Vulgar Latin, as in this political graffito at Pompeii, was the speech of ordinary people of the Roman Empire — different from Latin as written by the Roman elites.

Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris, "common speech") is a blanket term covering the popular dialects and sociolects of the Latin language which diverged from each other in the early Middle Ages, evolving into the Romance languages — a distinction usually attained between the 9th and the 11th centuries CE. The terms Vulgar Latin and Late Latin are often used synonymously. Vulgar Latin can also refer to vernacular speech from other periods, including the Classical period, in which case it may also be called Popular Latin. Latin profanity is the profane, indecent, or impolite vocabulary of Latin, and its uses. ... Image File history File links Pompeii-graffiti. ... For other uses, see Graffiti (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Pompeii (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ... A blanket term is a word or phrase that is used to describe multiple groups of related things. ... For dialects of programming languages, see Programming language dialect. ... In linguistics, a sociolect is the language spoken by a social group, social class or subculture. ... For other uses, see Latins and Latin (disambiguation). ... The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. ... The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family that comprises all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... Look up Vernacular in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, which begins roughly with the earliest-recorded Greek poetry of Homer (7th century BC), and continues through the rise of Christianity and the fall of the Western Roman Empire (5th century AD...

This spoken Latin came to differ from literary Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, though some of its features did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have been present much earlier in spoken Latin. A literary language is a register of a language that is used in writing, and which often differs in lexicon and syntax from the language used in speech. ... For other uses, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ...

During the Middle Ages, Vulgar Latin coexisted with a more cultivated form of the language used by scholars, scribes and the clergy in formal settings, but lacking any native speakers, called Medieval Latin. “Native Language” redirects here. ... Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. ...

What was Vulgar Latin?

The Cantar de Mio Cid (Song of my Cid) is the earliest text of reasonable length that exists in Medieval Spanish, and marks the beginning of this language as distinct from Vulgar Latin

The name "vulgar" simply means "common", derived from the Latin word vulgaris, meaning "common", or "of the people". "Vulgar Latin" has a variety of meanings: This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... A page from the original codex, starting from line 1922 El Cantar del Mio Cid is the oldest preserved Spanish cantar de gesta. ... Statue of El Cid in Burgos. ...

1. Variation within Latin (socially, geographically, and chronologically) that differs from the Classical literary standard in an age when most people were illiterate and the primary method of language transmission between people was oral. This typically excludes the language of the more educated upper classes, which, although it does include variation, comes closest to the standard.
2. The spoken Latin of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin represents the literary register of Latin, based on the model of ancient literary Greek. It represented a selection from a variety of spoken forms. The Latin brought by Roman soldiers to Gaul, Iberia or Dacia was not identical to the Latin of Cicero, and differed from it in vocabulary, and later in syntax and grammar as well.^[1] By this definition, Vulgar Latin was a spoken language and Classical Latin was used for writing, with the later style of literary Latin being slightly different, showing greater influence from the vulgar dialects, compared to the earlier "classical" standards.
3. The hypothetical ancestor of the Romance languages (so-called "Proto-Romance"), which cannot be directly known, except from a few graffiti inscriptions. Proto-Romance is a hypothetical vernacular derived from Latin that had undergone important and varying sound shifts and other changes which can be reconstructed from the changes evident in its descendants, the Romance languages.
4. Even more restrictively, the name Vulgar Latin is sometimes given to the hypothetical proto-Romance of the Western Romance languages: the vernaculars found north and west of the La Spezia-Rimini Line, France, and the Iberian peninsula; and the poorly attested Romance speech of northwestern Africa. According to the hypothesis, southeastern Italian, Romanian, and Dalmatian developed separately.^{[citation needed]}
5. "Vulgar Latin" is sometimes used to describe the grammatical changes found in some Late Latin texts, such as the 4th-century Itinerarium Egeriae, Egeria's account of her journey to Palestine and Mt. Sinai; or the works of St Gregory of Tours. Since written documentation of Vulgar Latin forms is scarce, these works are invaluable to philologists, mainly because of the occasional presence of variations or errors in spelling, providing some evidence of spoken usage during the period in which they were written.^[1]

Most definitions of "Vulgar Latin" define it as a spoken, rather than a written, language. It is important to remember that "Vulgar Latin" is an abstract term, not the name of any particular dialect. The term itself predates the field of sociolinguistics, and reseach into the history of Vulgar Latin was in some ways a precursor to sociolinguistics. The latter studies language variation associated with social variables, and tends not to view variation as a strict standard–non-standard dichotomy (for example, Classical–Vulgar Latin) but as a large pool of variations. In light of fields such as sociolinguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics, Vulgar Latin can be seen as nearly synonymous to "language variation in Latin" (socially, geographically, and chronologically) that excludes the speech, and especially writings, of the more educated upper classes. It is because there are so many types of variation that definitions of Vulgar Latin differ so much. For other uses, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ... A literary language is a register of a language that is used in writing, and which often differs in lexicon and syntax from the language used in speech. ... In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. ... Gaul (Latin: ) was the name given, in ancient times, to the region of Western Europe comprising present-day northern Italy, France, Belgium, western Switzerland and the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine river. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Iberian Peninsula. ... For other uses, see Dacia (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Cicero (disambiguation). ... A vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language. ... For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ... For the rules of English grammar, see English grammar and Disputes in English grammar. ... The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family that comprises all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... For other uses, see Graffiti (disambiguation). ... Proto-language may refer to either: a language that is the common ancestor of a set of related languages (a language family), or a system of communication during a stage in glottogony that may not yet be properly called a language. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time. ... In the linguistics of the Romance languages, the La Spezia-Rimini Line is a line that refers to a number of important isoglosses that distinguish the eastern Romance languages from the western Romance languages. ... The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe, and includes modern day Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar. ... Dalmatian is an extinct Romance language formerly spoken in the Dalmatia region of Croatia, and as far south as Kotor (Cattaro) in Montenegro. ... In early Chistian history, Egeria, also known as Aetheria, is the name of a woman who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land about 381–384, taking about four years to do it, and who wrote a long letter to her beloved circle of women at home (probably along the... Saint Gregory of Tours (c. ... Philology, etymologically, is the love of words. It is most accurately defined as an affinity toward the learning of the backgrounds as well as the current usages of spoken or written methods of human communication. The commonality of studied languages is more important than their origin or age (that is... For dialects of programming languages, see Programming language dialect. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context on the way language is used. ... Dialectology is the study of dialects of a language, their evolution, differentiation, inter-intelligibity, grammar, phonetics etc. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time. ...

History

Because the daily speech of Latin speakers was not transcribed, Vulgar Latin can only be studied indirectly through other methods. Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First, the comparative method reconstructs the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and notes where they differ from Classical Latin. Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the Late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin speakers were liable to commit, telling us how Latin speakers used their language. Third, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in Late Latin texts also reveal, in part, the author's spoken language.^[2] Transcription is the conversion into written, typewritten or printed form, of a spoken language source, such as the proceedings of a court hearing. ... The comparative method (in comparative linguistics) is a technique used by linguists to demonstrate genetic relationships between languages. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for the use of a language. ... In linguistic prescriptivism, a solecism is a grammatical or other mistake or absurdity. ...

