340 PHONETIC ANOMALIES, ETC. ETC. 
tance. Still, for us pepores dvGpwro as we are, beings constituted to 
syllable their utterances, matters of the kind I have touched upon, 
however minute and trivial they may seem, must have a degree of 
interest. It is a collection, as it were, of verbal fossils that I offer— 
philologic ‘‘ flies in amber,”’ of considerable antiquity, yet modern in 
their aspect. 
The vocal solecisms just enumerated, have been adopted by most 
of us as proprieties of speech. I might have urged them in the 
way of precedent to justify, to some extent, the traditional usages of 
our old-fashioned English grammarians; but I have adduced them 
not at all for this purpose, but simply as phenomena that require to 
be accounted for. 
_ It would seem as if, at the period of transition from the old lan- 
guages of Europe to the new, some one, on seeing the particular 
proper names and other words to which I have referred, had read 
them out in what we may call the English manner, giving to the 
vowels very nearly the sounds which we are accustomed to give them 
when we make use of our own language ; and that then, a scribe or 
reporter, writing from ear, and accustomed to pronounce the vowels 
in the general European manner, had committed them to paper 
phonetically, producing thereby no longer the ancient classic names, 
but Italian, French, and Romaic appellations. How else came 
Reate, for example, to be handed down to posterity, in Italian, as 
Rieti ? 
All the subcivisions of the great families of language, we know, 
were themselves subdivided into dialects, originating in isolation of | 
locality,—imitation of the individual peculiarities of chiefs, bards, 
&c., and other conceivable causes. When, then, new languages de- 
veloped themselves from the intermixture of the Northerners ard 
Southerners of ancient EHurope,—an intermixture arising not only 
from conquest, but from joint service in Roman armies long before 
the fall of the Western Empire,—it is certain that dialects did not 
cease, but rather multiplied. Not one of the new tongues was 
uniformly spoken, any more than the old ones had been. 
Now amongst the multitudes who, as adventurers or as soldiers, 
found themselves transplanted from trans-Rhenane or trans-Danubian 
regions, to sunny Provence, Lombardy, or Thessaly, we may be sure 
there were many of our ancestral blood-relations from the neigh- 
bourhood of the Elbe and the Weser. Did some of these, from 
