Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris, "folk 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 by the 9th century. A blanket term is a word or Phrase that is used to describe multiple groups of related things A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος dialektos) is a variety of a Language that is characteristic of a particular group of In Linguistics, a sociolect is the variety of language characteristic of a social background or status Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all 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. Vernacular refers to the Native language of a country or a locality Classical antiquity (also the classical era or classical period) is a broad term for a long period of cultural History centered on the Mediterranean

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. A literary language is a register of a Language that is used in Literary Writing. The Roman Empire was the post-Republican phase of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial Other features are likely to have been present much earlier in spoken Latin.

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. A first language (also mother tongue, native language, arterial language, or L1) is the language a human being learns from birth 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

Contents 1 What was Vulgar Latin? 2 History 3 Vocabulary 3.1 The Reichenau Glosses 4 Phonology 4.1 Evidence of changes 4.2 Consonants 4.3 Stressed vowels 4.4 Unstressed vowels 5 Grammar 5.1 The Romance articles 5.2 Gender: loss of the neuter 5.3 The loss of the noun case system 5.4 Prepositions multiply 5.5 Adverbs 5.6 Verbs 5.6.1 Copula 6 See also 6.1 History of specific Romance languages 7 Notes 7.1 References 8 External links

What was Vulgar Latin?

The name "vulgar" simply means "folk", derived from the Latin word vulgaris, meaning "of people". El Cantar de Mio Cid is the oldest preserved Spanish epic poem ( epopeya) Rodrigo (or Ruy) Díaz de Vivar (c 1040 Vivar, near Burgos &ndash 10 July 1099, Valencia) known as "Vulgar Latin" has a variety of meanings:

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. The Roman Empire was the post-Republican phase of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial Classical Latin represents the literary register of Latin, based on the model of ancient literary Greek. A literary language is a register of a Language that is used in Literary Writing. In Linguistics, a register is a subset of a Language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting 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. Gaul (Gallia was the Roman name for the region of Western Europe comprising present day northern Italy, France, Belgium, western Hispania was the name given by the Romans to the whole of the Iberian Peninsula (modern Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Gibraltar Dacia, in ancient geography was the land of the Dacians. It was named by the ancient Hellenes ( Greeks) " Getae " Marcus Tullius Cicero ( Classical Latin ˈkikeroː usually ˈsɪsərəʊ in English January 3, 106 BC &ndash December 7, 43 BC was a Roman The vocabulary of a person is defined either as the set of all Words that are understood by that person or the set of all words likely to be used by that person when constructing In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the Grammar is the field of Linguistics that covers the Rules governing the use of any given natural language. ^[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 ("Proto-Romance"), which cannot be directly known, except from a few graffiti inscriptions. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all Graffiti (singular graffito; the plural is used as a Mass noun) is the name for images or lettering scratched scrawled painted or marked in any manner on property 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. A proto-language is a Language which was the common ancestor of related languages that form a Language family. Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change
4. "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. In early Christian history, Egeria, also known as Aetheria, is the name of a Spanish or Gallic woman who made a Pilgrimage to Sinai; or the works of St Gregory of Tours. Saint Gregory of Tours ( November 30, c 538 &ndash November 17, 594) was a Gallo-Roman historian and bishop 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. See Comparative linguistics for the narrower field of "comparative philology" ^[1]

Most definitions of "Vulgar Latin" define it as the spoken, rather than written, language. It is important to remember that "Vulgar Latin" is an abstract term, not the name of any particular dialect. A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος dialektos) is a variety of a Language that is characteristic of a particular group of The term itself predates the field of sociolinguistics, and research 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. 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 (from Greek grc διάλεκτος dialektos, "talk dialect" and grc -λογία -logia) is a sub-field of Historical Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change It is because there are so many types of variation that definitions of Vulgar Latin differ so much.