Some literary works with a lower register of Latin from the Classical Latin period also provide a glimpse into the world of early Vulgar Latin. The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features; so too does the recorded speech of freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter. In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. ... Titus Macchius Plautus, generally referred to simply as Plautus, was a playwright of Ancient Rome. ... Publius Terentius Afer, better known as Terence, was a comic playwright of the Roman Republic. ... In linguistics, a basilect is a dialect of speech that has diverged so far from the standard language that in essence it has become a different language. ... This article is about the ancient book; for the band of the same name, see Satyricon (band). ... This article is about the Roman author Petronius. ...

The 3rd century CE is presumed to be a turning point when much of the vocabulary was changing (e.g., equus → caballus "horse", etc.). Recently, some studies, perhaps in need of more scientific development, have suggested that pronunciations too started to diverge, supposedly then becoming similar to modern local pronunciations; the most spectacular (alleged) effect occurring in the area of Naples.^{[citation needed]} Location of the city of Naples (red dot) within Italy. ...

For many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Vulgar Latin continued to coexist with a written form of Late Latin, nowadays referred to as Medieval Latin; for when speakers of one of the Romance vernaculars set out to write with correct grammar and spelling, they attempted to emulate the norms of Classical Latin. This scholarly Latin, "frozen" by Justinian's codifications of Roman law on the one hand, and by the Catholic Church on the other, was eventually unified by the medieval copyists; it continued to exist as a Dachsprache in the Middle Ages, and a lingua franca well beyond them. The Roman Empire is not the Holy Roman Empire (843-1806). ... Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. ... This article is about the Roman emperor. ... Using the term Roman law in a broader sense, one may say that Roman law is not only the legal system of ancient Rome but the law that was applied throughout most of Europe until the end of the 18th century. ... Catholic Church redirects here. ... The Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework is a tool developed by sociolinguists, e. ... Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ...

Vulgar Latin developed differently in the various provinces of the Roman Empire, gradually giving rise to such modern languages as French, Catalan, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Although the official language in these areas was Latin, Vulgar Latin was popularly spoken until the new localized forms diverged sufficiently from Latin, thus emerging as separate languages. However, despite the widening gulf between the spoken and written ("late") Latin, for the duration of the empire till the 8th century CE, it was not significant enough as to make them mutually unintelligible. József Herman states:^[3] Catalan IPA: (català IPA: or []) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, and in the city of LAlguer in the Italian island of Sardinia. ... For other uses, see Latins and Latin (disambiguation). ...

It seems certain that in the sixth century, and quite likely into the early parts of the seventh century, people in the main Romanized areas could still largely understand the biblical and liturgical texts and the commentaries (of greater or lesser simplicity) that formed part of the rites and of religious practice, and that even later, throughout the seventh century, saints' lives written in Latin could be read aloud to the congregations with an expectation that they would be understood. We can also deduce however, that in Gaul, from the central part of the eighth century onwards, many people, including several of the clerics, were not able to understand even the most straightforward religious texts

– József Herman, Vulgar Latin

Indeed, at the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language — either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars — since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg (842), a treaty between Charlemagne's grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German, were proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinguished from Latin. Consider the excerpt below: In the medieval Roman Catholic church there were several Councils of Tours, that city being an old seat of Christianity, and considered fairly centrally located in France. ... This article is about religious workers. ... The (Late Old High) German speaking area of the Holy Roman Empire around 950. ... Text of the Oaths The Oaths of Strasbourg (Modern French: les serments de Strasbourg, Modern German: die Straßburger Eide) is the name by which we know the pledges of allegiance taken in 842 by Louis the German, son of Louis the Pious, and ruler of the eastern Frankish kingdom... Charlemagne (left) and Pippin the Hunchback. ... Charles the Bald[1] (numbered Charles II of France and the Holy Roman Emperor) (French: , German: ) (13 June 823 – 6 October 877), Holy Roman Emperor (875–877) and king of West Francia (840–877), was the youngest son of Emperor Louis the Pious, by his second wife Judith. ... Louis the German (also known as Louis II or Louis the Bavarian or German Ludwig der Deutsche) (804 – August 28, 876), the third son of the emperor Louis the Pious and his first wife, Ermengarde of Hesbaye, was the king of Bavaria from 817, when his father partitioned the empire...

Extract of the Oaths

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in ajudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il me altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid numquam prindrai, qui, meon vol, cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

For the love of God and for Christendom and our common salvation, from this day onwards, as God will give me the wisdom and power, I shall protect this brother of mine Charles, with aid or anything else, as one ought to protect one's brother, so that he may do the same for me, and I shall never knowingly make any covenant with Lothair that would harm this brother of mine Charles. Image File history File links Pars extracta e Sacramentā Argentariae. ... Image File history File links Pars extracta e Sacramentā Argentariae. ...

From this point on, the Latin vernaculars began to be treated as separate languages in practice, developing local norms and orthographies of their own, and "Vulgar Latin" ceases to be a useful term. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. ...

Vocabulary

Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary. Classical equus, "horse", was consistently replaced by caballus "nag" (but note Romanian iapă, Sardinian èbba, Spanish yegua, Catalan euga and Portuguese égua all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical equa). A very partial listing of words that are exclusively Classical, and those that were productive in Romance, is to be found in the table to the right. Binomial name Equus caballus Linnaeus, 1758 The horse (Equus caballus, sometimes seen as a subspecies of the Wild Horse, Equus ferus caballus) is a large odd-toed ungulate mammal, one of ten modern species of the genus Equus. ...

Some of these words, dropped in Romance, were borrowed back as learned words from Latin itself. The vocabulary changes affected even the basic grammatical particles of Latin; there are many that vanish without a trace in Romance, such as an, at, autem, donec, enim, ergo, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quod, quoque, sed, utrum and vel.^[4] In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. ...

Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such suffixes as -bilis, -arius, -itare and -icare grew apace. These changes occurred frequently to avoid irregular forms or to regularise genders. Look up Suffix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

On the other hand, since Vulgar Latin and Latin proper were for much of their history different registers of the same language, rather than different languages, some Romance languages preserve Latin words that usually were lost. For example, Italian ogni ("each/every") preserves Latin omnes. Other languages use cognates of totus (accusative totum) for the same meaning; for example tutto in Italian, tudo/todo in Portuguese, todo in Spanish, tot in Catalan, tout in French and tot in Romanian.

Sometimes, a classical Latin word was kept alongside a Vulgar Latin word. In Vulgar Latin, classical caput, "head", yielded to testa (originally "pot") in some forms of western Romance, including French and Italian. But Italian, French and Catalan kept the Latin word under the form capo, chef, and cap which retained many metaphorical meanings of "head", including "boss". The Latin word with the original meaning is preserved in Romanian cap, together with țeastă, both meaning 'head' in the anatomical sense. Southern Italian dialects likewise preserve capo as the normal word for "head". Spanish and Portuguese have cabeza/cabeça, derived from *capetia, a modified form of caput, while in Portuguese testa was retained as the word for "forehead".

