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Vulgar Latin

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Languages

          Not to be confused with Latin profanity.

   Vulgar Latin, as in this political engraving at Pompeii, was the way
   that ordinary people of the Roman Empire spoke, which was different
   from the Classical Latin used by the Roman elite.
   Vulgar Latin, as in this political engraving at Pompeii, was the way
   that ordinary people of the Roman Empire spoke, which was different
   from the Classical Latin used by the Roman elite.

   Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris, "common speech") is a blanket
   term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken
   mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire until those
   dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early Romance
   languages — a distinction usually made around the ninth century. It is
   important to remember that it is an abstract term, and not the name of
   any particular dialect. The term itself predates the field of
   sociolinguistics, and was in some ways a precursor to sociolinguistics
   which studies language variation associated with social variables and
   which tends not to see language variation as such a strict
   standard/non-standard dichotomy (e.g. Classical/Vulgar Latin) but
   rather 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) except that it tries to
   exclude the speech and especially writings of the upper, more-educated
   classes. It is because there are so many different types of variation
   that definitions of Vulgar Latin differ so much.

   This spoken Latin differed from the literary language of classical
   Latin (i.e., the perceived standard) in its pronunciation, vocabulary,
   and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until the
   late Empire. Other features are likely to have been in place in spoken
   Latin, in at least its basilectal forms, much earlier. Most definitions
   of "vulgar Latin" mean that it is a spoken language, rather than a
   written language, because literature tends to be more conservative and
   therefore, less prone to variation. Because no one transcribed
   phonetically the daily speech of any Latin speakers during the period
   in question, students of Vulgar Latin must study it through indirect
   methods.

   Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First,
   the comparative method can reconstruct the underlying forms from the
   attested Romance languages, and note where they differ from classical
   Latin. Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the late Latin
   period condemn linguistic errors that Latin users were likely to
   commit, providing insight into how Latin speakers used their language.
   Finally, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are
   found in late Latin texts also shed light on the spoken language of the
   writer.

What was Vulgar Latin?

   The Cantar de Mio Cid is the earliest text of reasonable length we have
   in Mediaeval Spanish, and marks the beginning of this language as
   distinct from Vulgar Latin
   Enlarge
   The Cantar de Mio Cid is the earliest text of reasonable length we have
   in Mediaeval Spanish, and marks the beginning of this language as
   distinct from Vulgar Latin

   The name "vulgar" simply means "common"; it is derived from the Latin
   word vulgaris, meaning "common", or "of the people". "Vulgar Latin" to
   Latinists has a variety of meanings.
    1. It means variation within Latin (socially, geographically, and
       chronologically) that differs from the perceived Classical literary
       standard. As such, it typically excludes the language of the more
       educated, upper-classes which, although it does include variation,
       comes closest to the perceived standard.
    2. It means the spoken Latin of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin
       represents the literary register of Latin. It represented a
       selection from a variety of available 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, syntax, and grammar. By this definition, Vulgar Latin
       was a spoken language and "late" Latin was used for writing, its
       general style being slightly different from earlier "classic"
       standards.

    1. It means the hypothetical ancestor of the Romance languages
       ("Proto-Romance"). This is a language which cannot be directly
       known apart from through a few graffiti inscriptions; it was Latin
       that had undergone a number of important sound shifts and changes,
       which can be reconstructed from the changes that are evident in its
       descendants, the Romance vernaculars.
    2. In an even more restrictive sense, 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
       this hypothesis, southeastern Italian, Romanian, and Dalmatian
       developed separately.
    3. "Vulgar Latin" is sometimes used to describe the grammatical
       innovations found in a number of late Latin texts, such as the
       fourth 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 valuable to philologists mainly because of the occasional
       presence of variations or errors in spelling that provide some
       evidence of spoken usage during the period in which they were
       written.

   Some literary works in a lower register of language from the Classical
   Latin period also give a glimpse into the world of Vulgar Latin. The
   works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who
   were slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features, as does the
   recorded speech of the freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius
   Arbiter.

