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words redemptionem, integrum, nativus, etc., are represented in French in two forms, and these two so strikingly differing from each other? As the answer to this question embodies a fact of paramount importance, we will go into it as fully as the brief space at our disposal will allow.

The principal element of the French language is Latin; but Latin words, be it at once understood, have entered into the composition of French at different periods and by different processes.

I. In the first place we have a stock of Latin words amounting to about four thousand, and forming the substratum of the whole language, which the different Celtic nations and the Franks who subsequently settled and ruled in Gaul, under the pressure of the superior power and civilisation of the Romans, gradually adopted instead of their own native language.

Now this newly-adopted speech they, as a matter of course, had to shape as best they could, that is to say, as approximately as their deeply-rooted habit of speaking the tongue they had learned from their mothers would allow.' Nor is this the only reason why the new speech, which first went by the name of Romance, offers such a marked contrast with the Classic Latin which we learn in school; for it must be borne in mind that the great bulk of the people had to borrow their new terms from those with whom they were brought into contact, viz. the soldiers and colonists.

Now

Those who have heard foreigners of different nationalities grapple more or less successfully with the difficulties of English pronunciation and clothing the idioms of their mother tongue in English words, will easily understand our meaning.

these settlers on the soil of Gaul did not speak the language of Cicero, no more than in our days the labourers of Dorsetshire or Cumberland speak the Queen's English. They had a dialect of their own which their fathers and forefathers had spoken long before the conquest of Gaul, and known under the name of castrense verbum, or sermo plebeius.

And if we bear in mind that in this popular speech we meet with the forms digtus for digitus; vincre for vincere; saeclum for saeculum, etc; if we further remember that instead of the classic pugna, equus, hebdomas, they used the popular terms batualia, caballus, septimana, it will no longer be a matter of surprise that in modern French we have the shortened forms doigt, vaincre, siècle, and that the meaning of pugna, equus, hebdomas is expressed by bataille, cheval, semaine.

But a time came when the people had absorbed in their speech about as many words as they required for their daily wants; the husbandman had a name for everything relating to ploughing and planting, the artisan a name for every tool and trick of his handicraft, the huntsman a name for every kind of fur and feather; so the process of absorption little by little came to a standstill, and, it need hardly be added, with the practice also the power of spontaneous word framing was lost.

I The warrior and hunter, however, being a born Frank, was loath to give up the old homespun words he had inherited from his forefathers from beyond the Rhine; hence the numerous war terms of Teutonic origin still extant in French :-guerre (werra); massacrer (matsken, Mod. Germ., metzgen); heaume (helm); maréchal (marascalh); éperon (sporo), etc.

Further and higher wants had, however, yet to be supplied. The learned class, in those times exclusively ecclesiastics, went on adding more Latin words, but not from the storehouse of that vulgar Latin tongue, the sermo plebeius, which had supplied the first stock of words, for it was then no longer spoken; the sources from which they drew being such written stores of Latin literature as were then accessible to them. Of the laws which had operated in moulding the language spoken by the common folks they had not even a suspicion. The common people, for instance, had consistently modified the contracted form min'sterium of ministerium, into misterium, and then into mistier, mestier, métier; thus monasterium, or mon'sterium, into monstier, mostier, moustier, and lastly moûtier; and whilst making free with unaccented syllables, they had invariably respected the accented syllable of the Latin word as the core of the new offshoot.1

Not so the scholars, however, who drew their supplies from the written language, in which the tonic accent does not assert itself so strongly as in the spoken language. In their hands frigidus became frigide; frágilis became fragile, etc. So innocent were they of the work done by the people, that in introducing such words as liguer, rançon, intègre, natif, fragile, hôpital, fusion, they were not even aware that ligare, redemptionem, integrum, nativus, fragilis, hospitale, fusionem, were already represented in the French language

Just as in our days and in our English language, the syllable on which the stress is laid emerges almost intact from the process of violent contraction which words have to undergo in popular speech: won't for will not, Bedlam for Bethlehem. In the course of time and with the sanction of usage, what is at first familiar becomes correct.

in the popular form of lier, rançon, entier, naïf, frêle, hotel, foison

To sum up, French words of Latin origin must be subdivided into two classes :

(1) Words of popular (primary) formation moulded spontaneously by the people at large according to fixed laws from the Latin tongue as spoken by the common people.

(2) Words of learned (secondary) formation arbitrarily adopted by the learned from written Latin without regard to any fixed laws.

II. It now remains briefly to explain the laws which have been found to underlie the process of transformation of Latin words into French words.

We will take a few words from our Reader, and putting them side by side with the Latin from which they are derived as

(1) voisin, Lat. vicínus

moisson, Lat. messionem

we find that—

doigt, Lat. dígitus

reine, Lat. regina

the syllable accented in a Latin word always remains in the French word derived from it;

(2) vain, Lat. vánus

fer, Lat. férrum

hiver, Lat. hibérnus

devoir, Lat. debére

any unaccented vowel in the last syllable in a Latin word is either lost altogether or reduced to an e mute in the French

word derived from it;

(3) frêle, Lat. frágilis

spectacle, Lat. spectáculum

fable, Lat. fábula
connaître, Lat. cognoscere

any unaccented vowel in the last syllable but one of a Latin word is lost in the French word derived from it ;

(4) (a) vergogne, Lat. verěcúndia (b) vêtement, Lat. vestīméntum
naïf, Lat. nativus
ornement, Lat, ornāméntum

any unaccented vowel in the syllable immediately preceding the accented syllable of a Latin word is

(a) lost in the French word derived from it, if it is short; but (b) remains if it is long;

(5) venger, Lat. vindicáre

cherté, Lat. caritátem

rançon, Lat. redemptiónem
forger, Lat. fabricáre

the vowel in the syllable not immediately preceding the accented syllable of a Latin word, though unaccented, remains in the French word derived from it.

III. If we put side by side such French and Latin words

as

Fr. raison and Lat. ratio; Fr. paon and Lat. pavo; Fr. lièvre, Lat. lepus Fr. rien res; Fr. Cicéron Cicero; Fr. nuit,

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it is at once obvious that it is not to the nominative case but to one of the oblique cases of these Latin wordsrationem, rem, pavonem, Ciceronem, leporem, noctem, that we must look for the Latin forms upon which the derived French words have been moulded; and this conjecture is fully borne out by the investigations of modern scholarship. When the inhabitants of Gaul began to adopt the parlance of their conquerors, it can easily be imagined that the six Latin cases were too much for their understanding, even supposing that their illiterate masters were able to make a discriminate use of them. From a careful examina

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