While the Classical Latin tongue continued to disintegrate and to reshape itself as an analytical language on the Italian Peninsula, it was subject to still greater disintegrating in fluences in the provinces, where each native race impressed its racial and linguistic char acteristics upon it. In fact these racial char acteristics are noticeable in a striking degree in Italy itself where the tongue of the north is different from that of Rome and the west generally and both are radically different from that of the south and southwest and the ad jacent coastal islands. In the provinces the new Latin tongues that grew out of the decaying Latin shaped themselves in accordance with the tribal influences brought to bear upon them. Italian naturally keeps closer to the Classical Latin than most of the other Romance tongues. Yet the various dialects of southern Italy shows a wide divergency from the Classical tongue. In Spain and Portugal, where the Latin occupation had most influenced the native population, the Latin vocabulary suffers less contraction than in France. Yet in Cata lonia and the east coast of Spain, and in the Provencal districts of France, the tendency toward the suppression of unaccented vowels and word terminations is very noticeable. All this indicates that strong tribal influences were at work shaping the Latin tongue in conformity with the local lingual tendencies. Out of these various native lingual influences grew the modern Romance languages, Italian, French, Spanish, Rumanian, Romanish, Portuguese, Sardinian, Dalmatian (now extinct), Provençal, Catallin and Franco-Provencal. The formation of these Romance tongues was possible only through the spread of Roman rule and the pre.. dominance of Latin over Etruscan, Umbrian and other Italian dialects, and also over Iberian and Gallic. The power of Rome in the prov inces was shown in the imposition of the Latin tongue on the inhabitants of France and Spain.
throughout practically all of which territory and the rest of the vast Roman possessions it was, by the time of Augustus, spoken, with unim portant dialecdc variations.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Romance languages are essentially Latin in vocabulary, yet many changes took place in the Roman tongue before it finally became one of the Romance languages; and these changes were not always the same. Even in France itself there were two distinct forms of the Romance tongue, and various dialects. In Spain the Castilian and the Catalan developed differently; and there also grew up different dialects which still mark off very distinctly different localities of the Iberian Peninsula. Similar conditions prevailed in Italy. The Italian spoken in the Po and Liguria districts very much resembles the northwest Romanic speech; but it has evi dently been also influenced by the dialects of other parts of the country, which forced upon it the loss of the "s" so common in the Iberian tongues. In the centre of Italy the Italian dialect was considerably influenced by the north ern speech; but in the south, a combination of native dialectic speech and Greek and other influences worked together to produce a very considerable variation from the speech of northern Italy in vocabulary, accent and idioma tic turns of expression. In Portugal. too local
conditions produced a Romance tongue con siderably different from Spanish, French and Italian.
The breaking up of the Roman Empire, re moved the one great tendency which held to gether the various different ethnic elements that composed the Roman domains. Political disin tegration followed and brought with it the isolation of various districts. This isolation was helped by the invasion of the Latin country by various Germanic tribes. The Goths, Lom bards and Franks have left their traces on Italy; in Gaul, the Franks took possession of the north, the Burgundians of the east and the Visigoths of the south, during the last half of the 5th century. The Visigoths also overran most of Spain. Under these new conditions new groupings of people succeeded, and out of them sprang new and vigorous nations each of which spoke the Latin tongue in its own way. Soon the people speaking the new tongues could not understand Latin, a proof that the conditions that produced them must have been working silently for a very considerable period of time. Rapid changes in the form of the vocabulary and grammar of these new tongues followed. The primitive peoples who had fal len heir to the Latin language found it too com plicated for their simple uses. So they promptly discarded the future and the passive forms of the verb and, in most cases, made the plural form end in Later on, when they found the need of the future and passive, they formed the former by means of an auxiliary verb and substituted for the latter a reflexive form. The Latin genitive, too, gradually dis appeared, and the accusative became the com mon form of the substantive after prepositions, and finally the only form. The future had early been replaced by the present; and this old use of the present and also its employment to replace the perfect is still common in dialect speech and the language of the illiterate in the Romance tongues. The profuse use of diminu tires in -ullus and -elks. noticeable (mite early in the Romance tongues, was carried to excess in Italian and Spanish; and the Latin Ameri cans have so abused this effective feature of the Romance tongues as to injure the beauty of Spanish. Articles were also manufactured out of the pronouns ille and ipse, which assumed distinct forms in the different Romance lan guages. The genitive, when it went by the board, was replaced by de with the accusative. The frequent use of the accusative in this con nection led to the suppression of the nominative and the employment of the accusative in its place, thus aiding that simplicity which always appeals to rude undeveloped intelligences.