History

Because the daily speech of Latin speakers was not transcribed, Vulgar Latin can only be studied indirectly through other methods. Transcription is the conversion into written typewritten or printed form of a Spoken language source such as the proceedings of a court hearing 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. The comparative method (in Comparative linguistics) is a technique used by linguists to demonstrate genetic relationships between Languages It aims to prove Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the Late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin speakers were liable to commit, giving us an idea of how Latin speakers spoke. In Linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used Third, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in Late Latin texts also reveal, in part, the author's spoken language. Brewer's ''Dictionary of Phrase and Fable'' explains solecism as follows Misapplication of words an expression opposed to the laws of syntax so called from the ^[2]

Some literary works with a lower register of Latin also provide a glimpse into the world of early Vulgar Latin. In Linguistics, a register is a subset of a Language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting 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 freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter. Titus Maccius Plautus (c 254–184 BCE commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman Playwright. Publius Terentius Afer (195/185&ndash159 BC better known as Terence, was a Playwright of the Roman Republic. Due to the relationship between a Creole language and its superstrate language that is a language that is very closely related and whose speakers assert social political and economic Satyricon (or Satyrica) is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry Petronius (ca 27–66 was a Roman writer of the Neronian age he was a noted satirist.

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 Romance vernaculars set out to write with correct grammar and spelling, they attempted to emulate the norms of Classical Latin. The Decline of the Roman Empire, leading to the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the Fall of Rome, was the end of the Western Roman Empire. 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 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. Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus ( Greek: Φλάβιος Πέτρος Σαββάτιος Ιουστινιανός; known in English as Justinian I or Roman law is the legal system of Ancient Rome. As used in the West the term commonly refers to legal developments prior to the Roman/Byzantine state's adopting The Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache ( framework is a tool developed by sociolinguists for analysing and categorising the status of language varieties A lingua franca (from Italian, literally meaning Frankish language, see etymology under Sabir and Italian below is any Language widely

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. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Catalan ˈkætəˌlæn ( català kətəˈla or) is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal. Romanian or Daco-Romanian ( dated: Rumanian or Roumanian; self designation limba română, ˈlimba roˈmɨnə is a Romance 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. A language is a dynamic set of visual auditory or tactile Symbols of Communication and the elements used to manipulate them However, despite the widening gulf between the spoken and written Latin, throughout the imperial era and until the 8th century CE, it was not significant enough as to make them mutually unintelligible. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. József Herman states:^[3]

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. 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 A priest or priestess is a person having the authority or power to administer religious rites in particular rites of sacrifice to and propitiation of a deity or deities The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of Languages and include languages such as English Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg (842), a treaty between Charlemagne's grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German, was proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinguished from Latin. The Oaths of Strasbourg ( Modern French: les serments de Strasbourg, Modern German: die Straßburger Eide, Latin Sacramenta Charlemagne (ˈʃɑrlɨmeɪn Carolus Magnus or Karolus Magnus meaning Charles the Great) (747 – 28 January 814 was King of the Franks from 768 to his Charles the Bald ( 13 June 823 – 6 October 877) Holy Roman Emperor (875–877 as Charles II) and King of West Francia Louis (also Ludwig or Lewis) the German (also known as Louis II or Louis the Bavarian) (806 &ndash August 28, 876 Consider the excerpt below:

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.

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

Main article: Vulgar Latin vocabulary

Classical Latin	Vulgar Latin	English
bellum	*guerra [4]	war
cogitare	pensare	think
edere	*manducari [5]	eat
emere	comparare [6]	buy
equus	caballus	horse
feles	catta [7]	cat
hortus	*gardinus [4]	garden
ignis	focus [8]	fire
ludere	iocari [9]	play
omnis	totus [10]	all
os	bucca [11]	mouth
pulcher	bellus	beautiful
urbs	civitas	city
verbum	parabola [12]	word
vesper	sera	evening

Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary. Vulgar Latin vocabulary is the vocabulary of Vulgar Latin, ie 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). The horse ( Equus caballus) is a hoofed ( Ungulate) Mammal, one of eight living species of the family Equidae.

A sample of words that are exclusively Classical, and those that were productive in Romance, is to be found in the table to the right.

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. In Linguistics, the term particle is a word lacking a strict definition but has the function of changing the relation of the parts of the sentence to one another and is therefore ^[13]

Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such suffixes as -bilis, -arius, -itare and -icare grew apace. In Grammar, a suffix (also postfix, ending) is an Affix which is placed at the end of a word These changes occurred frequently to avoid irregular forms or to regularise genders.

