1. By Early Latin we usually mean the language spoken at Rome down to about the time of the first civil war, say 672/82,- that is, to the beginning of the Ciceronian. period. Of this earlier Latinity we possess, on the whole, rather scanty remains. 2. Through literary channels nothing has reached us in an entire condition except the plays of Plautus and Terence, twenty-six in number, and the short prose treatise of Cato de re rustica. Of other poets-Naevius, Ennius, Lucilius, etc.- - we have a good many fragments; of prose writers much fewer. From a time anterior to the beginning of literature, there have been preserved to us a very few prayers, laws, and other formulae; most of this material will be found in Part II. of this book. But all these remains, transmitted to us as they have been indirectly through many hands, have unfortunately been more or less modernized, so that from them alone we could gain but an imperfect idea of the early language. 3. It is the Inscriptions of this period which afford us the surest means of acquainting ourselves with the Latin language in its earlier stages. These alone give certain testimony as to the forms of speech of the time when they were 3 written. Of late years there has been greatly increased activity in collecting and studying Latin inscriptions. 4. The recently awakened interest in the study of early Latin, which has gone hand in hand with the historical or 'comparative' study of language generally, received its first distinct impulse from Friedrich Ritschl (b. 1806, d. 1876), who besides his well-known labors on Plautus, and numerous other contributions, published in 1862" Priscae Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica," a collection of the earliest inscriptions with admirable fac-simile representations. All inscriptions of the republican period are united, with fuller commentary, in the first volume of the " Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum” (Berlin, 1863), edited by Theodor Mommsen. Among the many others who have furthered these investigations, Wilhelm Corssen (b. 1820, d. 1875) deserves special mention for his grammatical researches, embodied in the large work, "Aussprache, Vokalismus und Betonung der lateinischen Sprache,” 2 vols. (2d edit., Leipzig, 1868–70), and in two smaller books. 5. The Romans learned the art of writing and received the alphabet from the Greeks of Cumae,' at a time not to be exactly defined. The oldest extant inscriptions date from about 300 B.C., but writing is certainly known to have been practised, though probably to a limited extent, long before that period. 1 The Cumaeans used the old West-Greek alphabet differing in several respects from the later Attic alphabet familiar to us. The Romans adopted it without essential change, except that they rejected the signs for 0, X, 9, (V) as useless for their language, and altered the function of the sign F. The first Roman alphabet, of twenty-one signs, must have been (neglecting minor differences in the form of a few letters),— ABC(=g) DEFZHIK(=c) L M N O P Q R S T V X, the sign C being used exclusively for the sound g, and K always for the sound c. Then K went gradually out of use, and C was for a time used to designate both sounds, g and c. This being presently found inconvenient, a new sign, G, a modification of C, was invented for the g-sound, and received its place in the alphabet after F, in place of Z, which had been meanwhile given up as needless. So arose the new Roman alphabet, also of twenty-one letters, — ABC(=c) DEF G (=g) H I K (seldom used) L M N O P Q R S T VX. Chief Phonetic Peculiarities of Early Latin. 6. Diphthong ai for later ae: quaistor. 7. Diphthong oi for later oe : foidus. 8. Diphthong oi (oe) for later ū: oinos = ūnus. 9. Diphthong ei preserved. This diphthong had an important place in the earliest Latin sound-system, but we find it subject to decay even in our oldest monuments of written Latin, passing sometimes into è, sometimes into i; finally, in the classical' period, i became its fixed representative. But meanwhile, after ei had assumed a simple sound, it came in turn to be used in place of i in words where it was not etymologically justified; that is, where there never had been a real diphthong pronounced. NOTE I. The original ei seems first to have passed into a simple sound intermediate between è and i, so that both è and i were likely to be substituted for it in writing. Later this half-way sound gradually settled down into i. Accordingly ei came to be looked on as a convenient graphical designation for the long i-sound, and was written indifferently for any i, very seldom for ē. NOTE 2. We thus distinguish two sorts of ei. (1.) The genuine diphthong which was once pronounced as such, so that the diphthongal spelling is etymologically justified. This is the case for instance in root-syllables as strengthening of i, as deico (dic-), feidus (fid-), like λɛíπw (Xiπ-); and in the dative singular of the third declension, virtutei; also in the nominative, dative, and ablative plural of the second declension, virei, doneis (where it stands for still older oi), and in the dative and ablative plural of the first declension, vieis (where it stands for older ai); so, too, in the pronouns heic and quei, in sei ‘if'; and in other words. This genuine ei is found in the earliest inscriptions. (2.) The spurious ei, never pronounced as a diphthong, but merely written in place of i. It is unknown in the earlier inscriptions, but frequent from about the Gracchan period (620/134) on. Examples are ameicus, audeire; the accusative plural and ablative singular of i-stems, as omneis, fontei; the infinitive passive, as darei; also the |