This slowness of pace affected the language. It took six centuries to transmute the Latin into the Romance tongues, a process as tremendous in its way as the formation during geological eons of the limestone and the chalk.
Two great movements had taken place in the speech of Gaul and Spain; first the imposition of the Latin tongue on the conquered provinces and then the reversal of the process till the Latin was again corrupted back into dialects. In the return journey the Latin remained as a foundation and in it were left many words belonging to the ancient language of the country, so that non-Latin words in Romance may date from either before or after the introduction of the classic tongue.
It was not until the fourth century that it showed signs of giving way. It broke up gradually into modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian Provençal. The tribes of the Acquitani gave the character to the dialects of the South-west, where, according to many writers, their speech still survives in the Basque language.
It would be a long story, that of the great Romance tongues from the earlier waverings of the Latin in the fourth century, to the eleventh century, when the first troubadour, Guillem de Poictiers, delighted the knights and ladies of Limousin and half France with his songs.
The langue d'oc was by that time ready to his hand, or so it would seem, for it is a remarkable fact that there is scarcely any difference between the language of this pioneer troubadour and that of his latest successors in the thirteenth century, whose voices were so soon to be drowned in the din and horror of the Albigensian wars.
Two hundred years of dance and song! Something at least saved from the gloom and folly of the human story!
During the six hundred years from the fourth to the eleventh century modern Europe, its religion, its institutions, its language, its destiny were in process of formation. And a rude process it was.
A PROVENÇAL FARM.
By E. M. Synge.