Frequently, words borrowed directly from literary Latin at some later date, rather than evolved within Vulgar Latin, are found side by side with the evolved form. The (lack of) expected phonetic developments is a clue that one word has been borrowed. For example, Vulgar Latin fungus (accusative fungum), "fungus, mushroom", which became Italian fungo, Catalan fong, and Portuguese fungo, became hongo in Spanish, showing the f > h shift that was common in early Spanish (cf. filius > Spanish hijo, "son" or facere > Spanish hacer, "to do"). But Spanish also had fungo, which by its lack of the expected sound shift shows that it was borrowed directly from Latin.^[4]

Vulgar Latin contained a large number of words of foreign origin not present in literary texts. Many works on medicine were written and distributed in Greek, and words were often borrowed from these sources. For example, gamba ( 'knee joint' ), originally a vetinary term only, replaced the classical Latin word for leg (crus) in most Romance languages. (cf. Fr. jambe, It. gamba). Cooking terms were also often borrowed from Greek sources, a calque based on a Greek term was ficatum (iecur)' (goose's liver fattened with figs), with the participle ficatum becoming the common word for liver in Vulgar Latin (cf. Sp. higado, Fr. foie, It. fegato, Romanian ficat). Important religious terms were also drawn from religious texts written in Greek, such as episcopos (bishop), presbyter (priest), martyr etc. Words borrowed from Gaulish include caballos ("horse" cf. caballus), and karros ("chariot" cf. carrus). // In linguistics, a calque (pronounced ) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word (Latin: verbum pro verbo) or root-for-root translation. ...

Insight into the vocabulary changes of late Vulgar Latin in France can be seen in the Reichenau Glosses,^[5] written on the margins of a copy of the Vulgate Bible, suggesting that the 4th-century Vulgate words were no longer readily understood in the 8th century, when the glosses were likely written. These glosses demonstrate typical vocabulary changes in Gallo-Romance. A gloss is a note made in the margins or between the lines of a book, in which the meaning of the text in its original language is explained in another language. ... The Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century version in Latin, partly revised and partly translated by Jerome on the orders of Pope Damasus I in 382. ... The Gallo-Romance branch of Romance languages includes French, Oïl languages, Catalan, and Occitan, among other languages. ...

The Reichenau Glosses show vocabulary replacement:

• femur > coxa (Portuguese, Galician and Old Spanish coxa, French cuisse, Italian coscia, Catalan cuixa, Romanian coapsă, "thigh")
• arena > sabulo (French sable, Italian rena and sabbia, "sand"; Spanish arena, Galician area, Portuguese areia)
• canere > cantare (Portuguese/Galician/Spanish/Catalan cantar, French chanter, Italian cantare, Romanian cânta, "to sing")

grammatical changes:

• optimus > meliores (Portuguese melhores, Galician mellores, Spanish mejores, Catalan millors, French meilleurs, Italian migliori, "better [plural]"; optimum survived in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, French and Romanian as óptimo, ó(p)timo, òptim, ottimo, optimal/optimum and optim respectively, with the sense of "excellent" or "optimal")
• saniore > plus sano (French plus sain, Italian più sano, Romanian mai sănătos, Catalan més sa, Spanish más sano, Portuguese mais são "healthier")

Germanic loan words:

• turbas > fulcos (French foule, Italian folla, "mob"; Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan turba)
• cementariis > mationibus (French maçons, "stonemasons")
• non perpercit > non sparniavit (French épargner, "to spare")
• galea > helme (French heaume, Italian/Portuguese elmo, Catalan elm, Spanish yelmo, "helmet")

and words whose meaning has changed:

• in ore > in bucca (Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan boca, French bouche, Italian bocca, "mouth")
• rostrum > beccus (French bec, Italian becco, Catalan bec, Spanish pico, Portuguese bico, "beak"; Spanish/Galician rostro, and Portuguese rosto survived to mean "face")
• isset > ambulasset (French allait, "he went"; Catalan anar, Italian andare, "to go")
• liberos > infantes (Catalan infants, "children"; French enfants, "children"; Italian infantile, "childish, infantile"; Portuguese infante, "prince"; Spanish infante, "child" but as a literary word and also "prince")
• milites > servientes (French sergents, "soldiers")

Phonology

See also: Latin spelling and pronunciation and Latin regional pronunciation

The Roman alphabet or Latin alphabet was adapted from an Etruscan alphabet, to represent the phonemes of the Latin language. ... Latin pronunciation, both in the classical and post-classical age, has varied across different regions and different eras. ...

Evidence of changes

Latin Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Appendix Probi

Evidence of these and other changes can be seen in the late 3rd century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe: Image File history File links Wikisource-logo. ... The original Wikisource logo. ... The Appendix Probi is a text of the third century A.D. by Valerius Probus. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for the use of a language. ...

• a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels ("masculus non masclus");
• the merger between long /e/ and short /i/ ("vinea non vinia");
• the levelling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/ ("coluber non colober") and /e/ and /i/ ("dimidius non demedius");
• regularization of irregular forms ("glis non glirus");
• regularization and emphasis of gendered forms ("pauper mulier non paupera mulier");
• levelling of the distinction between /b/ and /v/ between vowels ("bravium non brabium");
• the substitution of diminutives for unmarked words ("auris non oricla, neptis non nepticla")
• the loss of syllable-final nasals ("mensa non mesa") or their inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorrection ("formosus non formunsus").

Many of the forms castigated in the Appendix Probi proved to be the productive forms in Romance; oricla (Classical Latin neuter plural auricula) is the source of French oreille, Catalan orella, Spanish oreja, Italian orecchio, Romanian ureche, Portuguese orelha, "ear", not the Classical Latin form. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Hypercorrection comprises four linguistic phenomena: an elaborate, prescriptively based correction of common usage, often introduced in an attempt to avoid vulgarity or informality, that results in wording commonly considered clumsier than the usual, colloquial usage. ...

Consonants

Significant sound changes affected the consonants of Vulgar Latin: Sound change or phonetic change is a historical process of language change consisting in the replacement of one speech sound or, more generally, one phonetic feature by another in a given phonological environment. ...

Apocope

• Final -t, which occurred frequently in verb conjugations, and final -s, in nouns, were dropped.
• The scansion in Latin poetry suggests that the letter -m may have been pronounced very softly in classical Latin, being either voiceless or merely a silent letter that marked the nasalisation of the vowel which preceded it. It continued, however, to be consistently written in the literary language. In Vulgar Latin, these nasal vowels disappeared completely. (The nasal vowels of French and Portuguese developed from other sources.) One effect of their loss may have been the widespread shift of the masculine/neuter singular suffix -um [ũː] into -o [o].

Palatalisation

• Palatalisation ("softening") of Latin c, t and often g before the front vowels e and i was almost universal in Vulgar Latin. The initial results were likely affricates — [ts], [tʃ], [dz], [dʒ] —, possibly after a palatal intermediate stage, but these eventually became plain fricatives in most languages. Thus Latin caelum (sky, heaven), pronounced [kailu(m)] with an initial [k], became Italian cielo, [tʃɛlo], Spanish cielo, [θjelo] or [sjelo], French ciel, [sjɛl], Catalan cel, [sɛɫ], and Portuguese céu, [sɛu]. The only Romance languages that were not affected were Dalmatian and some varieties of Sardinian.

