tive and deponent, regular and irregular verbs, four
conjugations, and a complex synthetical method of forming the moods and
tenses, the pitfalls for the unwary Roman were without number, as the
present-day student of Latin can testify to his sorrow. That the man in
the street, who had no newspaper to standardize his Latin, and little
chance to learn it in school, did not make more mistakes is surprising. In
a way many of the errors which he did make were historically not errors at
all. This fact will readily appear from an illustration or two. In our
survey of preliterary Latin we had occasion to notice that one of its
characteristics was a lack of fixity in the use of forms or constructions.
In the third century before our era, a Roman could say audibo or audiam,
contemplor or contemplo, senatus consultum or senati consultum. Thanks to
the efforts of the scientific grammarian, and to the systematizing
influence which Greek exerted upon literary Latin, most verbs were made
deponent or active once for all, a given noun was permanently assigned to
a particular declension, a verb to one conjugation, and the slight
tendency which the language had to the analytical method of forming the
moods and tenses was summarily checked. Of course the common people tried
to imitate their betters in all these matters, but the old variable usages
persisted to some extent, and the average man failed to grasp the
niceties of the new grammar at many points. His failures were especially
noticeable where the accepted literary form did not seem to follow the
principles of analogy. When these principles are involved, the common
people are sticklers for consistency. The educated man conjugates: "I
don't," "you don't," "he doesn't," "we don't," "they don't"; but the
anomalous form "he doesn't" has to give way in the speech of the average
man to "he don't." To take only one illustration in Latin of the effect of
the same influence, the present infinitive active of almost all verbs ends
in -re, e.g., amare, monere, and regere. Consequently the irregular
infinitive of the verb "to be able," posse, could not stand its ground,
and ultimately became potere in vulgar Latin. In one respect in the
inflectional forms of the verb, the purist was unexpectedly successful. In
comedy of the third and second centuries B.C., we find sporadic evidence
of a tendency to use auxiliary verbs in forming certain tenses, as we do
in English when we say: "I will go," "I have