It appears to be taken for granted that the Romans pronounced their language as we do at present, so far at least as the enunciation of all the consonants, however we may admit our deviations from the classical standard in propriety of sounds and in measure of time. Yet the example of our own language, and of French, might show us that orthography may become a very inadequate representative of pronunciation. It is indeed capable of proof that in the purest ages of Latinity some variation existed between these two. Those numerous changes in spelling which distinguish the same words in the poetry of Ennius and of Virgil are best explained by the supposition of their being accommodated, to the current pronunciation. Harsh combinations of letters, softened down through delicacy of ear or rapidity of utterance, gradually lost their place in the written language. Thus exfregit and adrogavit assumed a form representing their more liquid sound; and auctor was latterly spelled autor, which has been followed in French and Italian. Autor was probably so pronounced at all times; and the orthography was afterwards corrected or corrupted, whichever we please to say, according to the sound. We have the best authority to assert that the final m was very faintly pronounced, rather it seems as a rest and short interval between two syllables than an articulate letter; nor indeed can we conceive upon what other ground it was subject to elision before a vowel in verse, since we cannot suppose that the nice ears of Rome would have submitted to a capricious rule of poetry for which Greece presented no analogy.[g]
A decisive proof, in my opinion, of the deviation which took place, through the rapidity of ordinary elocution, from the strict laws of enunciation, may be found in the metre of Terence. His verses, which are absolutely refractory to the common laws of prosody, may be readily scanned by the application of this principle. Thus, in the first act of the Heautontimorumenos, a part selected at random, I have found, I. Vowels contracted or dropped so as to shorten the word by a syllable; in rei, viâ, diutius, ei, solius, eam, unius, suam, divitias, senex, voluptatem, illius, semel; II. The proceleusmatic foot, or four short syllables, instead of the dactyl; scen. i. v. 59, 73, 76, 88, 109; scen. ii. v. 36; III. The elision of s in words ending with us or is short, and sometimes even of the whole syllable, before the next word beginning with a vowel; in scen. i. v. 30, 81, 98, 101, 116, 119; scen. ii. v. 28. IV. The first syllable of ille is repeatedly shortened, and indeed nothing is more usual in Terence than this licence; whence we may collect how ready this word was for abbreviation into the French and Italian articles. V. The last letter of apud is cut off, scen. i. v. 120; and scen. ii. v. 8. VI. Hodie is used as a pyrrhichius, in scen. ii. v. 11. VII. Lastly, there is a clear instance of a short syllable, the antepenultimate of impulerim, lengthened on account of the accent at the 113th verse of the first scene.
Its corruption by the populace,
and the provincials.
These licences are in all probability chiefly colloquial, and would not have been adopted in public harangues, to which the precepts of rhetorical writers commonly relate. But if the more elegant language of the Romans, since such we must suppose to have been copied by Terence for his higher characters, differed so much in ordinary discourse from their orthography, it is probable that the vulgar went into much greater deviations. The popular pronunciation errs generally, we might say perhaps invariably, by abbreviation of words, and by liquefying consonants, as is natural to the rapidity of colloquial speech.[h] It is by their knowledge of orthography and etymology that the more educated part of the community is preserved from these corrupt modes of pronunciation. There is always therefore a standard by which common speech may be rectified; and in proportion to the diffusion of knowledge and politeness the deviations from it will be more slight and gradual. But in distant provinces, and especially where the language itself is but of recent introduction, many more changes may be expected to occur. Even in France and England there are provincial dialects, which, if written with all their anomalies of pronunciation as well as idiom, would seem strangely out of unison with the regular language; and in Italy, as is well known, the varieties of dialect are still more striking. Now, in an advancing state of society, and especially with such a vigorous political circulation as we experience in England, language will constantly approximate to uniformity, as provincial expressions are more and more rejected for incorrectness or inelegance. But, where literature is on the decline, and public misfortunes contract the circle of those who are solicitous about refinement, as in the last ages of the Roman empire, there will be no longer any definite standard of living speech, nor any general desire to conform to it if one could be found; and thus the vicious corruptions of the vulgar will entirely predominate. The niceties of ancient idiom will be totally lost, while new idioms will be formed out of violations of grammar sanctioned by usage, which, among a civilized people, would have been proscribed at their appearance.
Such appears to have been the progress of corruption in the Latin language. The adoption of words from the Teutonic dialects of the barbarians, which took place very freely, would not of itself have destroyed the character of that language, though it sullied its purity. The worst law Latin of the middle ages is still Latin, if its barbarous terms have been bent to the regular inflections. It is possible, on the other hand, to write whole pages of Italian, wherein every word shall be of unequivocal Latin derivation, though the character and personality, if I may so say, of the language be entirely dissimilar. But, as I conceive, the loss of literature took away the only check upon arbitrary pronunciation and upon erroneous grammar. Each people innovated through caprice, imitation of their neighbours, or some of those indescribable causes which dispose the organs of different nations to different sounds. The French melted down the middle consonants; the Italians omitted the final. Corruptions arising out of ignorance were mingled with those of pronunciation. It would have been marvellous if illiterate and semi-barbarous provincials had preserved that delicate precision in using the inflections of tenses which our best scholars do not clearly attain. The common speech of any people whose language is highly complicated will be full of solecisms. The French inflections are not comparable in number or delicacy to the Latin, and yet the vulgar confuse their most ordinary forms.
But, in all probability, the variation of these derivative languages from popular Latin has been considerably less than it appears. In the purest ages of Latinity the citizens of Rome itself made use of many terms which we deem barbarous, and of many idioms which we should reject as modern. That highly complicated grammar, which the best writers employed, was too elliptical and obscure, too deficient in the connecting parts of speech, for general use. We cannot indeed ascertain in what degree the vulgar Latin differed from that of Cicero or Seneca. It would be highly absurd to imagine, as some are said to have done, that modern Italian was spoken at Rome under Augustus.[] But I believe it may be asserted not only that much the greater part of those words in the present language of Italy which strike us as incapable of a Latin etymology are in fact derived from those current in the Augustan age, but that very many phrases which offended nicer ears prevailed in the same vernacular speech, and have passed from thence into the modern French and Italian. Such, for example, was the frequent use of prepositions to indicate a relation between two parts of a sentence which a classical writer would have made to depend on mere inflection.[k]
From the difficulty of retaining a right discrimination of tense seems to have proceeded the active auxiliary verb. It is possible that this was borrowed from the Teutonic languages of the barbarians, and accommodated both by them and by the natives to words of Latin origin. The passive auxiliary is obtained by a very ready resolution of any tense in that mood, and has not been altogether dispensed with even in Greek, while in Latin it is used much more frequently. It is not quite so easy to perceive the propriety of the active habeo or teneo, one or both of which all modern languages have adopted as their auxiliaries in conjugating the verb. But in some instances this analysis is not improper; and it may be supposed that nations, careless of etymology or correctness, applied the same verb by a rude analogy to cases where it ought not strictly to have been employed.[m]
Next to the changes founded on pronunciation and to the substitution of auxiliary verbs for inflections, the usage of the definite and indefinite articles in nouns appears the most considerable step in the transmutation of Latin into its derivative languages. None but Latin, I believe, has ever wanted this part of speech; and the defect to which custom reconciled the Romans would be an insuperable stumbling-block to nations who were to translate their original idiom into that language. A coarse expedient of applying unus, ipse, or ille to the purposes of an article might perhaps be no unfrequent vulgarism of the provincials; and after the Teutonic tribes brought in their own grammar, it was natural that a corruption should become universal, which in fact supplied a real and essential deficiency.
Pronunciation no longer regulated by quantity.