red;
articles and prepositions took the place of the inflectional
terminations brought to a high state of artificial perfection in Latin;
and the wholesale suppression of unaccented syllables had so contracted
the Latin words that they were often scarcely recognizable. The
modification of vowel sounds increased the efficacy of the disguise
assumed by Latin words masquerading in the Romanic dialects throughout
Gaul; and the Celtic and other native words in current use to designate
the interests and occupations of the masses helped to differentiate the
popular speech from the classical Latin. Already Celtic, as a spoken
tongue, had almost entirely disappeared from the cities; and even in the
rural districts it had fallen into a certain amount of neglect, as the
_lingua franca_ of the first centuries of Roman occupation, reaching out
in every direction, became the ever-increasing popular speech.

3. The Competition of the Cultural Languages[245]

Some time ago a typewriter firm, in advertising a machine with Arabic
characters, made the statement that the Arabic alphabet is used by more
people than any other. A professor of Semitic languages was asked: "How
big a lie is that?" He answered: "It is true."

In a certain sense, it is true; the total population of all the
countries whose inhabitants use the Arabic alphabet (if they use any) is
slightly larger than that of those who use the Latin alphabet and its
slight variations, or the Chinese characters (which of course are not an
alphabet), or the Russian alphabet. If, however, the question is how
many people can actually use any alphabet or system of writing, the
Arabic stands lowest of the four.

The question of the relative importance of a language as a literary
medium is a question of how many people want to read it. There are two
classes of these: those to whom it is vernacular, and those who learn it
in addition to their own language. The latter class is of the greater
importance in proportion to its numbers; a man who has education enough
to acquire a foreign language is pretty sure to use it, while many of
the former class, who can read, really do read very little. Those who
count in this matter are those who can get information from a printed
page as easily as by listening to someone talking. A fair index of the
relative number of these in a country is the newspaper circulation
there.

A language must have a recognized literary standard and all the people
in