35 o LANGUAGES. 



with the ecclesiastics who instructed them in their new religion led to their 

 learning the Latin language, and speaking it more or less correctly. Being 

 endowed with a lively intelligence and ready wit, they were not long in 

 acquiring a knowledge of a new language which recommended itself to them 

 as having about it the halo of Roman greatness. 



In fine, the French language is composed of three perfectly distinct 

 elements Celtic, Germanic, and Latin ; the last, however, being by far the 

 most predominant. There are not more than a thousand words of Germanic 

 origin in the French language, and far fewer of Celtic origin. Nearly all 

 the rest are Latin, and it has been said with perfect truth that " French is 

 merely a patois of Latin." 



From the time of Clovis the progress made by Latin was very rapid. The 

 laws of the Franks, as of the other barbarian people who invaded the Roman 

 empire, were written in Latin ; not, it is true, in scholarly Latin, but in what 

 was called the sermo quotidianus, or every-day language, so termed because 

 everybody understood and spoke it. It is true that the Teutonic language 

 continued to be spoken by the Prankish tribes which occupied the banks of the 

 Rhine and the provinces of Germania ; but the Franks under Clovis and the 

 other kings or chiefs who had established themselves at Orleans, Paris, and 

 Soissons, soon adopted the vulgar Latin as their language. 



The Jeudes, or great vassals, either out of indolence or pride, adhered for a 

 longer period to their national language, and it was probably in use amongst 

 the upper classes as late as Charlemagne's reign. The kings of the first race, 

 in order to gain the sympathies of the Gallo-Roman population, nevertheless 

 assumed to feel an interest in the progress of the Latin vulgar tongue. Thus 

 two centuries earlier, the Gauls, who still spoke Celtic, endeavoured, according 

 to the expression of Sidonius Apollinaris, "to rid themselves of the rust of this 

 ancient language, in order to make themselves familiar with the graces of the 

 beautiful Latin language." Chilperic I., King of Soissons, in the middle of the 

 sixth century, plumed himself upon imitating in his speeches the rhetoric of 

 the most learned Romans. He endeavoured to develop the study of the Latin 

 tongue in his dominions, and as his subjects could not manage to reproduce 

 the sounds of the Teutonic idiom with the letters of the Roman alphabet, he 

 suggested the use of certain Greek and Hebrew letters which lent themselves 

 better to the intonations of the Frankish tongue. Contemporary with him, 

 Caribert, King of Paris, set up the pretension of being learned in jurispru- 



