Among those, too, who did know Latin there was the barrier of differing pronunciation. Lauder of Fountainhall was very much at sea to begin with, in spite of his Scotch pronunciation being much nearer to the French than an Englishman's would have been, and there is an anecdote in Vicente Espinel's "Marcos de Obregon" which is to the point here. The latter is a novel, it is true, but the tradition that it is semi-autobiographical is borne out by many of its tales reading as if they were actual experiences, of which the following is one. One day, the hero, a Spaniard, found himself in a boat on the river Po, with a German, an Italian, and a Frenchman, and to pass the time they tried to talk Latin so that all could understand each one; but they soon abandoned the plan, as the pronunciations varied too greatly. Nevertheless, the passing of Latin out of European conversation is to be attributed rather to the growth of Italian, and later of French, as international tongues. Gaspar Ens, who wrote a series of guides to nearly every part of Europe, says in his preface to the volume on France, "At this day their language is so much used in almost every part of the world that whosoever is unskilled therein is deemed a yokel." This was in 1609, at which date, or soon after, it was as true as a general statement can be expected to be; just as much so as the assertion in the preface to an English book in 1578: "Once every one knew Latin ... now the Italian is as widely spread."[19] It was only in the north that French came to rival Italian during this period, for the "lingua franca," also known as "franco piccolo," the hybrid tongue in which commerce was conducted along the shores of the Mediterranean, was so largely Italian that to the average Britisher, from whom Hakluyt drew his narratives, the two were indistinguishable; but an Italian would notice, as Della Valle did, that no form of a verb but the infinitive was used. If any one was met who knew more than two languages, he would oftenest be a Jew, who usually knew Spanish and Portuguese; the latter because the tribe of Judah, from which their deliverer was to come, was supposed to be domiciled in Portugal. Another hybrid language, as well established in its own area as the "lingua franca," was Scot-French, so constantly in use as to have an existence as a literary dialect as well as in French burlesque. These mixed languages have no place in the ordinary book-guide to languages, but were left to personal tuition; yet in the lists of the most common phrases which Andrew Boorde appends to each of his descriptions of countries may be noted a curious instance from this borderland of philology. In both the Italian and the Spanish lists he renders "How do you fare?" by "Quo modo stat cum vostro corps?"