sonorous character. Certain prefixes, like de-, dis-, and ex-, were freely
used with verbs, because they strengthened the meaning of the verb, and
popular speech is inclined to emphasize its ideas unduly.

To speak further of derivation, in the matter of compounds and
crystallized word groups there are usually differences between a spoken
and written language. The written language is apt to establish certain
canons which the people do not observe. For instance, we avoid hybrid
compounds of Greek and Latin elements in the serious writing of English.
In formal Latin we notice the same objection to Greco-Latin words, and yet
in Plautus, and in other colloquial writers, such compounds are freely
used for comic effect. In a somewhat similar category belong the
combinations of two adverbs or prepositions, which one finds in the later
popular Latin, some of which have survived in the Romance languages. A
case in point is ab ante, which has come down to us in the Italian avanti
and the French avant. Such word-groups are of course debarred from formal
speech.

In examining the vocabulary of colloquial Latin, we have noticed its
comparative poverty, its need of certain words which are not required in
formal Latin, its preference for certain prefixes and suffixes, and its
willingness to violate certain rules, in forming compounds and
word-groups, which the written language scrupulously observes. It remains
for us to consider a third, and perhaps the most important, element of
difference between the vocabularies of the two forms of speech. I mean the
use of a word in vulgar Latin with another meaning from that which it has
in formal Latin. We are familiar enough with the different senses which a
word often has in conversational and in literary English. "Funny," for
instance, means "amusing" in formal English, but it is often the synonym
of "strange" in conversation. The sense of a word may be extended, or be