in Dalmatian c before e are always preserved as velars, and in south Sardinian and in Rumanian the palatalization is more recent, and secondary. The preservation of the tenues between vowels as breathed fortes is peculiar to Rumano-Dalmatian, but as north Sardinian used breathed lenes in their place, while the dialect of Nuoro, in Sardinia, preserved the fortes, we have every ground for assuming that central and south Sardinia also possessed either fortes or lenes in earlier times. Moreover, south Italy, Sicily and a large part of central Italy as far as the Apennines replace the old Latin tenues either with breathed fortes or breathed lenes, in marked contrast to the regions of the Po, to Gallic and the Iberian group. All these phenomena may perhaps be explained in conjunction with two historical events. By the abandonment of the province of Dacia (in A.D. 270), Rumanian lost its close touch with the languages of nearest affinity; and the division of the empire under Diocletian and Constantine necessarily entailed a linguistic division. At that epoch the linguistic conditions were roughly as follows:—
The principal changes in the vowel-system, especially the development of qualitative beside quantitative variations, had been accomplished, but there was still a difference between ĭ and ẹ, ŭ and ọ̄. The old future had disappeared, and no tendency to produce a substitute had as yet appeared. The Latin pluperfect subjunctive still maintained its old usage, probably also the imperfect subjunctive and the future perfect. In declensions the type membrum, -a, had begun to spread; but corpus, -ora, was still in existence. Sardinia seems to have been, perhaps owing to its isolation, the first to have detached itself from this group. For it was not content with differentiating ē and ī, but it also retains -s, whereas the East-Rumanian and an Italian group suppressed -s, and in consequence also the difference between the nominative and the accusative singular. This and the levelling of neuters in -us and masculines in -u made it possible for the types membra and corpora to spread at the expense of the type loci,—a possibility of which South Italian and Rumanian made the fullest use.
On the given basis the various languages carried on their various developments, influenced partly by contiguity of other idioms, partly by causes unknown to us. Among neighbouring idioms, Greek had by right of its degree of civilization and its political power great influence in giving Rumanian and South Italian a similar direction, and that at a time when every trace of a geographical connexion between these two language-groups had long vanished. Thus, the replacing of the construction “I will come” by “I will that I come” took its rise in Greece and was passed on to Rumania and Apulia. The rise of the new future voĭu cântá, “I will sing,” in Rumanian is probably due to Greek influence. In Latin itself both ille caballus and caballus ille are found, the position depending on the accentual conditions of the sentence. Then the loss of s made room for the form caball[u] ille with a victory for the inverted order. In Rumania alone this was the actual process, under the influence of the surrounding speech—Illyrian or Bulgarian, or perhaps independently of them, in this latter case serving as prototype to these languages. Dalmatian and South Italian, on the other hand, were so closely connected with the languages that preserved s and therefore prefixed the article that in this particular they separated from Rumanian. This is not the place to show how the Rumanian vocabulary and the structure of words was permeated markedly by elements from Slav, less markedly by elements from Turkish, Mod. Greek and Hungarian, which gave the language an alien appearance in point of vocabulary.
In its consonants, and, as far as one can judge, in its morphology, Dalmatian has preserved the stamp of antiquity. But in its vowel-system there are marked changes, especially in the substitution of diphthongs for close vowels, e.g. changing a to e, u through the ü stage to oi, ị to ei, ọ to au, e to ai. Diphthongs such as they appear also in Istrian and Abruzzian, so that we must presuppose some sort of connexion.
It may be that Sardinian took another course of development because (A.D. 458) the island was rent from Rome and incorporated in the African empire of Genseric, king of the Vandals. Therefore the sympathies of Sardinia were alienated from Italy, and turned on the one hand towards Africa (and unfortunately we have no information as to the “latinity” of this region), on the other towards the Iberian peninsula. These conditions lasted for a while, but later we find Genoa and Pisa fighting at intervals for supremacy in Sardinia, their organization being in many points identical with that of the island. On the whole, this new combination has not materially affected the language, especially in Logodoro. The vowel system (of great antiquity), as well as the velar pronunciation of c before e, i, remained unchanged, neither did they get as far as to adopt the future-forms current on the mainland; on the contrary, the Sardinians arrived independently and later at their usage of depo cantare or haia a cantar. But the use of ipse as an article in Sardinia, Mallorca, and in the earliest times also in the Catalanian-Gascon area, clearly proves the linguistic connexion which for a time covered this area, and we may also see some connexion in the fact that the lenes became voiced between vowels. On the whole, and in spite of everything, Sardinian is the most archaic of the Romance languages. Owing to its retaining s, it has failed to extend the membra-tempora types of formation, indeed it has almost rejected them entirely. It has retained the imperfect subjunctive to this day, and as a corollary it has lost the pluperfect of that mood. And though every Romance language has a number of Latin words that are not common to the rest, yet in this language the number of these ἅπαξ λεγόμενα [=hapax legomena, plural of hapax legomenon “word occurring only once in a given corpus”] is greater than in others, and it is noteworthy that these have here survived such common expressions as domo, “house,” mannu, “great,” with other examples.
