ABSTRACT
The comparative method posed its own peculiar problems. What forms should be laid down side by side for comparison? The doubts arose only when Friedrich Diez undertook to apply the comparative method to the Romance languages. Two courses were possible. One was to intensify research in the abundant documentation offered by Latin itself, at all historical periods, in the hope of finding forms that would square better with the comparison. The other could be described as the course of least resistance: where a Romance comparison did not coincide with attested documentary or inscriptional Latin forms, throw out the Latin forms as irrelevant from the standpoint of the spoken language, and use the comparative method in the same fashion in which it was used by the Indo-Europeanists. The American Indian specialist has no recourse but to procure one or more native speakers, and figure out the structure of the language from the translation of the phrases and sentences he gives them.
