Boëthius, about 480-524 A.D. ("Consolation of Philosophy ").
4. Subsequent History of the Latin Language.—After the sixth century A.D. Latin divides into two entirely different streams. One of these is the literary language maintained in courts, in the Church, and among scholars. This was no longer the language of people in general, and as time went on, became more and more artificial. The other stream is the colloquial idiom of the common people, which developed ultimately in the provinces into the modern so-called Romance idioms. These are the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Provençal (spoken in Provence, i.e. southeastern France), the Rhaeto-Romance (spoken in the Canton of the Grisons in Switzerland), and the Roumanian, spoken in modern Roumania and adjacent districts. All these Romance languages bear the same relation to the Latin as the different groups of the Indo-European family of languages bear to the parent speech.
PART I.
SOUNDS, ACCENT, QUANTITY.
THE ALPHABET.
[1]. The Latin Alphabet is the same as the English, except that the Latin has no w.
1. K occurs only in Kalendae and a few other words; y and z were introduced from the Greek about 50 B.C., and occur only in foreign words—chiefly Greek.