1074 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
ions other reasons, there was less fixity of form in words, where¬ 
as now Florentine has finally expelled most of the dialectal 
forms from the Italian language. 
2. The major part of the material collected is from Petroc- 
chi’s Dizionario universale della lingua italiana; some words 
have been gathered by the investigator personally from Italian 
authors and from others. Petrocchi’s abbreviations, which I 
have had occasion to turn into English for the sake of greater 
uniformity, are the following: “volg.” (“volgare”), I have un¬ 
derstood as “illiterate” and so translated it; “non pop.” (“non 
popolare”), as “literary;” “pop.” (“popolare”), as “popular,” 
that is, the mean between “volgare” and “non popolare” or 
“letterario” (for example, such a word as is used generally by 
all, even by a very highly educated Italian and a careful speaker 
in his unguarded moments); “L. M.” (“lingua morta”), as 
“obsolete;” “cont.” (“del eontado”), as “peasant;” “mont.” 
(“delle montagne”), as “of the mountains,” meaning the hills 
more or less close to Florence. Abbreviations of my own will, 
I hope, be intelligible to the reader. Other abbreviations are 
of a standard kind: Ronr^Romania, ZRPh—Zeitschrift fur 
romanische Philologie, ALL=Archiv fiir lateinische Lexiko- 
graphie, AG=Archivio Glottologico, M.-L=Meyer-Lubke, etc. 
The references to Meyer-Liibke’s Grammaire des Langues 
Romanes are, of course, as the title indicates, to the French 
translation, Paris, 1890-1906. In the notes, figures above the 
line refer to editions. 
3. A very large number of words were, of course, discarded 
for various reasons. It was impossible, as well as unnecessary, 
to include all the derivatives of words discussed; when it is 
stated, for example, that fedele owes its irregular E in the ini¬ 
tial syllable to the influence of the accented E in fede, the same 
explanation hold true, of course, without mention for fedelta, 
fedelissimo, fedelmente, fedelone, and the like. Miany words 
had to be put aside, because of the uncertainty of their deriva¬ 
tion or of its exact form. In some of these cases, I found de¬ 
rivations which did not appeal to me, in others I did not find 
the derivation suggested anywhere. Doubtless the majority 