   Vulgar Latin developed differently in the various provinces of the
   Roman Empire, thus gradually giving rise to modern French, Italian,
   Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and Romansh. Although the
   official language, in all of these areas, was Latin, Vulgar Latin was
   what was popularly spoken until the new localized forms diverged
   sufficiently from Latin to emerge as separate standard languages. It is
   important to note that despite the widening gulf between the spoken and
   written ("late") form of Latin, that throughout the time of the empire
   and up till the eight century A.D. there was not an unbridgeable gap
   between them. Joszef Herman states: -

     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, saint's 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 eight century onwards, many
     people, including several of the clerics, were not able to
     understand even the most straightforward religous texts

     —Joszef Herman, Vulgar Latin

   The third century AD is presumed to be an age in which much vocabulary
   was changing (e.g., equus → caballus "horse", etc.) and recently, some
   studies (which still perhaps need more scientific development) have
   suggested that pronunciations too started to diverge, supposedly even
   then becoming similar to modern local pronunciations, with the most
   spectacular (alleged) effect in the area of Naples. However, these
   changes could not have been uniform across the Empire's territory, so
   the greatest differences were perhaps to be found among different forms
   of Vulgar Latin in different areas (some due to the acquisition of
   newer "local" roots). However it must be noted that most of this theory
   is based on reconstruction a posteriori rather than on texts.

   For several centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire,
   Vulgar Latin continued to coexist with written Late Latin: for when
   people who spoke one of the Romance vernaculars set out to write using
   proper grammar and spelling, what they put down was language that at
   least paid lip service to the norms of classical Latin. However, at the
   third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the
   vernacular language in order to be comprehensible — either the rustica
   lingua romanica, Vulgar Latin now recognisably distinct from the frozen
   Church Latin; or German. This could be a documented moment of the
   evolution. Within the space of a lifetime after the Council of Tours,
   in 842, the Oaths of Strasbourg, recording an agreement between two of
   Charlemagne's heirs, were spoken in a Romance language that was
   obviously not Latin:
   Extract of the Oaths
   Enlarge
   Extract of the Oaths

   Extract of the full text which is at Oaths of Strasbourg.

          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.

   Late Latin, still based in Rome, presumably reflected these
   acquisitions, recording what was changing in a nearer area — fairly
   identifiable with Italy. Formal Latin was then "frozen" by the
   codifications of Roman law on one side ( Justinian) and of the Church
   on the other side, finally unified by the medieval copyists and since
   then forever separated from already independent Romance vulgar idioms.
   The written language continued to exist as mediaeval Latin. The Romance
   vernaculars were recognised as separate languages, and began to develop
   local norms and orthographies of their own. "Vulgar Latin" ceases to be
   a useful name for either language.

   Vulgar Latin is then a collective name for a group of derived dialects
   with local — not necessarily common — characteristics, that do not make
   a "language", at least in a classical sense. It could perhaps be
   described as a sort of "magmatic" undefined matter that slowly locally
   crystallized into the several early forms of each Romance language,
   that consequently find their ultimate proper ancestry in formal Latin.
   Vulgar Latin was therefore an intermediate point of the evolution, not
   a source.

Phonology

Vowels

        Letter                         Pronunciation
                    Classical                   Vulgar
     A, a    short A [a]       [a]
     Ā, ā    long A [aː]      [a]
     e, e    short E [e]       [ɛ]
    Ē and ē  long E [eː]      [e]
    I and i  short I [i]       [e]
    Ī and ī  long I [iː]      [i]
    O and o  short O [o]       [ɔ]
    Ō and ō  long O [oː]      [o]
    U and u  short V [u]       [o]
    Ū and ū  long V [uː]      [u]
    Y and y  short Y [y]       [i]
    Y and y  long Y [yː]      [i]
   Ae and ae AE     [ai]      [ɛ]
   Oe and oe OE     [oi]      [e]
   Au and au AV     [au]      [au]
   (see International Phonetic Alphabet for an explanation of the symbols
   used);

   One profound change that affected every Romance language reordered the
   vowel system of classical Latin. Latin had ten distinct vowels: long
   and short versions of A, E, I, O, V, and three diphthongs, AE, OE and
   AV (four according to some, including VI). There were also long and
   short versions of the Greek borrowing, Y.

