Excerpt: ...from that of Cicero or Seneca. It would be highly absurd to imagine, as some are said to have done, that modern Italian was spoken at Rome under Augustus. i But I believe it may be asserted not only that much the greater part of those words in the present language of Italy which strike us as incapable of a Latin etymology are in fact derived from those current in the Augustan age, but that very many phrases which offended nicer ears prevailed in the same vernacular speech, and have passed from thence into the ...
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Excerpt: ...from that of Cicero or Seneca. It would be highly absurd to imagine, as some are said to have done, that modern Italian was spoken at Rome under Augustus. i But I believe it may be asserted not only that much the greater part of those words in the present language of Italy which strike us as incapable of a Latin etymology are in fact derived from those current in the Augustan age, but that very many phrases which offended nicer ears prevailed in the same vernacular speech, and have passed from thence into the modern French and Italian. Such, for example, was the frequent use of prepositions to indicate a relation between two parts of a sentence which a classical writer would have made to depend on mere inflection. k From the difficulty of retaining a right discrimination of tense seems to have proceeded the active auxiliary verb. It is possible that this was borrowed from the Teutonic languages of the barbarians, and accommodated both by them and by the natives to words of Latin origin. The passive auxiliary is obtained by a very ready resolution of any tense in that mood, and has not been altogether dispensed with even in Greek, while in Latin it is used much more frequently. It is not quite so easy to perceive the propriety of the active habeo or teneo, one Pg 281 or both of which all modern languages have adopted as their auxiliaries in conjugating the verb. But in some instances this analysis is not improper; and it may be supposed that nations, careless of etymology or correctness, applied the same verb by a rude analogy to cases where it ought not strictly to have been employed. m Next to the changes founded on pronunciation and to the substitution of auxiliary verbs for inflections, the usage of the definite and indefinite articles in nouns appears the most considerable step in the transmutation of Latin into its derivative languages. None but Latin, I believe, has ever wanted this part of speech; and the defect to which custom reconciled...
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