ate
English-speaking people do in the pronunciations "ellum" and "Henery." In
this way, for instance, the Roman avoided the difficult combinations -mn-
and -chn- by saying mina and techina for the historically correct mna and
techna. Another method of surmounting the difficulty was to assimilate one
of the two consonants to the other. This is a favorite practice of the
shop-girl, over which the newspapers make merry in their phonetical
reproductions of supposed conversations heard from behind the counter.
Adopting the same easy way of speaking, the uneducated Roman sometimes
said isse for ipse, and scritus for scriptus. To pass to another point of
difference, the laws determining the incidence of the accent were very
firmly established in literary Latin. The accent must fall on the penult,
if it was long, otherwise on the antepenult of the word. But in popular
Latin there were certain classes of words in whose case these principles
were not observed.

The very nature of the accent probably differed in the two forms of
speech. In preliterary Latin the stress was undoubtedly a marked feature
of the accent, and this continued to be the case in the popular speech
throughout the entire history of the language, but, as I have tried to
prove in another paper,[21] in formal Latin the stress became very slight,
and the pitch grew to be the characteristic feature of the accent.
Consequently, when Virgil read a passage of the _AEneid_ to Augustus and
Livia the effect on the ear of the comparatively unstressed language, with
the rhythmical rise and fall of the pitch, would have been very different
from that made by the conversation of the average man, with the accented
syllables more clearly marked by a stress.

In this brief chapter we cannot attempt to go into details, and in
speaking of the morphology of vulgar Latin we must content ourselves with
sketching its general characteristics and tendencies, as we have done in
the case of its phonology. In English our inflectional forms have been
reduced to a minimum, and consequently there is little scope for
differences in this respect between the written and spoken languages. From
the analogy of other forms the illiterate man occasionally says: "I swum,"
or, "I clumb," or "he don't," but there is little chance of making a
mistake. However, with three genders, five declensions for nouns, a fixed
method of comparison for adjectives and adverbs, an elaborate system of
pronouns, with ac