Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/246

226 and antiquarian trifling, and patiently repeated by modern and even very recent inquirers, that Roman civilization derived its germs and its main substance from Etruria. If this were the truth, some traces of it should be especially apparent in this field; but on the contrary the nucleus of the Latin art of writing was Greek, and its development was so national, that it did not even adopt the very desirable Etruscan sign for f. Indeed, when there is an appearance of borrowing, as in the numeral signs, the borrowing was on the part of the Etruscans, who derived from the Romans at least the sign for 50.

In fine, it is a significant fact, that among all the Italian stocks the development of the Greek alphabet chiefly consisted in a process of corruption. Thus the mediæ disappeared in the whole of the Etruscan dialects, while the Umbrians lost γ and d, the Samnites d, and the Romans γ; and among the latter d also threatened to amalgamate with r. In like manner among the Etruscans o and u early coalesced, and even among the Latins we meet with a tendency to the same corruption. Nearly the converse occurred in the case of the sibilants; for while the Etruscan retained the three signs z, s, sh, and the Umbrian rejected the last but developed two new sibilants in its room, the Samnite and the Faliscan confined themselves like the Greek to s and z, and the Roman of later times to s alone. It is plain that the more delicate distinctions of sound were duly felt by the introducers of the alphabet, men of culture and masters of two languages; but after the national writing became wholly detached from the Hellenic mother-alphabet, the mediæ and tenues gradually came to coincide, and the sibilants and vowels were thrown into disorder—shiftings or rather destructions of sound, of which the first in particular is entirely foreign to the Greek. The destruction of the forms of flexion and derivation went hand in hand with this corruption of sounds. The cause of this barbarization was, upon the whole, simply the necessary process of corruption which is continuously eating away every language, where its progress is not checked by literature and reason; only in this case evidences of what has elsewhere passed away without leaving a trace have been preserved in the writing of sounds. The circumstance that this barbarizing process affected the Etruscans more strongly than any other of the stocks adds to the numerous proofs of their inferior