The East-Rumanian group (coupled with Sardinia) finds its counterpart in the great group based upon the Latinity of Gaul, the Iberian peninsula, and north Italy. This group contains a considerable number of fundamental peculiarities in phonology, morphology and vocabulary which prima facie lead us to assume a fairly long period of contact.
The chief of these peculiarities is the final change of the vowel-system, i.e. the loss of the distinction between ē and ĭ, between ō and ŭ; then the change of breathed plosives and fricatives between vowels into voiced plosives and fricatives respectively; the use of the pluperfect subjunctive instead of the lost imperfect subjunctive (Ital. cantasse, Fr. que je chantasse, Sp. cantase, Port. cantasse), the formation of a new future from the infinitive of the verb and the present, or (as the case may be) the imperfect or perfect of habere, e.g. Ital. canterò, canterei, Fr. je chanterai, chanterais, Sp. cantare, cantaria. If it is safe to assume that this latter formation had its origin in places where we find it most firmly rooted, we are led to assign it to the north of France. For it is only there that both elements in the formation are inseparably connected from the beginning of our record. In the old Provençal the two constituent parts are still separable; in the oldest Spanish and Portuguese their position is not fixed (i.e. the auxiliary may follow or precede the verb). In north Italy we frequently find the form avrò cantare instead of cantarò, obviously because this formation is not properly acclimatized. But at any rate it is clear that the change of function from cantare habeo to cantabo belongs, to the time when the three great groups were still in close contact, and the evidence of the Latin texts falls into line with this view, showing this construction well established from the second half of the 4th century.[1] In the vocabulary we must note, among other things, the introduction of Germanic words, e.g. elmo, Fr. heaume, Sp. yelmo, “helmet”; harpa, “harp,” Ital. arpa, Fr. harpe, Sp. and Port. arpa; medus, “meed,” which is found in Antimus and Isidore, but disappears later (cf. O. Fr. mies, “meed”); waidanian, Ital. guadagnare, Fr. gagner, Sp. guadañar, and many more.
The further steps in the process of differentiation were conditioned by the breaking up of the Roman empire by the great migrations. The establishment of the rule of the Franks in north Gaul, of the Visigoths in south Gaul and the Iberian peninsula, loosened old ties, created new nations and in consequence new and independent groups of languages.
The Iberian group was marked primarily by a striking simplicity in its flexions. The three-case system was given up at an early stage, even in prehistoric times, and has left no traces whatever. Owing to the preservation of -s the type membra was doomed to perish, and thus we find, from the beginning of our record and therefore presumably soon after the great cleavage took place, the prevalence in nouns of the following simple rule: sing. -e, -o, -a; plur. -es, -os, -as. The loss of the dative may have some connexion with the fact that the form illui for the 3rd personal pronoun had not yet established itself; and the desire for uniformity may have ousted the nominative of o- stems. There are analogies in the conjugation. The pluperfect indicative was preserved, and even (largely) with a Latin significance, but in the region of flexion much simplification took place, e.g. uniformity of accentuation in the three conjugations, marked reduction of the s- perfect and u- perfect forms and a great reduction in the number of u- participles.
The vocabulary is characterized by certain archaisms, and still more by the fact that a series of common ideas are rendered by new words limited in use to the Iberian peninsula. Thus we have querer (quaerere) instead of velle; quedar (quietare) instead of manere; callar (deriv. uncertain) for tacere; hablar (fabulare), “to speak”; llegar (plicare), “to arrive”; dejar (?) instead of laxare, &c. Further, we may mention the preference of tenere to habere even for the formation of perfect-forms, of which examples are to be found in Orosius, and of magis to plus for expressing comparisons, for which also we may find examples in Latin authors or the Iberian peninsula. The influence of the Goths or Suevi and Vandals on the vocabulary is inconsiderable, and when we trace it it is not easy to explain; e.g. Galician laverca, “lark,” is clearly from a western Gothic *lawerka, but it is difficult to see why the name for this bird should have been supplied by the Germanic. To sum up, one may say that the Latin of Iberia was a self-contained language, at first showing little modification by influences from Iberian, or later by those from Germanic; further, that its development was slow, and that it aimed at simplicity.
At the present day there are three great groups, running almost
- ↑ See Thielmann, in Archiv f. lat. Lexikogr. ii. 48 seq.
