages of modern 

 Europe (Fig. 295), which were formed out of a mixture of the idiom of the 

 invader with the Latin tongue, which latter had become too deeply rooted in the 

 usages of ordinary life to be extirpated altogether. It is true that the classic 

 language of Livy, Cicero, and Sallust was only spoken and understood by the 

 upper classes of society, but the other classes used a rustic language which 

 varied with the district and population, but which was derived from the true 

 Latin tongue. This rustic language (lingua Romano) consisted of an infinity 

 of dialects proceeding from one and another, and differing, some more, some 

 less, from the mother tongue. 



The Celtic language also comprised a certain number of dialects, which 

 existed amongst the Gauls at the epoch of the expeditions of Caesar, and which 

 were, as he says in his " Commentaries," merely variations of the same 

 language. Strabo also says that the Gauls everywhere used a single native 

 language, merely modified by differences of dialect. Moreover, the Celtic 

 language simply underwent certain modifications, under the influence of the 

 Latin language, when the latter became exclusively the political or official 

 language of the Roman colony. The Emperors established in the principal 

 cities of Gaul, notably at Lyons, Autun, and Besancon, schools in which the 

 Latin language was taught, and the most earnest efforts were made to pro- 

 pagate it not only in the aristocratic classes, but amongst the people, who 

 were more stubborn in the retention of their national idiom. This policy of 

 the Romans was very successful. Not only did the Gallo-Romans lush into 

 servitude, as Tacitus expresses it, but they took willingly to the language of 

 their conquerors, with the exception of a few unavoidable errors of pro- 

 nunciation and the introduction of a few Celtic words into the Latin 