Lenition

Several other consonants were "softened", especially in intervocalic position (an instance of diachronic lenition): An apocope or apocopation is a type of metaplasm that refers to a word formed by removing the end of a longer original word. ... In literature, meter or metre (sometimes known as prosody) is a term used in the scansion (analysis into metrical patterns) of poetry, usually indicated by the kind of feet and the number of them. ... This article is about the art form. ... In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the words pronunciation. ... A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. ... Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ... Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ) but release as a fricative (such as or or, in a couple of languages, into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel. ... Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). ... Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. ... Dalmatian is an extinct Romance language formerly spoken in the Dalmatia region of Croatia, and as far south as Kotor (Cattaro) in Montenegro. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. ...

• Single voiceless plosives became voiced: -p-, -t-, -c- → -b-, -d-, -g-. In a few languages such as Spanish, these were further lenited to approximants, [β̞], [ð̞], [ɣ].
• The plain sibilant -s- [s] was also voiced to [z] between vowels, although in many languages its spelling has not changed. (In Spanish, intervocalic [z] was later devoiced back to [s].)
• The double plosives became single: -pp-, -tt-, -cc-, -bb-, -dd-, -gg- → -p-, -t-, -c-, -b-, -d-, -g- in most languages. Some languages of Italy have retained the distinction between double and single consonants, although they have also tended to add to the number of geminates. In French spelling, double consonants are merely etymological.
• The double sibilant -ss- [sː] also became phonetically single [s], although in many languages its spelling has not changed.
• The voiced labial consonants -b- and -v- (pronounced [b] and [w], respectively, in classical Latin) both shifted to the fricative [β] between vowels.^[6] This is clear from the orthography; in medieval times, the spelling u/v is often used for what had been a b in classical Latin, or the two spellings are used interchangeably. In many Romance languages (Italian, French, etc.), this fricative later developed into a [v] sound; but in others (Spanish, Catalan, etc.) it eventually merged back with [b] into a common phoneme.

Fortition

• The approximant j, which in Latin was merely an allophone of the vowel i, became a fricative, and in most languages split into an independent phoneme.

Prosthesis

• In the Western Romance area, an epenthetic vowel was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with s and another consonant: thus Latin spatha (sword) becomes Portuguese and Spanish espada, Catalan espasa, French épée. Eastern Romance languages preserved euphony rules by adding the epenthesis in the preceding article when necessary instead, so Italian preserves feminine spada as la spada, but changes the masculine *il spaghetto to lo spaghetto.

Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. ... A sibilant is a type of fricative or affricate, made by directing a jet of air through a narrow channel towards the sharp edge of the teeth. ... In phonetics, gemination is when a spoken consonant is doubled, so that it is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a single consonant. ... Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). ... The voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... Fortition is a consonantal mutation in which a sound is changed from one considered weak to one considered strong. ... In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ... Prosthesis or prothesis in linguistics and poetry (Greek pro pre- + thesis putting) is the appending of a consonant, a vowel, or a whole syllable in front of a word, usually to facilitate pronunciation. ... In poetry and phonetics, epenthesis (, from Greek epi on + en in + thesis putting) is the insertion of a consonant, a vowel, or a whole syllable into a word, usually to facilitate pronunciation. ... Euphony describes flowing and aesthetically pleasing speech. ...

Stressed vowels

One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its vowel system. Classical Latin had five short vowels, ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ, and five long vowels, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, each of which was an individual phoneme (see the table in the right, for their likely pronunciation in IPA), and three diphthongs, ae, oe, and au (four according to some authors, including ui). There were also long and short versions of y, representing the rounded vowel [y(ː)] in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced [i(ː)] even before Romance vowel changes started. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ... In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ... In phonetics, a diphthong (also gliding vowel) (Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally with two sounds, or with two tones) is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. ... Vowels See also: IPA, Consonants Near‑close Close‑mid Mid Open‑mid Near‑open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ...

There is evidence that in the imperial period all the short vowels except a differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts.^[7] So, for example ē was pronounced close-mid /eː/ while ĕ was pronounced open-mid /ɛ/, and ī was pronounced close /iː/ while ĭ was pronounced near-close /ɪ/. The diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced /ai/ and /oi/ in earlier Latin, had also begun their monophthongisation to /ɛ/ and /e/, respectively. Oe was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin; in Old Latin, oinos (one) regularly became unus.^[1] A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... The open-mid vowels make a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. ... A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. ... Vowels See also: IPA, Consonants Near‑close Close‑mid Mid Open‑mid Near‑open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... A monophthong (in Greek μονόφθογγος = single note) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation; compare diphthong. ... For the Old Latin Bible used before the Vulgate, see Vetus Latina. ...

As Vulgar Latin evolved, three main changes occurred in parallel. First, length distinctions were lost, so that for instance ă and ā came to be pronounced the same way. Second, the near-close vowels ĭ and ŭ became more open in most varieties of Vulgar Latin, merging with the long vowels ē and ō, respectively. As a result, Latin pira "pear" (fruit) and vēra "true", came to rhyme in most of its daughter languages: Italian, French, and Spanish pera, vera; Old French poire, voire. Similarly, Latin nucem ("nut", acc. sing) and vōcem (voice) become Italian noce, voce, Portuguese noz, voz, and French noix, voix (in some cases the quality of the vowel later changed again, because of regularising tendencies, or other extraneous influences). Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300. ...

There must have been some regional variation in pronunciation, since the Eastern Romance languages and the Southern Romance languages evolved differently.^[8] In Sardinian, for instance, ĭ and ŭ became more close, merging with their long counterparts ī and ū. Apart from Sardinian, which preserved the position of the Classical Latin vowels but lost phonemic vowel length, what happened to Vulgar Latin can be summarized as in the table to the right. More precisely, these mergers happened in most of western Europe, yielding the seven vowel system of proto-Italo-Western-Romance. Map of Balkans with regions inhabited by Romanians/Vlachs highlighted The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin. ... Southern Romance languages are parte of Romance languages that includes the Sardinian language and Sicilian language. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Italo-Western redirects here. ...

In general, though, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin (not counting the Greek letter y), which relied on phonemic vowel length, was newly modelled into one in which vowel length distinctions lost phonemic importance, and qualitative distinctions of height became more prominent. (Exceptions were Friulian, and some dialects of French, which have retained a contrast between long and short vowels.) In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ... In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ... In phonetics, vowel height refers to the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth in a vowel sound. ... This article includes a list of works cited or a list of external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ...

In the third place, the stress on accented syllables became much more pronounced in Vulgar Latin than in Classical Latin. This tended to cause unaccented syllables to become less distinct, while working further changes on the sounds of the accented syllables. The results of short o and e in stressed position proved to be unstable in several of the Romance languages, with a tendency to break up into diphthongs. Classical focus (accusative focum), "hearth", became the general word in proto-Romance for "fire" (replacing ignis), but its short o sound became a diphthong — a different diphthong — in many languages: In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. ...

• Italian: fuoco
• Spanish: fuego
• French: feu (now no longer a diphthong but [fø])

In French and Italian, these changes occurred only in open syllables. Spanish, however, diphthongised in all circumstances, resulting in a simple five-vowel system in both stressed and unstressed syllables. Romanian shows diphthongisation of short e (fier from Latin ferrum, "iron") but not of short o (foc). In Portuguese, no diphthongisation occurred at all (ferro, fogo).