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 were lost in most others. For example, Italian ogni ("each/every") preserves Latin omnes. Other languages use cognates of totus 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, "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", 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. ^[13]

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 veterinary 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. In Linguistics, a calque (kælk or loan translation is a Word or Phrase borrowed from another Language by Literal, word-for-word Sp. higado, Fr. foie, Pt. fígado, It. fegato, Romanian ficat). Important religious terms were also drawn from religious texts written in Greek, such as episcopus (bishop), presbyter (priest), martyr etc. Words borrowed from Gaulish include caballus (horse) and carrus (chariot).

The Reichenau Glosses

Insight into the vocabulary changes of late Vulgar Latin in France can be seen in the Reichenau Glosses,^[14] 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. This article is about the literary term For other uses see Gloss (disambiguation. The Vulgate is an early Fifth Century version of the Bible in Latin, and largely the result of the labours of Jerome, who was commissioned by These glosses demonstrate typical vocabulary changes in Gallo-Romance. The Gallo-Romance branch of Romance languages includes French, Occitan, Arpitan, and several other languages spoken in modern France

The Reichenau Glosses show vocabulary replacement:

• arena > sabulo (French sable, Italian sabbia, "sand"; but c. f. Spanish arena, Galician area, Portuguese areia, Italian rena)
• canere > cantare (Portuguese/Galician/Spanish/Catalan cantar, French chanter, Italian cantare, Romanian cânta, "to sing", frequentative of canere)
• mares (nom. In Grammar, a frequentative form of a word is one which indicates repeated action mas) > masculi (French mâle, Italian maschio, Spanish macho, "male", diminutive of mas)
• liberos > infantes (Catalan infants, "children"; French enfants, "children"; Italian infantile, "childish, infantile"; Portuguese infante, "prince"; Spanish infante, "child" but as a literary word also "prince")
• hiems > hibernus (French hiver, Italian inverno, Spanish invierno, Portuguese inverno, Catalan invern, Romanian iarnă, "winter", adjective of heims)
• forum > mercatum (French marché, Italian mercato, Spanish mercado; "market")
• lamento > ploro (French pleurer, Spanish llorar, Portuguese chorar, Catalan plorar, "to weep")
• ager > campus (French champ, Italian/Spanish/Portuguese campo, Romanian câmp)
• caseum > formaticum (French fromage, Italian formaggio, Catalan formatge, "cheese", post-classical, from formare, "to form"; but cf. A diminutive is a formation of a Word used to convey a slight degree of the root meaning smallness of the object or quality named encapsulation intimacy or endearment Italian cacio, Portuguese queijo, Spanish queso, Romanian caş)
• flare > suflare (French souffler, Italian soffiare, Spanish soplar, "to blow", from flare with prefix sub)
• ita > sic (Italian sì, Spanish sí, Portuguese sim, "yes")
• pulcra > bella (French beau, Italian/Spanish bello, Portuguese belo, Catalan bell, "beautiful", diminutive of bonus, "good")
• umo > terra (French terre, Italian/Portuguese terra, Spanish tierra, "ground")
• lebes > chaldaria (French chaudière, Italian calderone, Spanish caldera, "cauldron", from calidus, "warm")
• necetur > occidetur (Italian uccidere, Romanian ucide, "to kill")
• pingues > grassi (French gros, Italian grasso, "fat", post-classical, of uncertain origin)
• ungues > ungulas (French ongle, Italian unghia, Spanish uña, Portuguese unha, Catalan ungla, "fingernail", diminutive of unguis)
• vim > fortiam (French force, Italian forza, Spanish fuerza, Portuguese força, "force", post-classical, from fortis, "strong")
• si vis > si voles (French tu veux, Italian tu vuoi, Catalan tu vols, "you want", 2nd personal singular of *volere, "to want", regularized form of velle)
• oppidis > civitatibus (French cité, Italian città, Portuguese cidade, Spanish ciudad, Catalan ciutat, "city")

Grammatical changes:

• optimos > meliores (Portuguese melhor, Galician mellor, Spanish mejor, Catalan millor, French meilleur, Italian migliore, "best", originally "better"; but cf. Spanish óptimo, Portuguese ótimo, Italian ottimo, French optimal, with the sense of "excellent" or "optimal")
• saniore > plus sano (French plus sain, Italian più sano)

