Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/193

 LATIN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 1ST tains also a very considerable number of for- eign words and forms which cannot be resolved into Greek elements. Niebuhr was probably the first who succeeded in separating the Greek from the non- Greek elements. Lange, Lassen, Muller, Doderlein, Mommsen, Auf recht, JQrch- hoff, Gorssen, and G. Gurtius have made these differences clearer. Like the Hellenes, the Lat- ins remodelled the linguistic material imported by the Pelasgians, according to their own needs and under the influence of the languages spo- ken in the surrounding districts of Italy. (See ITALIC RACES AND LANGUAGES.) During the first 500 years of the existence of Rome, Latin was thus developed into a peculiar idiom with- out experiencing the guidance of a native lit- erature; there is therefore nothing whereby the internal history of the formation of the Latin language can be traced. Dated inscrip- tions of high antiquity are also exceedingly rare; the oldest are those of Scipio Barbatus at Luceria, or of the second half of the 5th century of the city. During the long period of nearly eight centuries, from about 250 B. 0. to A. D. 500, while Latin was a living tongue and had a literature, it experienced compara- tively few grammatical changes. Some ar- chaic endings of nouns and verbs in declension and conjugation were eliminated during the classic period, but otherwise the grammar maintained great stability. The vocabulary, however, was constantly enriched. Some wri- ters took great pleasure in forming new words, many of which met with general adoption and came to be used in place of other words, which gradually disappeared. Latin was in its highest perfection in the 1st century B. C., and afterward deteriorated. Disputations were then made about the classicism or Latinity (latinitas) of words and phrases. Latinitas was probably the colloquial language of the higher classes, in distinction from the archaisms and mutilations of the uncultured. A people which owed its entire literary culture to foreign lands, and which constantly came in contact with foreign nations, necessarily adopted a multitude of foreign words into its vocabulary. With the beginnings of a literature came also an influx of Greek expressions, not only for objects of art and science, as theatrum, tra- gcedia, philosophia, grammaticus, but also for common household utensils, as amphora, abacus, and aulcBum. By taking up a dictionary and looking over the words beginning with chamce, chrys, cy, dia, ep, eu, Ji (especially hy leuc, meso, mono, my, nyct, orth, oxy, pseudo, sym, syn, th, x, and z, one may easily gain an idea of the vast number of Greek words which the Lafr- in language contains. Hebrew, Syriac, Punic, Persian, and Parthic words were also incorpo- rated, but not as largely as Celtic expressions acquired with the conquest of Gallic lands. Germanic terms also make their appearance during the time of the empire ; a few, as 'bal- lux, a grain of gold, gurdvs, stupid, and laurex, a rabbit, are said to be of Spanish (probably of Iberian) origin ; and mastruca, fur, accord- ing to Quintilian, is a Sardinian word. Never- theless, excepting what Latin has borrowed from Greek, it contains remarkably little of foreign origin; and in spite of the constant intercourse with foreign lands and nations, it always retained its own original structure and composition. The history of the Latin alpha- bet, so important on account of its remaining in use in several of the most cultured languages of Europe, has not been completely and accu- rately retraced. The chief cause of this fail- ure is the lack of written monuments of a date earlier than the 3d century B. C. Cicero and Quintilian say that the Latin alphabet was originally composed of 21 letters, and ended with the letter X ; but the earliest monuments exhibit only 20 different characters. Mommsen, F. Lenormant, and other great palseographical scholars are of opinion that the letter which disappeared was Z. The argument is, that the Latin alphabet was formed after the model of the Greek, and that the letter G, subsequently introduced, was put between F and H because the disappearance of the Z had left a gap there. Mommsen considers the character 3f on the inscription of Milonia to be a Z. It is sup- posed that the Greek alphabet reached Rome by way of Sicily or from Cumaa. Kirchhoff, in Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissen- schaften zu Berlin (1863), was the first to per- ceive that the ^Eolo-Doric variety of the Greek alphabet, employed in the Chalcidian colonies, was the parent of the Latin characters. The first and second columns of the following illus- tration seem to establish the opinion. The first notable change in the composition of the alphabet was the reduction of the sibilants S and Z to the single letter S, and of the gutturals C and K to C only. It is evident, however, that C and K did not at first represent the same sound. As in Greek, C was originally a G. It was customary to write K before a, instead of C, which stood before the other vowels ; thus, Karihago, merlcatus, for the defi- nite orthography Carthago, mercatvs. Ottfried Muller suggests that it is due to Etruscan in- fluence that in course of time all gutturals were pronounced hard, which deprived the C of the G sound, and rendered it homophonous with K. Thereafter C rapidly supplanted K, and was gen- erally written for every guttural sound except Q. The need of a G sound soon became apparent again, but as the form C had lately acquired the power of K, another letter was fashioned by a slight appendix to the character C, form- ing G. The letters Y and Z came late into use to supply articulations of Hellenic words which the Latin alphabet could not indicate. They were not generally employed before the time of Cicero, when they were made to follow the original series of Latin letters. The pronunci- ation of Latin, as now taught, is not uniform. Scholars in different countries generally pro- nounce it substantially as they do their own languages. In the United States, however,