Some languages experienced further mergers, reducing the number of stressed vowels down from seven (to six in Romanian, to five in Sardinian and Spanish). On the other hand, later monophthongisations led to new vowel phonemes in some languages (such as [y], [œ], and [ø] in French), while nasalisation produced new phonemic nasal vowels in French and Portuguese. A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. ...

Latin au was under some pressure to change in the Roman Republican period; a number of populist politicians adopted the spelling Clodius for the well known Roman name Claudius, but this change was not universal, and marked as basilectal well into the early Empire. Au was initially retained, but was eventually reduced in many languages to [o]. (Portuguese evolved only as far as [ou] until much more recently; Occitan and Romanian preserve [au] to this day.)^[8] The results of Latin ae were also subject to at least some early variation; French proie (spoils) presumes [e] rather than [ɛ] from Classical Latin praeda. This article is about the state which existed from the 6th century BC to the 1st century BC. For the state which existed in the 18th century, see Roman Republic (18th century). ... Clodius is the Roman nomen Claudius altered to a spelling that would have sounded plebeian to Roman ears. ... For other persons named Claudius, see Claudius (disambiguation). ... In linguistics, a basilect is a dialect of speech that has diverged so far from the standard language that in essence it has become a different language. ... Occitan (IPA AmE: ), known also as Lenga dòc or Langue doc (native name: occitan [1], lenga dòc [2]; native nickname: la lenga nòstra [3] i. ...

Unstressed vowels

There was more variability in the result of the unstressed vowels. Two main paths can be distinguished:

• Languages like Italian or Spanish have largely retained the system of five unstressed vowels of Vulgar Latin, with pronunciations still close to what they would have been in Classical Latin, except for length.

• In French, Portuguese, or Occitan, there has been more instability, with unstressed vowels changing pronunciation significantly (unstressed o, a → [u], [ɔ] in Occitan; unstressed o, e → [u], [i]/[ɨ] in Portuguese), some being reduced to a kind of schwa (unstressed final a → e → [ə] in French).

In Catalan, the process was similar to that of Portuguese in that the short Latin o turned into an open vowel, but short e eventually turned into a closed [e] in Western dialects (opposite to the pattern in the other Italo-Western languages), and a schwa in the Eastern ones. This schwa slowly evolved towards an open [ɛ], although in most of the Balearic Islands the schwa is maintained even nowadays. Eastern dialects have some vocalic instability similar to that of Portuguese as well: unstressed [e] and [a] turn into a schwa (at some point of the evolution of the language, this change did not affect [e] in pre-stressed position, a pronunciation that can still be heard in part of the Balearics), and, except in most of Majorca, unstressed [o] and [u] merge into [u]. The IPA symbol for the Schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean: An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel. ... Catalan IPA: (català IPA: or []) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, and in the city of LAlguer in the Italian island of Sardinia. ...

Grammar

The Romance articles

It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in some form in all of the Romance languages, arose; largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed. Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzards 1996 performance released on video and CD. The video/DVD and CD performances were both recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, England. ...

Definite articles formerly were demonstrative pronouns or adjectives; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, (illud), in the Romance languages, becoming French le and la, Catalan and Spanish el and la, and Italian il and la. The Portuguese articles o and a are ultimately from the same source. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ipsum, ipsa (su, sa); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after the noun, eg. lupul ("the wolf") and omul ("the man" — from lupum illum and *hominem illum).^[8] In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase with or without a determiner, such as you and they in English. ... In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjectives subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to. ... Demonstratives are words that indicate which objects a sentence is referring to. ... The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family that comprises all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ...

This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille dæmon sodalis peccati ("The devil is a companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Greek, which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.^[4] Vetus Latina is a collective name given to the Biblical texts in Latin that were translated before St Jeromes Vulgate bible became the standard Bible for Latin-speaking Western Christians. ... Many religions and spiritual movements believe that their sacred texts (or scriptures) are the Word of God, often feeling that the texts are wholly divine or spiritually inspired in origin. ... In early Chistian history, Egeria, also known as Aetheria, is the name of a woman who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land about 381–384, taking about four years to do it, and who wrote a long letter to her beloved circle of women at home (probably along the...

Another indication of the weakening of the demonstratives can be inferred from the fact that at this time, legal and similar texts begin to swarm with prædictus, supradictus, and so forth (all meaning, essentially, "aforesaid"), which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes, Erat autem. . . beatissimus Anianus in supradicta civitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were felt no longer to be specific enough.^[4] In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ecce (originally an interjection: "behold!") or *eccu, from Classical eccum ("behold it!") which also spawned Italian ecco. This is the origin of Old French cil (*ecce ille), cist (*ecce iste) and ici (*ecce hic); Spanish aquel and Portuguese aquele (*eccu ille); Italian questo (*eccu istum), quello (*eccu illum) and obsolescent codesto (*eccu tibi istum); Spanish acá and Portuguese cá, (*eccu hac), Portuguese acolá (*eccu illac) and aquém (*eccu inde); Romanian acest (*eccu istum) and (*eccu illum) and many other forms. An interjection is a part of speech that usually has no grammatical connection with the rest of the sentence and simply expresses emotion on the part of the speaker, although most interjections have clear definitions. ...

On the other hand, even in the Oaths of Strasbourg, no demonstrative appears even in places where one would clearly be called for in all the later languages. (pro Deo amur — "for the love of God") Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been too slangy for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles can be suffixed to the noun, as in other members of the Balkan linguistic union and the North Germanic languages. Text of the Oaths The Oaths of Strasbourg (Modern French: les serments de Strasbourg, Modern German: die Straßburger Eide) is the name by which we know the pledges of allegiance taken in 842 by Louis the German, son of Louis the Pious, and ruler of the eastern Frankish kingdom... The Balkan sprachbund or linguistic area is the ensemble of areal features—similarity in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology—among languages of the Balkans, which belong to various branches of Indo-European, such as Albanian, Greek, Romance and Slavic. ... The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the East Germanic languages. ...

The numeral unus, una (one) supplies the indefinite article everywhere. This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BCE. An article is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made to the noun. ... For other uses, see Cicero (disambiguation). ...

Gender: loss of the neuter

The genders

The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages. In Latin, gender is partly a matter of inflection, i.e. there are different declensional paradigms associated with the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, and partly a matter of agreement, i.e. nouns of a certain gender require forms of the same gender in adjectives and pronouns associated with them. In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once. ... Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for cat, with blue representing the masculine gender, pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender, and green representing the plural number. ... In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. ...

The loss of these final consonants led to a remodelling of the gender system. In Classical Latin, the endings -us and -um distinguished masculine from neuter nouns in the second declension; with both -s and -m gone, the neuters merged with the masculines, a process that is complete in Romance. By contrast, some neuter plurals such as gaudia, "joys", were re-analysed as feminine singulars. The loss of the final m was a process which seems to have begun by the time of the earliest monuments of the Latin language. The epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who died around 150 BCE, reads TAVRASIA CISAVNA SAMNIO CEPIT, which in Classical Latin would be Taurāsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cēpit, "He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium". (Note that in the Latin alphabet, the letters u and v, i and j were not distinguished until the early modern period. Upper-case u and j did not exist, while lower-case j and v were only graphic variations of i and u, respectively.) In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. ... In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns and adjectives to indicate such features as number (typically singular vs. ... In etymology, the process of back-formation is the creation of a neologism by reinterpreting an earlier word as a compound and removing the spuriously supposed affixes. ... For other uses, see Epitaph (disambiguation). ... The tomb of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, erected around 150 BC, contains an Old Latin inscription in Saturnian metre. ... Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz redirects here. ...

