The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature by Frank Frost Abbott
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page 18 of 203 (08%)
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spoken elsewhere in the Empire.
A more satisfactory explanation seems to be that first clearly propounded by the Italian philologist, Ascoli. His reasoning is that when we acquire a foreign language we find it very difficult, and often impossible, to master some of the new sounds. Our ears do not catch them exactly, or we unconsciously substitute for the foreign sound some sound from our own language. Our vocal organs, too, do not adapt themselves readily to the reproduction of the strange sounds in another tongue, as we know from the difficulty which we have in pronouncing the French nasal or the German guttural. Similarly English differs somewhat as it is spoken by a Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. The Frenchman has a tendency to import the nasal into it, and he is also inclined to pronounce it like his own language, while the German favors the guttural. In a paper on the teaching of modern languages in our schools, Professor Grandgent says:[14] "Usually there is no attempt made to teach any French sounds but _u_ and the four nasal vowels; all the rest are unquestioningly replaced by the English vowels and consonants that most nearly resemble them." The substitution of sounds from one's own language in speaking a foreign tongue, and the changes in voice-inflection, are more numerous and more marked if the man who learns the new language is uneducated and acquires it in casual intercourse from an uneducated man who speaks carelessly. This was the state of things in the Roman provinces of southern Europe when the Goths, Lombards, and other peoples from the North gradually crossed the frontier and settled in the territory of Latin-speaking peoples. In the sixth century, for instance, the Lombards in Italy, the Franks in France, and the Visigoths in Spain would each give to the Latin which they spoke a twist peculiar to themselves, and out of the one Latin came Italian, out of the second, the language of France, and out of the |
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