A more satisfactory explanation seems to be that first clearly propounded by the Italian philologist, Ascoli.  His reasoning is that when we acquire a foreign language we find it very difficult, and often impossible, to master some of the new sounds.  Our ears do not catch them exactly, or we unconsciously substitute for the foreign sound some sound from our own language.  Our vocal organs, too, do not adapt themselves readily to the reproduction of the strange sounds in another tongue, as we know from the difficulty which we have in pronouncing the French nasal or the German guttural.  Similarly English differs somewhat as it is spoken by a Frenchman, a German, and an Italian.  The Frenchman has a tendency to import the nasal into it, and he is also inclined to pronounce it like his own language, while the German favors the guttural.  In a paper on the teaching of modern languages in our schools, Professor Grandgent says:[14] “Usually there is no attempt made to teach any French sounds but u and the four nasal vowels; all the rest are unquestioningly replaced by the English vowels and consonants that most nearly resemble them.”  The substitution of sounds from one’s own language in speaking a foreign tongue, and the changes in voice-inflection, are more numerous and more marked if the man who learns the new language is uneducated and acquires it in casual intercourse from an uneducated man who speaks carelessly.

This was the state of things in the Roman provinces of southern Europe when the Goths, Lombards, and other peoples from the North gradually crossed the frontier and settled in the territory of Latin-speaking peoples.  In the sixth century, for instance, the Lombards in Italy, the Franks in France, and the Visigoths in Spain would each give to the Latin which they spoke a twist peculiar to themselves, and out of the one Latin came Italian, out of the second, the language of France, and out of the third, Spanish.  This initial impulse toward the development of Latin along different lines in Italy, France, and Spain was, of course, reinforced by differences in climate, in the temperaments of the three peoples, in their modes of life, and in their political and social experiences.  These centrifugal forces, so to speak, became effective because the political and social bonds which had held Italy, France, and Spain together were now loosened, and consequently communication between the provinces was less frequent, and the standardizing influence of the official Latin of Rome ceased to keep Latin a uniform thing throughout the Empire.

One naturally asks why Latin survived at all, why the languages of the victorious Germanic peoples gave way to it.  In reply to this question it is commonly said that the fittest survived, that the superiority of Roman civilization and of the Latin language gave Latin the victory.  So far as this factor is to be taken into account, I should prefer to say that it was not so much the superiority of Latin, although