The archaic Latin inscription known as the Inscription of Duenos, from a word occurring in it which may be a personal name, stands on a small triple jar found in Rome in 1880 and first published by its finder, H. Dressel, apparently in collaboration with F. Bücheier, who also wrote on it. Scholars have been busying themselves with it ever since, until we find the forty-first interpretation in a recent monograph of E. Goldmann of Vienna.

It is evident, upon even a cursory examination, that the curiously faulty hexameters of Commodian illustrate one stage in the loss of quantitative distinctions which the Latin language suffered in postclassical times. This fact has suggested to many that we may find in them a clue to the change which has made modern European verse so different from the classical measures. I, too, am convinced that the clue is there, and the purpose of this paper is to find it.

A somewhat detailed study of this particular dialect is interesting for two reasons: firstly, because this is the dialect furthest removed from the primarily monosyllabic type characteristic of Zapotek and other related languages; secondly, because in its use of pitch tone it presents a very typical problem in the evolution of tone from a functional, variable, morphological factor to a fixed, independent, semasiological entity.