Schlatter—The Development of the Vowel . 1075 
of these cases would have added little or nothing in the way of 
data. 1 Other words were omitted through uncertainty of 
provenance. Petrocchi’s abbreviations are occasionally insol¬ 
uble or ambiguous, owing to the fact that his table of abbrevi¬ 
ations is not complete and to the fact that he does not always 
persist in the use of a single abbreviation to denote the same 
thing. 
4. The results of the investigation seem to show that, if the 
Florentine language had developed without let or hindrance, it 
would to-day present only four vowels in the initial unaccented 
syllable: I from Classic Latin I, Y, E, AE, OE ; A from Classic 
Latin A, or from AIJ when the following syllable contained ac¬ 
cented U; O from O, tJ, except when the following syllable 
contained I, a palatalized consonant, or voiced S; and U from 
IT, ATT (except in the case mentioned above), and from O and 
IJ when the following syllable contained I, a palatalized con¬ 
sonant, or voiced S. The reasons, in order of importance, per¬ 
verting this development may be divided into four classes: 1, 
the influence of allied forms, accented on the vowel involved; 1 
2, the immense influence exerted by Latin; 2 3, dialect intru¬ 
sion ; 3 and 4, the other usual perverting phenomena of language, 
of which the most common for Italian is perhaps apheresi3. 
The influence of Latin and dialect has finally become almost 
nil and the language has now rid itself—except in the case 
of learned words—of a very large majority of such forms. 
5. As to dialects, the Tuscan only are touched upon and they, 
only incidentally. Sections 37, 75, and 84 are added merely 
for comparative purposes. A complete treatment, or even a 
§3. Note 1. Examples of such words are: baeria, belletta, berlin- 
gaccio, bieco, diaci, fazzoletto, frollo, frugare, boffi, caendo, rigno, 
scilinguagnolo, a vanvera, etc. It is to be remembered that such 
words as frollo, boffi, etc., cannot be discarded offhand because they 
are accented on the first syllable; many such words originally did 
have an unaccented initial syllable, -cf. pdcchia, from apecchia, dritto, 
from diritto, et sim. 
§4. Note 1. This influence, which involved such an immense num¬ 
ber of words is at once plain from such forms as suonare, chiedeva, 
etc., which still persist. 
2. For the old language, too much stress can scarcely be laid on this 
cause. No other language ever had Latin so constantly with it. Cf. 
520, note 11. 
3. See §§ 37, 75. and 84. 
