culture of Italian begins at the court of Frederic II., about A.D. 1200, and within a century and a half of that time lived, sang, and narrated the three greatest writers of Italy—Dante (ob. 1321), Petrarch (ob. 1374), and Boccaccio (ob. 1375). The Spanish heroic legend commences in the twelfth century; and there are monuments of Portuguese speech of about the same time. Among these languages, the French is that which has undergone most change during the historical period; the oldest French and Provençal form a kind of middle term between the modern language and the ancient Latin, illustrating the transition from the latter to the former.
But if we have called the branch of Indo-European speech to which these tongues belong the Romanic, we have done so out of regard to its later history and present constitution, and not altogether properly. To the student of Indo-European philology, these are the recent branchings of a single known stock, the Latin; to trace their development is a task of the highest interest, a whole linguistic school in itself; they furnish rich and abundant illustration of all the processes of linguistic growth: but, as regards any direct bearing upon the history of Indo-European speech, they have value only through the Latin, their common parent. The remoter relations of the Latin itself receive light from various sources. In its familiar classic form, it represents to us the speech of the learned and educated Romans of a century or two before the Christian era; it is somewhat refined by literary culture from the diction of the oldest authors whose works have come down to us, in fragments or entire—as Livius Andronicus, Plautus, Terence—and is far more notably changed from the language of earlier Roman times—as is shown by the yet extant monuments, like the inscription on the Duilian column (about B.C. 260), that on the sarcophagus of a founder of the Scipio family (a little older than the last mentioned), and especially the Salian hymn and song of the fratres arvales, of yet earlier but uncertain date, in which the best Latin scholar would find himself wholly at fault without the traditional interpretation which is handed down along with them: in these monuments is preserved to us
