Introduction to the Grammar of the Romance Languages (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: both these classes we shall speak hereafter. In connexion with these influences we must criticize the degree of adulteration which has been sustained by each of the Romance idioms, the German and Greek influences having been nearly similar everywhere; it is not so much the numbers of the foreign words, as the number of the foreign languages and the constitution of the latter (many of which were less easily amalgamated with the Latin than the Greek and German were), which remain to be criticized by the etymological inquirer. JURISDICTIONS. We now proceed to the second topic of our discourse, namely, the several provinces or jurisdictions of the Romance family of languages. Within each jurisdiction we have to enumerate the nations that originally inhabited or that subsequently colonized it; and as regards their languages we must briefly examine their peculiar components so far as these can yet be ascertained; their limits, their names, their earliest public use, their earliest memorials and documents, and the first grammatical labors that have been bestowed on them. Some attention must also be devoted to the most important popular dialects, in which, . however, we shall limit ourselves to their literal phonetic relations. ? While the various names of the several languages have to be mentioned in turn, we must not have the general name unnoticed. The Romans called their own language Latina; the term Romana appears but once in early times in a poem in Plin. Hist. Nat. 31, 2, and in the middle ages very rarely (comp. A. W. Schlegel's Observ., not. 24). The phrase Romanesque languages (Romanische Sprachen) was first used in recent times, and in Germany, as a general expression for all the descendants of the Latin. In former periods each of these languages laid claim to this deno...