The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases absorbed by the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The syntactical confusion starts already in the Pompeian graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum "dead body" and hoc locum for hunc locum "this place" (-us was normally a masculine ending, and -um a neuter ending). The morphological confusion shows primarily in the adoption of the nominative ending -us (-Ø after -r) in the o-declension: in Petronius Arbiter, we find balneus for balneum "bath", fatus for fatum "fate", caelus for caelum "heaven", amphiteatrus for amphitheatrum "amphitheatre" and conversely the nominative thesaurum for thesaurus "treasure". For other uses, see Pompeii (disambiguation). ...

In modern Romance languages, the nominative s-ending has been abandoned and all substantives of the o-declension have an ending derived from -UM > -u/-o/-Ø: MURUM > Italian and Spanish muro, Catalan and French mur and CAELUM > Italian, Spanish cielo, French ciel, Catalan cel, Sardinian kelu. Old French still had -s in the nominative and -Ø in the accusative in both original genders (murs, ciels).

For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was the productive form in Romance; for others, the nominative/accusative form, which was identical in Classical Latin, was the one that survived. Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French (le) lait, Catalan (la) llet, Spanish (la) leche, Portuguese (o) leite, Italian (il) latte, and Romanian lapte(le) ("milk"), all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin nom./acc. neut. lacte or acc. masc. lactem. Note also that in Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, lapte/lăpturi). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French nom, Portuguese nome, and Italian nome ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative nomen, rather than the oblique stem form *nominem (which nevertheless produced Spanish nombre).^[8]

Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in -A or -IA; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as gaudium ("joy"), plural gaudia; the plural form lies at the root of the French feminine singular (la) joie, as well as of Catalan and Occitan (la) joia (Italian la gioia is a borrowing from French); the same for lignum ("wood stick"), plural ligna, that originated the Catalan feminine singular noun (la) llenya, and Spanish (la) leña. Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient neuter plural which is treated grammatically as feminine: e.g. BRACCHIUM : BRACCHIA "arm(s)" > Italian (il) braccio : (le) braccia, Romanian braț(ul) : brațe(le). Cf. also Merovingian Latin ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant. For other uses, see Merovingian (disambiguation). ...

Alternations such as l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") / le uova fresche ("the fresh eggs") in Italian are usually analysed as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in -a (heteroclisis). However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that uovo is simply a regular neuter noun (< ovum, plural ova) and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is -o in the singular and -e in the plural. Thus, neuter nouns can arguably be said to persist in Italian, and also Romanian.

These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, the names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin pirus ("pear tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian (il) pero and Romanian păr(ul); in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations (le) poirier, (el) peral; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the feminine derivations (a) pereira, (la) perera. Fagus ("beech"), another feminine noun ending in -us, is preserved in some languages as a masculine, e.g. Romanian fag(ul) or Catalan (el) faig; other dialects have replaced it with its adjectival forms fageus or fagea ("made of beechwood"), whence Italian (il) faggio, Spanish (el) haya, and Portuguese (a) faia. The coniferous Coast Redwood, the tallest tree species on earth. ... Species About 30 species; see text For other uses, see Pear (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Beech (disambiguation). ...

As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension noun manus ("hand"), another feminine noun with the ending -us, Italian and Spanish derived (la) mano, Catalan (la) mà, and Portuguese (a) mão, which preserve the feminine gender along with the masculine appearance.

Except for the Italian and Romanian heteroclitic nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but all have vestigial, semantically neuter pronouns. French: celui-ci, celle-ci, ceci; Spanish: éste, ésta, esto (all meaning "this"); Italian: gli, le, ci ("to him", "to her", "to it"); Catalan: ho, açò, això, allò ("it", this, this/that, that over there); Portuguese: todo, toda, tudo ("all of him", "all of her", "all of it").

In Spanish, a three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles el, la, and lo. The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno, literally 'the good' or 'that which is good', from bueno: good; "lo importante", i.e. that which is important. "¿Sabes lo tarde que es?", literally "Do you know 'the late' that it is?", or more idiomatically "Do you know how late it is?", from tarde late. This is traditionally interpreted as the existence of a neuter gender in Spanish, although no morphological distinction is made anywhere else but in the singular definite article.

Some varieties of Astur-Leonese maintain endings for the three genders such as follows: bonu, bona, bono ("good"). Astur-Leonese is a Romance language group of the West Iberian group, spoken in the Spanish provinces of Asturias (Asturian Language, asturianu, or Bable), León, Zamora and Salamanca (Leonese language, Llïonés). ...

The loss of the noun case system

The sound changes that were occurring in Vulgar Latin made the noun case system of Classical Latin harder to sustain, and ultimately spelled doom for the system of Latin declensions. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, vulgar Latin moved from being a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic language where word order is a necessary element of syntax. Consider what the loss of final /m/, the loss of phonemic vowel length, and the sound shift of ae from /ai/ to /ɛ/ entailed for a typical first declension noun (see table). In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ... Latin is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. ... A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ... An analytic language is any language where syntax and meaning are shaped more by use of particles and word order than by inflection. ...

The complete elimination of case happened only gradually. Old French still maintained a nominative/oblique distinction (called cas-sujet/cas-régime); this disappeared in the course of the 12th or 13th centuries, depending on the dialect. Old Occitan also maintained a similar distinction, as did many of the Rhaeto-Romance languages until only a few hundred years ago. Romanian still preserves a separate genitive/dative case along with vestiges of a vocative case. Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300. ... The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. ... An oblique case (Latin: ) in linguistics is a noun case of analytic languages that is used generally when a noun is the predicate of a sentence or a preposition. ... Romansh (also spelled Rumantsch, Romansch or Romanche) is any of the various Rhaetian languages spoken in Switzerland. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given. ... The vocative case is the case used for a noun identifying the person (animal, object, etc. ...

The distinction between singular and plural was marked in two ways in the Romance languages. North and west of the La Spezia-Rimini line, which runs through northern Italy, the singular was usually distinguished from the plural by means of final -s, which was present in the old accusative plurals in masculine and feminine nouns of all declensions. South and east of the La Spezia-Rimini Line, the distinction was marked by changes of final vowels, as in contemporary standard Italian and Romanian. This preserves and generalizes distinctions that were marked on the nominative plurals of the first and second declensions. For other uses of number, see number (disambiguation). ... Look up plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In the linguistics of the Romance languages, the La Spezia-Rimini Line is a line that refers to a number of important isoglosses that distinguish the eastern Romance languages from the western Romance languages. ... The accusative case (abbreviated ACC) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. ...

