An excerpt from the Author's INTRODUCTION.
French belongs to the group of modem European tongues known as the Romance languages, which have developed out of Latin. The group includes Spanish and Portuguese, French and Provençal, Italian, Wallachian or Roumanian, and Rhaetic or Ladin (spoken in the Grisons in Switzerland, and in the western part of the Tyrol).
These languages developed, not out of literary Latin as we find it in the Classical writers, but out of the popular spoken language ('sermo rusticus' or 'vulgaris') known as Vulgar Latin. The two, literary and popular Latin, were originally the same; but, whereas the literary Latin was artificially preserved, with little or no change, by the Roman writers and grammarians, the popular Latin, like every spoken language, was in constant process of change, so that the two deviated more and more with the lapse of time. It was this Vulgar Latin which was carried by the Roman conquests into the various provinces forming the Empire, and which supplanted the native tongues of the inhabitants of those provinces; it is thus the source to which we must trace back the modern Romance languages.
The difficulty lies in the fact that Vulgar Latin, being purely a spoken language, has not been preserved for us by any literary monuments. But there are certain sources of evidence to which we can have recourse:—
1. Words and forms mentioned as belonging to the popular speech by Latin rhetoricians, grammarians, or compilers of glossaries.
2. Inscriptions, written by more or less illiterate men, and showing unclassical forms.
3. Deviations from Classical Latin which are found in Low Latin, that is, the degenerate literary Latin of the fifth or sixth centuries, greatly corrupted by the influence of the spoken Latin.
4. Above all, a comparison of the Romance languages ; such peculiarities as are common to all or several of them, and do not derive from Classical Latin, may be justly inferred to belong to their common stock, Vulgar Latin.
We are thus enabled to form a fairly accurate idea of the characteristic differences between Vulgar and Classical Latin. The vocabulary of the vulgar tongue was considerably poorer than that of the literary language ; it was deficient especially in abstract and philosophical terms. The following peculiarities are of frequent occurrence:—
1. Words change their meaning. Thus hostis, originally meaning a stranger, then an enemy, comes to mean an army; compare the Old French ost, borrowed in English host; necare, originally to slay, then to drown (noyer); senior, originally elder, then lord (sire, sieur, seigneur).
2. Simple words are replaced by derivatives: e.g. sol by soliculus (soleil), avis by avicellus (oiseau). (Compare in Modern French the supplanting of seoir by asseoir, of emplir by remplir, of O.F. aloue by alouette; and the tendency in the spoken language at the present day to replace entrer by rentrer.)
3. Adjectives are used as nouns; e.g. diumus (jour), hibernus (hiver), hospitalis (hôtel),
4. Classical Latin words are replaced by others which either are not found in Classical Latin or are found with different meanings; e.g. urbs by civitas (cité), villa (ville); domus by casa (chez), orig. a hut, by mansio (maison), orig. night-quarters, or by hospitalis; equus by caballus (cheval), orig. draught-horse, or by paraveredus (palefroi); magnus by grandis; jubeo by ordinare; edere by manducare (manger), orig. to chew; caput by testa (tête), orig. tile....
