southern Spain, and Africa. This attempt on his part aroused a national
spirit among the peoples of these lands, and developed in them a sense of
their national independence and individuality. They threw off the foreign
yoke and became separate peoples, and developed, each of them, a language
of its own. Naturally this sentiment became effective at somewhat
different periods in different countries. For France the point may be
fixed in the sixth century, for Spain and Italy, in the seventh, and at
these dates Latin may be said to take the form of French, Spanish, and
Italian.




The Latin of the Common People



Unless one is a professional philologist he feels little interest in the
language of the common people. Its peculiarities in pronunciation, syntax,
phraseology, and the use of words we are inclined to avoid in our own
speech, because they mark a lack of cultivation. We test them by the
standards of polite society, and ignore them, or condemn them, or laugh at
them as abnormal or illogical or indicative of ignorance. So far as
literature goes, the speech of the common people has little interest for
us because it is not the recognized literary medium. These two reasons
have prevented the average man of cultivated tastes from giving much
attention to the way in which the masses speak, and only the professional
student has occupied himself with their language. This is unfortunate
because the speech of the common people has many points of interest, and,
instead of being illogical, is usually much more rigid in its adherence