Prepositions multiply

Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntax purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in numbers, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish donde, "where", from Latin de + unde, or French dès, "since", from de + ex or dans, "in" from de intus, "from the inside", while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese desde is de + ex + de. Spanish después and Portuguese depois, "after", represent de + ex + post. Some of these new compounds appear in literary texts during the late empire; French dehors, Spanish de fuera and Portuguese de fora ("outside") all three represent de + foris (Romanian afară - ad + foris), and we find St Jerome writing si quis de foris venerit ("if anyone goes outside").^[4] For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with adposition. ... For other uses, see Jerome (disambiguation). ...

Samples:

As Latin was losing its case system, prepositions started to move in to fill the void. In colloquial Latin, the preposition ad followed by the accusative was sometimes used as a substitute for the dative case.

Classical Latin:

Jacōbus patrĭ librum dat. "James is giving his father a/the book."

Vulgar Latin:

´Jacọmọs ´lẹvrọ a ´patre ´dọnat/dat. "James is giving a/the book to his father."

Just as in the disappearing dative case, colloquial Latin sometimes replaced the disappearing genitive case with the preposition de followed by the ablative.

Classical Latin:

Jacōbus mihi librum patris dat. "James is giving me his father's book."

Vulgar Latin:

´Jacọmọs mẹ ´lẹvrọ dẹ ´patre ´dọnat/dat. "James is giving me the book of (belonging to) his father."

or

´Jacọmọs ´lẹvrọ dẹ ´patre a ´mẹ ´dọnat/dat. "James is giving the book of (belonging to) his father to me."

Adverbs

Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbs from adjectives: carus, "dear", formed care, "dearly"; acriter, "fiercely", from acer; crebro, "often", from creber. All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin, where adverbs were invariably formed by a feminine ablative form modifying mente, which was originally the ablative of mentis, and so meant "with a _____ mind". So velox ("quick") instead of velociter ("quickly") gave veloce mente (originally "with a quick mind", "quick-mindedly") This explains the widespread rule for forming adverbs in many Romance languages: add the suffix -ment(e) to the feminine form of the adjective. This originally separate word becomes a suffix in Romance. This change was well under way as early as the 1st century BCE, and the construction appears several times in Catullus, for example in Catullus 8, line 11: sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura "but carry on obstinately [obstinate-mindedly]: get over it!" Adverbs redirects here. ... In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjectives subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to. ... In linguistics, ablative case (also called the sixth case) (abbreviated ABL) is a name given to cases in various languages whose common thread is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ. ... Fresco from Herculaneum, presumably showing a love couple. ... // Latin Text Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire, et quod vides perisse perditum ducas. ...

Verbs

Further information: Romance verbs

The verb forms were much less affected by the phonetic losses that eroded the noun case systems; indeed, an active verb in Spanish (or other modern Romance language) will still strongly resemble its Latin ancestor. One factor that gave the system of verb inflections more staying power was the fact that the strong stress accent of Vulgar Latin, replacing the light stress accent of Classical Latin, frequently caused different syllables to be stressed in different conjugated forms of a verb. As such, although the word forms continued to evolve phonetically, the distinctions among the conjugated forms did not erode (much). In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ...

For example, in Latin the words for "I love" and "we love" were, respectively, amō and amāmus. Because a stressed A gave rise to a diphthong in some environments in Old French, that daughter language had (j')aime for the former and (nous) amons for the latter. Though several phonemes have been lost in each case, the different stress patterns helped to preserve distinctions between them, if perhaps at the expense of irregularising the verb. Regularising influences have countered this effect in some cases (the modern French form is nous aimons), but some modern verbs have preserved the irregularity, such as je viens ("I come") versus nous venons ("we come").^[8]

Another set of changes already underway by the 1st century CE was the loss of certain final consonants. A graffito at Pompeii reads quisque ama valia, which in Classical Latin would read quisquis amat valeat ("may whoever loves be strong/do well").^[4] In the perfect tense, many languages generalized the -aui ending most frequently found in the first conjugation. This led to an unusual development; phonetically, the ending was treated as the diphthong /au/ rather than containing a semivowel /awi/, and the /w/ sound was in many cases dropped; it did not participate in the sound shift from /w/ to /β̞/. Thus Latin amaui, amauit ("I loved; he/she loved") in many areas became proto-Romance *amai and *amaut, yielding for example Portuguese amei, amou. This suggests that in the spoken language, these changes in conjugation preceded the loss of /w/.^[8] For other uses, see Graffiti (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Pompeii (disambiguation). ... The perfect tenses are verb tenses showing actions completed at or before a specific time. ...

Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. This may have been due to phonetic merger of intervocalic /b/ and /w/, which caused future tense forms such as amabit to become identical to perfect tense forms such as amauit, introducing unacceptable ambiguity. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb habere, *amare habeo, literally "to love I have". This was contracted into a new future suffix in Western Romance forms which can be seen in the following modern examples of "I will love": It has been suggested that Future perfect tense be merged into this article or section. ... The perfect tenses are verb tenses showing actions completed at or before a specific time. ...

• French: j'aimerai (je + aimer + ai) < aimer ["to love"] + ai ["I have"].
• Portuguese and Galician: amarei (amar + [h]ei) < amar ["to love"] + hei ["I have"]
• Spanish and Catalan: amaré (amar + [h]e) < amar ["to love"] + he ["I have"].
• Italian: amerò (amar + [h]o) < amare ["to love"] + ho ["I have"].

An innovative conditional (distinct from the subjunctive) also developed in the same way (infinitive + conjugated form of habere). The fact that the future and conditional endings were originally independent words is still evident in Portuguese, which in these tenses allows clitic object pronouns to be incorporated as infixes between the root of the verb and its ending: "I will love" (eu) amarei, but "I will love you" amar-te-ei, from amar + te ["you"] + (eu) hei = amar + te + [h]ei = amar-te-ei. Galician (Galician: galego, IPA: ) is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community with the constitutional status of historic nationality, located in northwestern Spain and small bordering zones in neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castilla y León. ... Catalan IPA: (català IPA: or []) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, and in the city of LAlguer in the Italian island of Sardinia. ... The conditional mood (or conditional tense) is the form of the verb used in conditional sentences to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event that is contingent on another set of circumstances. ... In grammar, the subjunctive mood (sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood) is a verb mood that exists in many languages. ... In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. ... An infix is an affix inserted inside an existing word. ...

Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, that has now survived 6000 years of known evolution, the synthetic passive voice was utterly lost in Romance, being replaced with periphrastic verb forms—composed of the verb "to be" plus a passive participle—or impersonal reflexive forms—composed of a verb and a passivizing pronoun. In grammar, voice is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... Periphrasis is a figure of speech where the meaning of a word or phrase is expressed by many or several words. ... In grammar, a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient (typically represented syntactically by the subject and the direct object) are the same. ...

Apart from the gramatical and phonetic developments there were many cases of verbs merging as complex subtleties in Latin were reduced to simplified verbs in Romance. A classic example of this is the verbs expressing the concept "to go". Consider three particular verbs in Classical Latin expressing concepts of "going": ire, vadere, and ambulare. In Spanish and Portuguese ire and vadere merged into the verb ir which derives some conjugated forms from ire and some from vadere. andar was maintained as a separate verb derived from ambulare. Italian instead merged vadere and ambulare into the verb andare. And at the extreme French merged all three Latin verbs with, for example, the present tense deriving from vadere and ambulare and the future tense deriving from ire. Similarly the Romance distinction between the Romance verbs for "to be", essere and stare, was lost in French as these merged into the verb être.

