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Updated: May 31, 2025
The relation of Latin to, say, the Romanic of Provence, was like that of literary English to Lancashire or Somerset dialect; no one thinks of glossing a literary English book by Somersetshire word-forms; for, if he can read at all, it is the literary English that he does read.
They are dialects rather than distinct languages, more closely resembling one another than is the case even with the Romanic languages of modern Europe, which are descended from Latin. Most of the Semitic languages or dialects if we like so to call them are now dead, swallowed up by the Arabic of Mohammed and the Qorân.
It may easily be imagined that these events were not without their influence on a language deteriorated on the one hand by constant contact with a Romanic idiom, and in Holland by the transmission of the sovereign crown to the House of Avesnes. The "Chambers of Rhetoric," an institution peculiar to the Low Countries, reached their highest point of prosperity under the Burgundian rule.
From that moment his efforts were unceasingly directed towards the reintegration of his mother-tongue, which had so long played but the part of a Cinderella among the Romanic nations. Nor did he remain inactive during the Revolution of 1848, addressing the people in home-phrase in several small volumes of prose.
The higher laws of affinity, as applied to the Romanic languages, are also daily more a matter of investigation. Diez and Delius, in Bonn, are at the head of this movement.
Longfellow's choice of words in his translation of Dante, we see at once the unsoundness of the principle that Italian words should be rendered by their Romanic equivalents in English. Words that are etymologically identical with those in the original are often, for that very reason, the worst words that could be used.
It was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view, and so barren of immediate result.... That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa, attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden, all this is the work of Cæsar."
To these two languages, and to the Provencal, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, called, from their Roman origin, the Romance or Romanic languages, all that is prominent and precious in modern letters belongs. But it is not until the eleventh century that their progress becomes identified with the history of literature.
Doubtless by long familiarity with the Romanic languages, the scholar becomes to a great degree emancipated from the conditions imposed upon him by the peculiar composition of his native English. The concrete significance of the Romanic words becomes apparent to him, and they acquire energy and vitality.
Coming now in contact with them, the Christian Spaniards learned their language. Later they met with another tribe of their own race who had remained with the Arabians, known as the Mocarabes, a people of superior refinement and civilization. Hence a new dialect from these contending elements was gradually formed, and became known, like the other languages of southern Europe, as the Romanic.
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