   At some time during the classical Latin period, all the vowels except
   [a] began to differ by quality as well as by length. The long vowels
   became more close, while the short vowels became more open. So, for
   example, /eː/ remained [eː], while /e/ became [ɛ]; /iː/ remained [iː],
   while /i/ became [e]; /oː/ remained [oː], but /o/ became [ɔ]; and /uː/
   remained [uː], but /u/ became [o]. Thus the five-times-two triangular
   vowel system of Latin became a nine-vowel triangular system, with a
   close set corresponding to the open set.

   In effect, Latin went from this:
   ī i u ū
   ē e o ō
    ā a

   to this:
   /iː/ /e/ /o/ /uː/
   /eː/ /ɛ/ /ɔ/ /oː/
         /a/

   In Vulgar Latin, next, long /eː/ and short /e/ merged, and long /oː/
   and short /o/ merged in the West, yielding the seven vowel system of
   proto-Western-Romance. As a result for example, Latin pira ("pear
   (fruit)", fem. sing.) and vēra ("true", fem. singular), came to rhyme
   in most of the daughter languages: Italian, French, and Spanish pera,
   vera; Old French poire, voire. Similarly, in the western Roman Empire,
   Latin nuce(m) ("nut", acc. sing) and vōce(m) ("voice") become Italian
   noce, voce, Portuguese noz, voz, and French noix, voix. This change did
   not occur in Romanian (nucă, voce), or, of course, in Sardinian.

   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.

   The diphthongs AE and OE usually became [ɛ] and [e] respectively. OE
   was always a rare phoneme in Classical Latin; in Old Latin times oinos
   ("one") regularly became unus. The results of Latin AE were also
   subject to at least some early changes; French proie ("spoils")
   presumes [e] rather than [ɛ] from classical Latin praeda. Latin AV 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. AV was initially retained, but
   was eventually reduced in many languages to [o] after the original [o]
   and [oː] experienced further changes. (Portuguese evolved only as far
   as [ou] until much more recently; Occitan and Romanian preserve [au].)

   Thus, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin (not counting diphthongs
   and the Greek Y), which relied on phonemic vowel length was newly
   modelled into a system in which vowel length distinctions were
   suppressed and alterations of vowel quality ( vowel height, more
   specifically) became phonemic. Because of this change, 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 result was a system with seven stressed vowel
   phonemes (six in Romanian, five in Sardinian) and five unstressed vowel
   phonemes.

   The results of short O and E proved to be unstable in the daughter
   languages, and tended 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 daughter languages:
     * French: feu (now no longer a diphthong but /fø/)
     * Italian: fuoco
     * Spanish: fuego

   In French and Italian, these changes occurred only in open syllables.
   Spanish, however, diphthongized in all circumstances, resulting in a
   simple five-vowel system in both stressed and unstressed syllables. In
   Portuguese, no diphthongization occurred at all (fogo ['fogu]).
   Romanian shows diphthongization of short E (fier from Latin ferrum) but
   not of short O (foc). Portuguese actually avoided some of the
   instability of its vowels by retaining the Latin distinction between
   long and short vowels to a certain extent in its system of closed and
   open vowels. Long Latin e and o generally became closed vowels in
   Portuguese (written ê and ô when accented), while the corresponding
   short vowels became open vowels in Portuguese (é and ó when accented).
   The pronunciation of these vowels is the same as is indicated in the
   table of Vulgar Latin vowels to the right. Some vowel instability did
   occur, however, particularly with unstressed o, which changes to [u],
   and unstressed e, which changes to [i] or [ɨ].

   In Catalan, the process was similar to that of Portuguese. The short
   Latin o turned into an open vowel, while short e eventually turned into
   a closed [e] in Western dialects 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 mantained even nowadays. Eastern dialects
   have some vocalic instability similar to that of Portuguese as well:
   unstressed /e/ and /a/ turn into a schwa (in some point of the
   evolution of the language, this change didn't affect /e/ in prestressed
   position, a pronunciation that is still kept alive in part of the
   Balearics), and, except in most of Majorca, unstressed /o/ and /u/
   merge into [u].