Copula

Main article: Romance copula

The copula (that is, the verb signifying "to be") of Classical Latin was esse. This evolved to *essere in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix -re to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian essere and French être through Proto-Gallo-Romance *essre and Old French estre as well as Spanish and Portuguese ser (Romanian a fi derives from fieri which means "to become"). However, in Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb stare, which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand" to denote a more temporary meaning. That is, *essere signified the essence, while stare signified the state. Stare evolved to Spanish and Portuguese estar and Old French ester (both through *estare), while Italian retained the original form. The copula or copulae (the verb or verbs meaning to be) in all Romance languages derive from the Latin verbs SVM and STO. The former was the copular verb to be (ultimately from the Indo-European copula *h1es-), and the latter mainly meant to stand (ultimately from the Indo-European... For other uses, see Copula (disambiguation). ...

The semantic shift that underlies this evolution is more or less as follows: A speaker of Classical Latin might have said (hypothetically, Classical Latin was nearly fully restricted to writing and reserved for rhetorical purposes): vir est in foro, meaning "the man is at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin should have been *(h)omo stat in foru, "the man stands at the marketplace", replacing the est (from esse) with stat (from stare), because "standing" was what was perceived as what the man was actually doing. The use of stare in this case was still actually correct assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from essere to stare became more wide-spread, and, in the end, essere only denoted natural qualities that would not change. (Although it might be objected that in sentences like Spanish la catedral está en la ciudad, "the church is in the city" this is also unlikely to change, but all locations are expressed through estar in Spanish.)

In French, the evolved forms of the two verbs, estre and ester, merged in the late Middle Ages, as the "s" disappeared from words beginning in est-, as this phenomenon produced Modern French être and an obscure form *éter, which eventually merged.

See also

• Cantar de Mio Cid
• Romance copula
• Romance languages
• Veronese Riddle

A page from the original codex, starting from line 1922 El Cantar del Mio Cid is the oldest preserved Spanish cantar de gesta. ... The copula or copulae (the verb or verbs meaning to be) in all Romance languages derive from the Latin verbs SVM and STO. The former was the copular verb to be (ultimately from the Indo-European copula *h1es-), and the latter mainly meant to stand (ultimately from the Indo-European... The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family that comprises all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... It was probably in the early 9th century that one day a Catholic monk from Verona, in North Italy (Veneto), probably exhausted after a day spent copying Latin manuscripts, wrote a riddle, apparently half-Italian, half-Latin on the margin of a parchment. ...

History of specific Romance languages

• Catalan phonology and orthography
• History of French
• History of Portuguese
• History of the Spanish language
• Latin to Romanian sound changes
• Old French

// Diachronical Phonological Features in Relation to Latin Several characteristic features of Catalan as a Romance language: Like Occitan, loss of Latin final unstressed vowels, except -a; and then after some of the resulting consonantic groups a support vowel appears, e. ... French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended from Latin) that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in Northern France. ... The Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. It began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the 5th century, and started... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... This article presents the sound changes that happened from Latin to Romanian. ... Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300. ...

Notes

References

• Allen, W. Sidney. (2003). Vox Latina – a Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37936-9.
• Boyd-Bowman, Peter. From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts. Contains a great deal of data showing exactly how various Latin words developed into their Romance equivalents.
• Harrington, K. P., J. Pucci, and A. G. Elliott. (1997). Medieval Latin. 2nd edition. Univ. of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-31712-9. Discusses the vocabulary, orthographical, and grammatical changes of Late Latin as they appear in literary sources and texts.
• Herman, József. (2000). Vulgar Latin. First published in French as Le latin vulgaire, Paris, 1967. Trans. by Roger Wright. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-02001-6). A good overview of the phonological, morphological and lexical changes leading to Vulgar Latin and Proto-Romance.
• Palmer, L. R. (1954). The Latin Language. Repr. 1988, Univ. Oklahoma. ISBN 0-8061-2136-X. A general history of the Latin language from the earliest monuments of the language to the present. It confirms that a number of features of early Romance, excluded in classical Latin, appear in early texts.
• Pulgram, Ernst (1950). "Spoken and Written Latin". Language 26 (4): 458–466. 
• Sihler, A. L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 0-19-508345-8. A more recent comparative grammar giving an etymological treatment with focus on the older language.
• Tucker, T. G. (1931). Etymological Dictionary of Latin. Repr. 1985, Ares Publishers. ISBN 0-89005-172-0. An older attempt at tracing the etymological roots of Latin words.
• Vincent, Nigel. (1990). "Latin". In M. Harris and N. Vincent (eds), The Romance Languages. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 0-19-520829-3. Contains an extensive discussion of the subject, including syntactic changes.
• von Wartburg, Walther. (1928-). Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. In German and French. An extensively detailed work covering the etymology of French and Occitan words, with a great deal of information on the lexical development of Vulgar Latin.

Various books cover the changes between Latin and specific Romance languages, including:

• For French: Glanville Price (1984) The French language: present and past (Grant and Cutler) is an excellent overview of the phonological, morphological and syntactic changes occurring between Latin and modern French; Mildred K. Pope (1934) From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman Phonology and Morphology (Manchester University Press), is an older etymological reference grammar focusing specifically on sound changes; William W. Kibler, An Introduction to Old French also contains a good account of the sound changes leading to Old French.
• For Spanish: Ralph Penny (2002) A History of the Spanish Language (Cambridge Univ. Press) covers the sound changes leading to Spanish in exacting detail.
• For Portuguese: Edwin B. Williams (1968) From Latin to Portuguese: Historical Phonology and Morphology of the Portuguese Language (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press) is the standard reference, and highly detailed.
• For Occitan: William D. Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan is a good overview of the changes leading to Old Occitan. (It includes a 150-page glossary of all the terms found in the readings in the book, with extensive etymological information on each.)

External links

• An Introduction to Vulgar Latin by C.H. Grandgent
• Latin at the End of the Imperial Age by Dag Norberg
• Orbis Latinus, a website about Latin and the Romance languages
• Verbix Conjugate Vulgar Latin verbs.

For other uses, see Latins and Latin (disambiguation). ... For the Old Latin Bible used before the Vulgate, see Vetus Latina. ... Classical Latin is the language used by the principal exponents of that language in what is usually regarded as classical Latin literature. ... Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. ... Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, particularly by the humanist movement. ... New Latin (or Neo-Latin) is a post-medieval version of Latin, now used primarily in International Scientific Vocabulary cladistics and systematics. ... Recent Latin is the form of Latin used from the late nineteenth century down to the present. ... The Duenos inscription, from the 6th century BC, is the second-earliest known Latin text. ... Latin literature, the body of written works in the Latin language, remains an enduring legacy of the culture of ancient Rome. ... The term Ecclesiastical Latin (sometimes called Church Latin) refers to the Latin language as used in documents of the Roman Catholic Church and in its Latin liturgies. ... The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family that comprises all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) is a comprehensive collection of ancient Latin inscriptions. ...