wed to settle in a more or less peaceful fashion in Roman territory,
so that a large part of the western world came into their possession by
way of gradual occupation rather than by conquest.[15] They became peasant
proprietors, manual laborers, and soldiers in the Roman army. Perhaps,
therefore, their occupation of central and southern Europe bears some
resemblance to the peaceful invasion of this country by immigrants from
Europe, and they may have adopted Latin just as the German or Scandinavian
adopts English.

This brings us to the last important point in our inquiry. What is the
date before which we shall call the language of the Western Empire Latin,
and after which it is better to speak of French, Spanish, and Italian?
Such a line of division cannot be sharply drawn, and will in a measure be
artificial, because, as we shall attempt to show in the chapter which
follows on the "Latin of the Common People," Latin survives in the Romance
languages, and has had a continuous life up to the present day. But on
practical grounds it is convenient to have such a line of demarcation in
mind, and two attempts have been made to fix it. One attempt has been
based on linguistic grounds, the other follows political changes more
closely. Up to 700 A.D. certain common sound-changes take place in all
parts of the western world.[16] After that date, roughly speaking, this is
not the case. Consequently at that time we may say that unity ceased. The
other method of approaching the subject leads to essentially the same
conclusion, and shows us why unity ceased to exist.[17] In the sixth
century the Eastern Emperor Justinian conceived the idea of reuniting the
Roman world, and actually recovered and held for a short time Italy,
southern Spain, and Africa. This attempt on his part aroused a national
spirit among the peoples of these lands, and developed in them a sense of
their national independence and individuality. They threw off the foreign
yoke and became separate peoples, and developed, each of them, a language
of its own. Naturally this sentiment became effective at somewhat
different periods in different countries. For France the point may be
fixed in the sixth century, for Spain and Italy, in the seventh, and at
these dates Latin may be said to take the form of French, Spanish, and
Italian.

The Latin of the Common People

Unless one is a professional philologist he feels little interest in the
language of the commo