Consonants

   Palatalization of Latin /k/, /t/, and often /g/ was almost universal in
   vulgar Latin; the only Romance languages it did not affect were
   Dalmatian and some varieties of Sardinian. Thus Latin caelum ('sky',
   'heaven'), pronounced /kaelu(m)/ beginning with /k/, became Italian
   cielo, /tʃɛlo/, French ciel, /sjɛl/, Catalan cel, /sɛl/, Spanish cielo,
   /θjelo/ or /sjelo/ (depending on dialect) and Portuguese céu, /'sɛu/,
   beginning with sibilant consonants. The former semivowels written in
   Latin as V as in vinum, pronounced /w/, and I as in iocunda, pronounced
   /j/, came to be pronounced /v/ and /dʒ/, respectively. Between vowels,
   /b/ and /w/ or /v/ often merged into an intermediate sound /β/.

   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. These graphic variants were used (mainly at the
   beginning of words) for esthetic purposes, or to help differentiate i
   and u from similar-looking letters such as n and m. It was only from
   the 16th century that the consonant value started to be assigned to j
   and v, while only the vocalic value remained assigned to i and u,
   probably based on the fact that the consonant value of I and V occurred
   more commonly at the beginning of a word. In was only after this
   phonetic differentiation took place that upper-case U and J were
   introduced, in order to show the newly introduced phonetic distinction
   also in upper-case.

   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.

   Gender was remodelled in the daughter languages by the loss of final
   consonants. 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 final -M is
   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 BC, reads TAVRASIA CISAVNA SAMNIO CEPIT,
   which in classical Latin would be written Taurāsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium
   cēpit ("He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium"). Final -M was,
   however, consistently written in the literary language, though it is
   often treated as silent for purposes of scansion in poetry.

Evidence of changes

   Evidence of these and other changes can be seen in the late third
   century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribing correct
   classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe:
     * a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels (MASCVLVS NON
       MASCLVS);
     * the reduction of formerly syllabic /e/ and /i/ to /j/ (VINEA NON
       VINIA);
     * the levelling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/ (COLVBER NON
       COLOBER) and /e/ and /i/ (DIMIDIVS NON DEMEDIVS);
     * regularization of irregular forms (GLIS NON GLIRIS);
     * regularization and emphasis of gendered forms (PAVPER MVLIER NON
       PAVPERA MVLIER);
     * levelling of the distinction between /b/ and /v/ between vowels
       (BRAVIVM NON BRABIVM);
     * the substitution of diminutives for unmarked words (AVRIS NON
       ORICLA, NEPTIS NON NEPTICLA)
     * the loss of syllable-final nasals (MENSA NON MESA) or their
       inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorrection (FORMOSVS NON
       FORMVNSVS).

   Many of the forms castigated in the Appendix Probi proved to be the
   productive forms in Romance; oricla is the source of French oreille,
   Catalan orella, Spanish oreja, Italian orecchio, Romanian ureche,
   Portuguese orelha, "ear", not the classical Latin form.

Vocabulary

          Classical Only        Classical & Romance  English
   brassica                     caulis              cabbage
   cruor                        sanguis             blood
   domus                        casa                house
   emere                        comparare           buy
   equus                        caballus            horse
   ferre (perfective stem tul-) portare             carry
   ludere                       jocare              play
   magnus                       grandis             big
   pulcher                      bellus              beautiful
   os                           bucca               mouth
   sidus (stem sider-)          stella              star

   Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary.
   Classical equus, "horse", was consistently replaced by caballus (but
   note Romanian iapă, Sardinian èbba, Spanish yegua, Catalan egua and
   Portuguese égua all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical equa).
   Classical aequor, "sea", yielded to mare universally. 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.

   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.

   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 in Portuguese,
   todo in Spanish, tot in Catalan, tout in French and tot in Romanian.

   Frequently, Latin words reborrowed from the "higher" register of the
   language are found side by side with the evolved form. The (lack of)
   expected phonetic developments is a clue that one word has been
   borrowed. In Spanish, for example, Vulgar Latin fungus (accusative
   fungum), "fungus, mushroom", became Italian fungo, Catalan fong,
   Portuguese fungo and Spanish hongo, with the F > H that was usual in
   Spanish (cf. filius > Spanish hijo, "son" or facere > Spanish hacer,
   "to do"). But hongo shares its semantic space with fungo, which by its
   lack of the expected sound shift displays that it has been re-borrowed
   from the higher register of classical Latin.

