to perceive the propriety of the active habeo or teneo, one or
both of which all modern languages have adopted as their auxiliaries in
conjugating the verb. But in some instances this analysis is not
improper; and it may be supposed that nations, careless of etymology or
correctness, applied the same verb by a rude analogy to cases where it
ought not strictly to have been employed.[489]

Next to the changes founded on pronunciation and to the substitution of
auxiliary verbs for inflections, the usage of the definite and
indefinite articles in nouns appears the most considerable step in the
transmutation of Latin into its derivative languages. None but Latin, I
believe, has ever wanted this part of speech; and the defect to which
custom reconciled the Romans would be an insuperable stumbling-block to
nations who were to translate their original idiom into that language. A
coarse expedient of applying _unus_, _ipse_, or _ille_ to the purposes
of an article might perhaps be no unfrequent vulgarism of the
provincials; and after the Teutonic tribes brought in their own grammar,
it was natural that a corruption should become universal, which in fact
supplied a real and essential deficiency.

[Sidenote: Pronunciation no longer regulated by quantity.]

That the quantity of Latin syllables is neglected, or rather lost, in
modern pronunciation, seems to be generally admitted. Whether, indeed,
the ancient Romans, in their ordinary speaking, distinguished the
measure of syllables with such uniform musical accuracy as we imagine,
giving a certain time to those termed long, and exactly half that
duration to the short, might very reasonably be questioned; though this
was probably done, or attempted to be done, by every reader of poetry.
Certainly, however, the laws of quantity were forgotten, and an
accentual pronunciation came to predominate, before Latin had ceased to
be a living language. A Christian writer named Commodianus, who lived
before the end of the third century according to some, or, as others
think, in the reign of Constantine, has left us a philological
curiosity, in a series of attacks on the pagan superstitions, composed
in what are meant to be verses, regulated by accent instead of quantity,
exactly as we read Virgil at present.[490]

It is not improbable that Commodianus may have written in Africa, the
province in which more than any the purity of Latin was debased. At the
end of the fourth century St. Augustin a