Germanic loan words:

• turbas > fulcos (French foule, Italian folla, "mob"; but cf. Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan turba)
• cementariis > mationibus (French maçon, Spanish masón, "stonemason")
• galea > helme (French heaume, Italian/Portuguese elmo, Catalan elm, Spanish yelmo, "helmet")
• coturnix > quaccola (French caille, Italian quaglia, "quail"; but cf. Spanish/Portuguese codorniz)
• furvus > brunus (French/Romanian brun, Catalan bru, Portuguese/Italian bruno, "brown/dark")

And words whose meaning has changed:

• in ore (nom. os) > in bucca (Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan boca, French bouche, Italian bocca, "mouth", originally "cheek")
• emit > comparavit (Italian comprare, Spanish comprar, Portuguese comprar, Romanian cumpăra, Catalan comprar, "to buy", originally "to arrange, settle")
• rerum (nom. res) > causarum (French chose, Italian/Spanish/Catalan cosa, Portuguese coisa/cousa, "thing", originally "cause")
• rostrum > beccus (French bec, Italian becco, Catalan bec, Spanish pico, Portuguese bico, "beak", post-classical, from Gaulish; but cf. Spanish/Galician rostro, and Portuguese rosto, "face")
• femur > coxa (Portuguese, Galician and Old Spanish coxa, French cuisse, Italian coscia, Catalan cuixa, Romanian coapsă, "thigh", originally "hip", first attested in Silver Latin)

Phonology

See also: Latin spelling and pronunciation and Latin regional pronunciation

Evidence of changes

Evidence of phonological changes can be seen in the late 3rd century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. The Roman alphabet or Latin alphabet, was adapted from the Old Italic alphabet, to represent the Phonemes of the Latin language, which had in Latin pronunciation, both in the classical and post-classical age has varied across different regions and different eras The Appendix Probi is a text of the Third century AD by Valerius Probus In Linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used These glosses describe:

• 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"). Hypercorrection is a Linguistic phenomenon which may take any of the following forms an elaborate prescriptively based correction of common
• the loss of /h/, both initially ("hostiae non ostiae", although note that this is a hypercorrection) and within the word ("adhuc non aduc").

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

Consonants

Significant sound changes affected the consonants of Vulgar Latin:

Apocope

• Final -t, which occurred frequently in verb conjugations, and final -s, in nouns, were dropped. Sound change includes any processes of Language change that affect pronunciation ( phonetic change) or sound system structures ( Phonological change
• 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. In Poetry, the meter or metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse. In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that in a particular word does not correspond to any sound in the word's Pronunciation. 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). 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.

Palatalisation

• Palatalisation ("softening") of Latin c, t and often g before the front vowels e and i was almost universal in Vulgar Latin. Palatalization or palatalisation (ˌpælətəlɨˈzeɪʃən generally refers to two phenomena As a process or the result of a process 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. Affricate Consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or) but release as a fricative (such as or or occasionally into 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 are Consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together Thus Latin caelum (sky, heaven), pronounced [kailu(m)] with an initial [k], became Italian cielo, [tʃɛlo], Romanian cer [tʃer], 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. Dalmatian is an extinct Romance language formerly spoken in the Dalmatia region of Croatia, and as far south as Kotor in Montenegro Sardinian ( Sardu, Saldu) is after Italian the main language spoken in the island of Sardinia, Italy, remarkable for being the most conservative

Lenition

Several other consonants were "softened", especially in intervocalic position (an instance of diachronic lenition):

• Single voiceless plosives became voiced: -p-, -t-, -c- → -b-, -d-, -g-. Lenition is a kind of Consonant mutation that appears in many Languages Along with assimilation, it is one of the primary sources of historical change Voice or voicing is a term used in Phonetics and Phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless In a few languages such as Spanish, these were further lenited to approximants, [β̞], [ð̞], [ɣ]. Approximants are speech sounds ( Phonemes) that could be regarded as intermediate between Vowels and typical Consonants In the articulation of approximants
• The plain sibilant -s- [s] was also voiced to [z] between vowels, although in many languages its spelling has not changed. A sibilant is a type of Fricative or Affricate Consonant, made by directing a jet of air through a narrow channel in the Vocal tract towards (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. In Phonetics, gemination happens when a spoken Consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short Consonant. 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. 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 The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet ^[15] 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. Fortition is a consonantal change from a 'weak' sound to a 'strong' one the opposite of the more common Lenition. The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU

