work on the meaning of words which has come down to us in a later abridgment; Aulus Gellius, who, toward the end of the second century, compiled a huge scrap-book on a variety of subjects, many of them of great linguistic interest, and, with the exception of a few chapters, still extant; Priscianus Caesariensis, who wrote under Justinian at Constantinople eighteen books of grammatical commentaries which form the most complete grammar of antiquity; and Aelius Donatus (A.D. 333), whose elementary treatise was so highly thought of in the Middle Ages that the name "donat" (Chaucer) was used as a generic term for a grammar.

From these and many other writers one gathers a great mass of instructive facts; and their very silence is sometimes as significant as what they say.

(2) The orthography of the language itself as seen in the inscriptions. Latin orthography was in the main phonetic (Quintilian, I. 7. 11). The language was pronounced as it was spelled. But as is always the case, changes in orthography lagged a little behind changes in the pronunciation. Hence even the blunders made by an ignorant lapidary in cutting an inscription are often a source of information to us.

(3) The representation in Greek letters of Roman sounds. A number of Greek writers treated of Roman history, Roman biography, and Roman geography. In so doing they were obliged to represent many Latin names and words in Greek characters. But many of these writers had no particular knowledge of the Latin language, and hence spelled these Latin names and words phonetically. Their method of doing this is both interesting and instructive. The writers of this sort who are oftenest cited are Polybius (B.C. 175), the friend of the younger Scipio and the author of a General History of Rome from the Second Punic War down to the conquest of Macedonia; Strabo the geographer (24 B.C.); Diodorus Siculus, the contemporary of Julius Caesar and author of an Historical Library in forty books; and Plutarch (A.D. 80), the best known of the Greek writers on Roman subjects^[2].

(4) A critical comparison of all the modern languages of Europe that are derived from the Latin (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) with reference to those points wherein they all agree. This source of information is of less importance than one would think, because these languages are not derived directly from the classical Latin, but from Latin that was either provincial or modified by foreign influences. Still, this comparison is useful in corroborating facts that are elsewhere learned, and is of positive value when not contradicted by other evidence.

(5) The traditions of scholars, and especially of the Roman Catholic Church, which in its rites has employed Latin continuously from the first century down to the present time. The rhymes of the early Christian hymns also have a bearing on this subject.

(6) The general principles of the science of phonology, which are now well established and understood, and are of great value in detecting erroneous assumptions which would otherwise pass unchallenged.

From these six sources can be gained a very accurate understanding of how Latin was pronounced in the days of Cicero and Caesar. It is not too much to claim that the system of pronunciation upon which scholars are now agreed, differs less from that of the Romans of the Augustan Age than does our modern pronunciation of English differ from that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

[It is not always remembered that only very gradually was the true pronunciation of Latin lost in Europe. Scholars long retained the essential features of it, and by the fact of their constant intercourse long prevented the growth of local and national variations from the established method. Great teachers like Erasmus passed from country to country, lecturing in Latin at the universities of Italy, Germany, Holland, Trance, and England, teaching pupils of all nationalities, and being everywhere understood without any difficulty, for Latin was the lingua franca of the educated, and one general pronunciation of it prevailed. Even in England, it was only after that country's isolation, political and religious, in the sixteenth century, that an "English pronunciation" arose, and this was long protested against, e.g. by Cardinal Wolsey, by Milton, and as late as the last century by Ainsworth (1746) and Philipps (1750). For the Continental traditions, see Justus Lipsius in his Dialogus de Recta Pronunciatione Linguae Latinae; and Erasmus, De Recta Latini Graecique Sermonis Pronunciatione (Basic, 1528). In Scotland, the Continental sound of the vowels was long retained, on which see the incident imagined by Sir Walter Scott in his novel The Fortunes of Nigel, ch. ix.]

[1]. Schneider in his Elementarlehre der Lateinischen Sprache cites more than fifty ancient authors. Besides those mentioned above, reference is often made to Velius Longus, Servius, Marius Victorinus, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella.

[2]. Others are Josephus, the Jewish historian; Dionysius of Halicarnassus; Appian; and Dio Cassius,—the last a Roman who wrote in Greek.

III.

THE LATIN ALPHABET.

IN its earliest form, the Latin alphabet consisted of 21 characters,—A, B, C, D, E, F, Z, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X. These letters were derived from the alphabet used by the Dorian Greeks of Campania. At a very early period the letters K and Z fell into disuse, although K continued to occur in a few ancient abbreviations, such as Kal. for Kalendae, K. S. for carus suis, K. K. for calumniae causa (a legal phrase), KK. for castrorum, KA. for capitalis; and the use of Z was subsequently revived in transliterating Greek words. Originally, the character C had the sound which was afterwards given to G; but when K was abandoned, C took its place and its sound; while a new letter, G, was formed by slightly changing the original C. Plutarch says that the character G was first employed by Spurius Carvilius about the year 230 B.C. In Cicero's time the letter Y was introduced to represent the sound of the Greek Υ; but its presence in a word always marks a foreign origin, so that the character can scarcely be regarded as an essential part of the Roman alphabet. About the year A.D. 44, the Emperor Claudius tried to introduce three new symbols into the alphabet: (1) the inverted diagamma to mark the consonantal sound of V; (2) the character known as "anti-sigma" to express the sound denoted by the Greek ψ (ps or bs); and (3) the sign , which was to have the sound of the Greek υ, i.e. of modern French u or German ü. It may be mentioned also, that consonants were not doubled in writing Latin until the practice was adopted from the Greek by Ennius (B.C. 239-169), who in various ways conformed Roman usages to those of the Greeks.

The Roman alphabet, like the early alphabet of the Greeks, lacked distinctive characters for the long and short vowels. This defect, which was partly corrected in Greek by the adoption of the letters η and ω (traditionally ascribed to Epicharmus of Syracuse, B.C. 500), was never fully remedied in Latin, though at different times various devices were employed to distinguish between ā and ă, ē and