   Sometimes, a classical Latin word was kept along side a Vulgar Latin
   word. In Vulgar Latin, classical caput, "head", yielded to testa
   (originally "pot", a metaphor common throughout Western Europe — cf.
   English cup with German Kopf) 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
   ţeastă, 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 testa was retained in Portuguese as the word for
   "forehead". Overall, this demonstrates a common pattern observed in
   many circumstances -- peripheral dialects tend to be more conservative
   than central dialects.

   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.

   Insight into the vocabulary changes of late Vulgar Latin in France can
   be seen in the Reichenau glosses, written into the margins of a copy of
   the Vulgate Bible, which explain fourth-century Vulgate words no longer
   readily understood in the eighth century, when the glosses were likely
   written. These glosses are likely of French origin; some vocabulary
   items are specifically French.

   These glosses show vocabulary replacement:
     * FEMVR > coxa (Portuguese and Old Spanish coxa, French cuisse,
       Italian coscia, Catalan cuixa, Romanian coapsă, "thigh")
     * ARENA > sabulo (Spanish arena, Portuguese areia, French sable,
       Italian sabbia, "sand")
     * CANERE > cantare (Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan cantar, French
       chanter, Italian cantare, Romanian cânta, "to sing")

   grammatical changes:
     * OPTIMUS (best) MELIORES (better) > meliores ("optimum" survived in
       Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, and French as óptimo,
       ó(p)timo, òptim, ottimo and optimal/optimum respectively, which
       mean the best, whereas mejor and melhor mean better; Portuguese
       melhores, Spanish mejores, Catalan millors, French meilleurs,
       Italian migliori, "better [plural]")
     * 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:
     * TVRBAS > fulcos (Spanish turbia, Portuguese/Catalan turba, French
       foule, Italian folla, "mob")
     * 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")
     * ROSTRVM > beccus (Spanish/Galician rostro, and Portuguese rosto
       survived to mean "face". French bec, Italian becco, Catalan bec,
       Spanish pico, Portuguese bico, "beak")
     * ISSET > ambulasset (French allait, "he went"; Catalan anar, Italian
       andare, "to go")
     * LIBEROS > infantes (French enfants, "children"; Italian infantile,
       "childish, infantile")
     * MILITES > servientes (French sergents, "soldiers")

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 it arose
   in seldom was written until the daughter languages had strongly
   diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully
   developed.

   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 ipsu(m), 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).

   This pronoun 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 has 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.

   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 ciuitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that
   city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were felt no longer
   to be specific enough. In less formal speech, reconstructed forms
   suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful
   by being compounded with ecce (originally an interjection: "look!") or
   *eccu, from Classical eccum ("look at it!"). 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); and many other forms.

   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 ninth 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
   Sprachbund and the North 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 quite immoral gladiator"). This suggests
   that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a
   certain" or "some" by the first century BC.

Gender: loss of the neuter

   The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a
   two-gender system in the Romance languages (though see below). In Latin
   gender is partly a matter of agreement, i.e. certain nouns take certain
   forms of the adjectives and pronouns, and partly a matter of
   inflection, i.e. there are different paradigms associated with the
   masculine/feminine on the one hand and the neuter on the other.

   The classical Latin neuter was normally 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". 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", amphiteater for amphitheatrum
   "amphitheatre" and conversely the nominative thesaurum for thesaurus
   "treasure".

   In Modern Romance, the nominative s-ending has been abandoned and all
   substantives of the o-declension have the ending -UM > -u/-o/-Ø: MURUM
   > Italian and Spanish muro, Catalan and French mur and CAELUM >
   Italian, Spanish cielo, French ciel, Catalan cel. 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,
   identical in Classical Latin, was the form that survived. Evidence
   suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the
   Roman Empire 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; the standard nominative and
   accusative form in classical Latin was lac. Note also that Spanish
   assigned it to the feminine gender, while French, Portuguese, Italian
   and Romanian made it masculine. 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 used in Spanish
   nombre.

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

                                            Typical Italian endings
                                                  Nouns Adj. & determiners
                                         sing.    plur. sing.  plur.
                                    m giardino giardini buono  buoni
                                    f    donna    donne buona  buone
                                   (n     uovo     uova buono buone)

   Forms such as Italian l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") / le uova fresche
   ("the fresh eggs") are usually explained away by saying that they are
   masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, and that they
   have an irregular plural in -a (heteroclisis). However, it is also
   consistent with the facts 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
   Romanian.