Prosthesis

• In Western Romance, 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. Prothesis in Linguistics (from Greek pro "before" + tithenai "to put" is the prepending of Phonemes at the beginning of a In Phonology, epenthesis (/əˈpɛnθəsɪs/ Ancient Greek ἐπένθεσις - epenthesis from epi "on" + en "in" Italian preserved euphony rules by adding the epenthesis in the preceding article when necessary instead, so it preserves feminine spada as la spada, but changes the masculine *il spaghetto to lo spaghetto.

Stressed vowels

Evolution of the stressed vowels in Vulgar Latin
Classical			Vulgar
Acad. 1	Roman	IPA		Acad. 1
ă	short A	[a]	[a]	a
ā	long A	[aː]
ĕ	short E	[ɛ]	[ɛ]	ę
ē	long E	[eː]	[e]	ẹ
ĭ	short I	[ɪ]
ī	long I	[iː]	[i]	i
ŏ	short O	[ɔ]	[ɔ]	ǫ
ō	long O	[oː]	[o]	ọ
ŭ	short V	[ʊ]
ū	long V	[uː]	[u]	u
ў	short Y	[y] > [ɪ]	[e]	ẹ
ȳ	long Y	[yː] > [iː]	[i]	y, i
æ	AE	[ai] > [ɛ]	[ɛ]	ę
œ	OE	[oi] > [e]	[e]	ẹ
au	AV	[au]	[au] > [o]	au, ọ
1 Traditional academic transcription in Latin and Romance studies, respectively.

One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its vowel system. In Phonetics, a vowel is a Sound in spoken Language, such as English ah! or oh!, pronounced with an open Vocal tract 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). In Linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a Vowel sound The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU In Phonetics, a diphthong (also gliding vowel) (from Greek grc δίφθογγος "diphthongos" literally "with two sounds" or "with 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. The close front rounded vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in some spoken Languages The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents

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. ^[16] 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/. A close-mid vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in some spoken Languages The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds The open-mid vowels make a class of Vowel sounds used in some spoken Languages The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned A close vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in many spoken Languages The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as A near-close vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in some spoken Languages The defining characteristic of a near-close vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly The diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced /ai/ and /oi/ in earlier Latin, had also begun their monophthongisation to /ɛ/ and /e/, respectively. A monophthong ( Greek μονόφθογγος "monophthongos" = single note) is a "pure" Vowel sound one whose articulation at Oe was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin; in Old Latin, oinos (one) regularly became unus. Old Latin (also called Early Latin or Archaic Latin) refers to the Latin language in the period before the age of Classical Latin; that is all ^[1]

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. Old French was the Romance Dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium Similarly, Latin nux ("nut", acc. sing) and vōx (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).

There must have been some regional variation in pronunciation, since the Eastern Romance languages and the Southern Romance languages evolved differently. The Eastern Romance languages, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe The Southern Romance languages are a sub-group of the family of Romance languages that includes the Sardinian, the Corsican language, with the Gallurese ^[17] In Sardinian, for instance, ĭ and ŭ became more close, merging with their long counterparts ī and ū. Sardinian ( Sardu, Saldu) is after Italian the main language spoken in the island of Sardinia, Italy, remarkable for being the most conservative 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 Italo-Western-Romance.

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. In Linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a Vowel sound The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU In Phonetics, a vowel is a Sound in spoken Language, such as English ah! or oh!, pronounced with an open Vocal tract (Exceptions were Friulian, and some dialects of French, which have retained a contrast between long and short vowels. Friulian ( or affectionately marilenghe in Friulian friulano in Italian) (also Eastern Ladin) is a Romance language belonging French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people )

In Vulgar Latin, the stress on accented syllables became much more pronounced than in Classical Latin. In Linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain Syllables in a word 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. Focus, "fireplace", became the general word in Vulgar Latin for "fire" (replacing ignis), but its short o sound became a diphthong — a different diphthong — in many languages:

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

In French and Italian, these changes occurred only in open syllables. Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people 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). Romanian or Daco-Romanian ( dated: Rumanian or Roumanian; self designation limba română, ˈlimba roˈmɨnə is a Romance In Portuguese, no diphthongisation occurred at all (ferro, fogo). Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal.

