Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 11.djvu/887

* LATIN LANGUAGE. 803 LATIN LANGUAGE. plicity and directness of expression, anil a con- stant striving after eU'ect by means of rlietorieal elaboration and ornament, defects which are not glaring in writers of the first fifty years after the accession of Tiberius, although sulficiently conspicuous in the authors of Nero's age. The Silver Latinity is most thoroughly represented in the writings of Tacitus. His style and diction are typical, and present this stage of the lan- guage in the best as well as the truest light. ]!ut the language, like the Km])ire itself, was on the decline. The African Latinity of the time of Hadrian (.. I). 117-138)shows a great falling oil' in refinement and general quality, when compared with the Spanish Latinity of the preceding cen- tury. Affected archaisms, wearisome repetitions, and Gro'cisms are especially noticeable, as well as numberless newly created forms and extensive drafts on the plebeian dialect, all of which mark an extreme departure from classical usage. The death of Fronto (a.d. 170) may be con- veniently assigned as the close of the classical period. The post-classical period is commen- surate with the third and last stage in the his- tory of the Latin tongue — the stage which ex- hibits the popular speech (which since the time of Plautus had entered as an in»ignificant factor into literary expression) as reappearing in lit- cr.ature and as developing into the languages of the Romance period. Thus the literary language itself was impoverished and disorganized, for its approximation to the vulgar Latin could no longer be checked even by Claudian and other poets of the revival. This state of things was due in no small meas- ure to the influence of TertuUian and the other fathers of the Christian Church, who introduced the barbarisms of the people into their religious writings. The transformation begun in the sec- ond century was completed in the fifth. The events which mainly conduced to it were the transplanting of the seat of the Empire to Con- stantinople and the invasions of the barbarians. In the East secular literature again found an organ in the Creek language; in the West the Latin language was flooded with foreign forms and idioms through the inroads of the Goths, 'andals. and l.ongobards. In this con<lition it was termed the linflua Rumnna, and distinguished from the lingua Latina, which was cultivated only by the learned. From the lini/iia Romana sprang the eight so- called Romance tongues of modern Europe: Por- tuguese, Spanish, Catalan (in Northeastern Spain and Roussillon), Provencal. French, Italian. Rhir- toromanie (in the Tyrol, Engadino. etc.), and Rmuanian or Wallachian. As perpetuated by Christianity, the Latin langiiuge continued to live, 11i(iMgli in a state of deterimaf ion. lung after the total dismemberment of the Roman Empire. It remain<'d, in fact, the ecclesiastical, political, and ollicial language of Kvirope for centuries. GENEn.i, CnARACTEHisTics. Alphabet, pro- nunciation, grammar, and lexicon. (A) Alphabet. The Romans derived their alphabet from the Greeks of Southern Italy, who used the Chalcidian. or Western Greek, alphabet, in which the letters differed in many respects from the Ionian, which became later the common alpliabet of file Hellenic world. Thus, the Chal- cidian alphabet had the forms <, C for T : >, D for A ; N| for A ; P for H ; R for P; X for 2 ; V for Y. It used X for f instead of x> and V.)L. XI.— S2. •ir for X instead of tp, and had also the diffamma p and the Koppa 9 > while the aspi- rate was the full letter U. From this the Ro- mans adopted their original alphabet of twenty- one letters: ARCDEFZlllKL.l(JPt,)RSTVX. They had no use for the asjurated consonants z^ pli, e = th, 'if = cli, and so accepted these letters only as numerals. Here C occupies the place and has the value of the Greek yiuiiiiiii, while the voiceless sound is represented whidly by X. But in course of time C came to take also the K sound; and K, thus becoming super- fluous, was dropped except in a few special words and names, as Kah-iiiln; Kwso. The fact that C now represented both K and G led to much confusion, and a new letter was invented by a slight modification, so that C was left with the voiceless sound of K, and G was used for the voiced sound, and substituted in the alphaliet for Z, which had ceased to be used. A reminiscence of the original sound of C as G is preserved, however, in the abbreviation C. = Gaius and ex. = Gncriis. In transcribing Greek words into Latin in the early period, V was used for Y, and S (initial) and SS (medial) for f — as in Jiiirnis =z Pijrrhus. soiia = fiii^, atticisso =: dTTocifu. It was only in the first century B.C. that the Gi'eek letters Y and Z were actual- Iv introduced into Latin. The alphabet then had twentv-three letters: ABCDEFGHIKLMXOPQR STVXYZ. The Emperor Claudius (a.d. 41-54) endeavored to add three new letters, to represent the consonantal V (our W), the modified V (as German i with umlaut), and the sound PS; but these had only an ephemeral existence. I.»itin was first written houstrophedon, that is, alter- nately from right to left and from left to right, as on the primitive cippus found in the Forum. The fihula Prcvtustinu and the Diirnox inscription show it written from right to left ; but later it was always written from left to right. (B) Pronunci.^tiox. In the modern teaching of Latin, various methods of pronunciation have been employed, as the "Roman method,' the 'Con- tinental method.' the 'English method.' As Latin has never ceased to be spoken as a learned lan- guage, its pronunciation has followed in general the principles governing the language of each country in which it is used. Thus Cicero, as a Latin name, would usually be pronounced in Ger- many Tsitxcrn. in Italy Chicluro, in Spain Thithcro, in France Sis&o, in England Si.iero. The Church of Rome uses a form of pronuncia- tion developed from the modern languages during the Middle .gcs : and this is essentially the same in all coiuitries. though modified, of course, by the native language of the speaker. This is the so-called 'Continental' pronunciation. The "Eng- lish methoil.' still used in England, consists in pronouncing Latin words precisely as if they were English, each syllable, however, being pro- nounced as such. The 'Roman method.' an at- tempt to attain to the real pronunciation of I.;itin in the time of Cicero, is now almost universal in the universities, colleges, and .schools of this counfry. The vowels arc pronounced almost as in the Romance languages (Italian, French, Span- ish), i.e. long and short A. I. U, close E and 0. and open E and O. The diphthongs are .E (like » in »it)i, 0^ and 01 (as in .<ioil). EI (as in rein), AV (like oir in oirt). EU (sounded separately, with greater stress on the E). VI (as wc). The consonants have their English sounds, with the