   These formations were especially common when they could be used to
   avoid irregular forms. In Latin, names of trees were usually feminine
   gender, 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 masculines in
   Italian ((il) pero) and Romanian (păr(ul)); in French and Spanish it
   has been replaced by the masculine derivations (le) poirier, (el)
   peral, in Portuguese or Catalan by the feminine derivation (a) pereira,
   (la) perera). Fagus (" beech"), another feminine noun in masculine
   dress, is preserved in some dialects as a masculine, e.g. Romanian
   fag(ul) or Catalan (el) faig; other dialects have replaced it with its
   adjective forms fageus or fagea ("made of beechwood"), thus Italian
   (il) faggio, Spanish (el) haya, and Portuguese (a) faia.

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

   Except for the Italian and Romanian "heteroclitic" nouns, other major
   Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but all have 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 ("every" m., "every" f.,
   "everything").

   Some varieties of Astur-Leonese maintain endings for the three genders
   such as follows: bonu, bona, bono ("good").

   (Note: Spanish has a neuter gender of sorts with the neuter article
   'Lo', usually used with nouns denoting abstract categories: "lo bueno",
   i.e. that or everything which is 'good', from bueno: good; "lo
   importante", i.e. that or everything 'important'. "Sabes LO TARDE que
   es?", literally "Do you know 'that which is late' that it is?", or more
   idiomatically: "Do you know how late it is?" from tarde: late. As far
   as pronouns, Spanish also has a neuter singular ello, aside from the
   well cited él, ella.)

The loss of the noun case system

                                                     Classical Latin
                                                         Nominative: rosa
                                                         Accusative: rosam
                                                           Genitive: rosae
                                                             Dative: rosae
                                                           Ablative: rosā
                                                        Vulgar Latin
                                                         Nominative: rosa
                                                         Accusative: rosa
                                                           Genitive: rose
                                                             Dative: rose
                                                           Ablative: rosa

   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 from AE /ai/ to E /ɛ/ entailed for a typical first
   declension noun (see table).

   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.

   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.

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" represents 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 "afara" ad + foris), and we find St Jerome writing si
   quis de foris venerit ("if anyone goes outside").

   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:
          + Iacōbus patrī librum dat.—James is giving his father a/the
            book.

     * Vulgar Latin:
          + ´Jacọmọs ´lẹvrọ a ´ppatre ´dọnat.—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:
          + Iacōbus mihi librum patris dat.—James is giving me his
            father's book.

     * Vulgar Latin:
          + ´Jacọmọs mẹ ´lẹvrọ dẹ ´patre ´dọnat.—James is giving me the
            book of (belonging to) his father.

   or
     * Vulgar Latin:
          + ´Jacọmọs ´lẹvrọ dẹ ´patre a ´mmẹ ´dọnat.—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 nigh-invariable rule to form regular adverbs in almost all 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 first century B.C., and
   the construction appears several times in Catullus, most famously in
   Catullus 8:

          Nunc iam illa non vult; tu, quoque, impotens, noli
          Nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive,
          Sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.

          ("Now she doesn't want you anymore; you, too, should not want
          her, neither chase her as she flees, nor pine in misery: but
          carry on obstinately [obstinate-mindedly]: get over it!")

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).

   For example, in Latin the words for "I love" and "we love" were,
   respectively, āmo 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").

   Another set of changes already underway by the first century AD 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"). 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 /v/. Thus Latin amaui,
   amauit ("I loved; he/she loved") in many areas became proto-Romance
   *amai and *amaut, yielding for example Spanish amé, amó, Portuguese
   amei, amou. This suggests that in the spoken language, these changes in
   conjugation preceded the loss of /w/.

   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 /v/, 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":
     * French: j'aimerai (je + aimer + ai) < aimer ["to love"] + ai ["I
       have"].
     * Portuguese: 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.

   Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb
   system, the passive voice was utterly lost in Romance, which entailed
   its replacement with auxiliary verbs—forms of "to be" plus a passive
   participle—or impersonal reflexive forms.

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