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. The Roman Republic was the phase of the ancient Roman civilization characterized by a Republican form of government a period which began with the overthrow of the Clodius is the Roman Nomen Claudius altered to a spelling that would have sounded Plebeian to Roman ears Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus or Claudius I ( August 1, 10 BC &ndash October 13, AD 54 ( Tiberius Claudius Drusus from birth to Due to the relationship between a Creole language and its superstrate language that is a language that is very closely related and whose speakers assert social political and economic 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. Occitan ( IPA BrE: /ˈɒksɪtn/ AmE: /ˈɑksəˌtɑn/ known also as Lenga d'òc or Langue d'oc (native name occitan )^[17] 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.

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 Linguistics, specifically Phonetics and Phonology, schwa can mean the following An unstressed and toneless neutral

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. Catalan ˈkætəˌlæn ( català kətəˈla or) is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official This schwa slowly evolved towards an open [ɛ], although in most of the Balearic Islands the schwa is maintained even today. 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].

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 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. In Linguistics and Grammar, a pronoun is a Pro-form that substitutes for a (including a noun phrase consisting of a single Noun) with or In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the Demonstratives are deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all The Portuguese articles o and a are ultimately from the same source. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ipse, 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 lupus ille and *homo ille)^[17], a result of its membership in the Balkan linguistic union. The Balkan Sprachbund or linguistic area is the ensemble of Areal features —similarity in grammar syntax vocabulary and phonology—among languages of

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. Vetus Latina is a collective name given to the Biblical texts in Latin that were translated before St Jerome 's Vulgate 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. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force. In early Christian history, Egeria, also known as Aetheria, is the name of a Spanish or Gallic woman who made a Pilgrimage to ^[13]

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. ^[13] 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!"), which also spawned Italian ecco. An interjection is a Part of speech that usually has no connection with the rest of the sentence and simply expresses Emotion on the part of the speaker 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 iste), quello (*eccu ille) and obsolescent codesto (*eccu tibi iste); Spanish acá and Portuguese cá, (*ecce hic), Portuguese acolá (*ecce illic) and aquém (*ecce inde); Romanian acest (*ecce iste) and (*ecce ille) 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. The Oaths of Strasbourg ( Modern French: les serments de Strasbourg, Modern German: die Straßburger Eide, Latin Sacramenta (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. The Balkan Sprachbund or linguistic area is the ensemble of Areal features —similarity in grammar syntax vocabulary and phonology—among languages of The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages

The numeral unus, una (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases. This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with a most immoral gladiator"). Marcus Tullius Cicero ( Classical Latin ˈkikeroː usually ˈsɪsərəʊ in English January 3, 106 BC &ndash December 7, 43 BC was a Roman This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BCE.

Gender: loss of the neuter

The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong In Latin, gender is partly a matter of inflection, i. In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice e. there are different declensional paradigms associated with the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, and partly a matter of agreement, i. In Languages agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase e. nouns of a certain gender require forms of the same gender in adjectives and pronouns associated with them.

The loss of these final consonants led to a remodelling of the gender system. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong 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. In Linguistics, declension (or declination) is the occurrence of Inflection in Nouns Pronouns and Adjectives indicating By contrast, some neuter plurals such as gaudia, "joys", were re-analysed as feminine singulars. In Etymology, back-formation refers to the process of creating a new Lexeme (less precisely a new "word" by removing actual or supposed Affixes 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". An epitaph (in Greek, &mdash literally " on the gravestone " is a short text honoring a deceased person strictly speaking that inscribed on Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (died c 280 BC was one of the Roman Consuls in 298 BC (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. )

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. Pompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples and Caserta in the Italian region of Campania, in 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".

