The Romance Languages

This study of the emergence of Romance and its crystallization into French, Spanish, Italian, Rumanian, etc. elucidates not only the creation of the modern languages but also the decline of Latin. The author provides as a setting the world of 'Vulgar Latin', a Roman world where the Latin tongue showed all the anarchical tendencies of popular speech and to which the mingling peoples in the Empire brought new and linguistically exotic elements. He explains how, from the fifth century to the ninth, the forces which procured Rome's political weakening at the same time accelerated the disintegration and differentiation of the Latin vernacular, though enriching it with contributions of their own--Germanic, Arabic, and Slavonic.