The language is very peculiar.  We are obliged to call it French, but it is not “Frenche of Paris.”  “Its style,” says Paulin Paris, “is about as like that of good French authors of the age, as in our day the natural accent of a German, an Englishman, or an Italian, is like that of a citizen of Paris or Blois.”  The author is at war with all the practices of French grammar; subject and object, numbers, moods, and tenses, are in consummate confusion.  Even readers of his own day must at times have been fain to guess his meaning.  Italian words are constantly introduced, either quite in the crude or rudely Gallicized.[5] And words also, we may add, sometimes slip in which appear to be purely Oriental, just as is apt to happen with Anglo-Indians in these days.[6] All this is perfectly consistent with the supposition that we have in this MS. a copy at least of the original words as written down by Rusticiano a Tuscan, from the dictation of Marco an Orientalized Venetian, in French, a language foreign to both.

But the character of the language as French is not its only peculiarity.  There is in the style, apart from grammar or vocabulary, a rude angularity, a rough dramatism like that of oral narrative; there is a want of proportion in the style of different parts, now over curt, now diffuse and wordy, with at times even a hammering reiteration; a constant recurrence of pet colloquial phrases (in which, however, other literary works of the age partake); a frequent change in the spelling of the same proper names, even when recurring within a few lines, as if caught by ear only; a literal following to and fro of the hesitations of the narrator; a more general use of the third person in speaking of the Traveller, but an occasional lapse into the first.  All these characteristics are strikingly indicative of the unrevised product of dictation, and many of them would necessarily disappear either in translation or in a revised copy.

Of changes in representing the same proper name, take as an example that of the Kaan of Persia whom Polo calls Quiacatu (Kaikhatu), but also Acatu, Catu, and the like.

As an example of the literal following of dictation take the following:—­

“Let us leave Rosia, and I will tell you about the Great Sea (the Euxine), and what provinces and nations lie round about it, all in detail; and we will begin with Constantinople—­First, however, I should tell you about a province, etc....  There is nothing more worth mentioning, so I will speak of other subjects,—­but there is one thing more to tell you about Rosia that I had forgotten....  Now then let us speak of the Great Sea as I was about to do.  To be sure many merchants and others have been here, but still there are many again who know nothing about it, so it will be well to include it in our Book.  We will do so then, and let us begin first with the Strait of Constantinople.