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). ^[17]

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

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. The Merovingians (also Merovings) were a Salian Frankish dynasty that came to rule the Franks in a region (known as Francia in Latin

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. A pear is a pomaceous Fruit produced by a tree of Genus Pyrus. Fagus ("beech"), another feminine noun ending in -us, is preserved in some languages as a masculine, e. For the babyfood see Beech-Nut. Beech ( Fagus) is a genus of ten Species of Deciduous Trees in the 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.

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"); Venetian: 'sto qua, 'sta qua, questo (meaning "this") and qûeło là, qûeła là, queło=queła (meaning "that").

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 Dialect continuum included in the West Iberian branch of the Romance languages.

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. In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the Latin is an inflected language and as such its nouns pronouns and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function 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. A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of 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).

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 French was the Romance Dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium 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 An oblique case (casus generalis in Linguistics is a Noun case of Synthetic languages that is used generally when a Noun is the object Old Occitan also maintained a similar distinction, as did many of the Rhaeto-Romance languages until only a few hundred years ago. Rhaeto-Romance languages are a Romance language sub-family which includes multiple languages spoken in North-Eastern Italy and Switzerland. Romanian still preserves a separate genitive/dative case along with vestiges of a vocative case. Romanian or Daco-Romanian ( dated: Rumanian or Roumanian; self designation limba română, ˈlimba roˈmɨnə is a Romance In Grammar, the genitive case or possessive case (also called the second case) is the case that marks a Noun as modifying another 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. In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" Plural is a Grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the Referent in the real world 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. The La Spezia - Rimini Line (sometimes also referred to as the Massa - Senigallia Line in the Linguistics of the Romance languages Italy (Italia officially the Italian Republic, (Repubblica Italiana is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest The accusative case ( abbreviated ACC) of a Noun is the Grammatical case used to mark the Direct object of a Transitive 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. In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the In Grammar, a preposition is a Part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. 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 represent de + foris (Romanian afară - ad + foris), and we find St Jerome writing si quis de foris venerit ("if anyone goes outside"). Jerome (c 347 – September 30, 420) ( Latin: Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus; Εὐσέβιος Σωφρόνιος Ἱερώνυμος ^[13]

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 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 dat. "James is giving me the book of (belonging to) his father. "

or

´Jacọmọs ´lẹvrọ dẹ ´patre a ´mẹ 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. In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the 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". In Linguistics, ablative case ( abbreviated ABL) is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic 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!"

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. For persons with a Cognomen "Catulus" see Lutatius Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca Romance verbs refers to the Verbs of the Romance languages. In the transition from Latin to the Romance languages verbs went through many phonetic 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. In Linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain Syllables in a word 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, 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"). ^[17]

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"). Graffiti (singular graffito; the plural is used as a Mass noun) is the name for images or lettering scratched scrawled painted or marked in any manner on property Pompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples and Caserta in the Italian region of Campania, in ^[13] In the perfect tense, many languages generalized the -aui ending most frequently found in the first conjugation. The perfect aspect is variously considered either an aspect or tense which calls a listener's attention to the consequences generated by an action rather than the 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/. ^[17]

Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. In Grammar, the future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet but expected to happen in the future (in an Absolute tense 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. The perfect aspect is variously considered either an aspect or tense which calls a listener's attention to the consequences generated by an action rather than the 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"]. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people
• 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"]. Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal. Catalan ˈkætəˌlæn ( català kətəˈla or) is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official
• Italian: amerò (amar + [h]o) < amare ["to love"] + ho ["I have"]. Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy.

An innovative conditional (distinct from the subjunctive) also developed in the same way (infinitive + conjugated form of habere). The conditional mood 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 In Grammar, the subjunctive mood (sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood) is a Verb mood that exists in many languages 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. In Linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonologically dependent Word. An infix is an Affix inserted inside a stem (an existing word

Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, which 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, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified In Linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which a grammatical category or relationship is expressed by a Free morpheme (typically one or more Function 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

Apart from the grammatical 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. The Copula or copulae (the verb or verbs meaning "to be" in all Romance languages derive mostly from the Latin verbs SVM and 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 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, as this usage originally conveyed the sense of "the church stands in the city". )

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

• Oaths of Strasbourg
• Romance copula
• Romance languages
• Veronese Riddle

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

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

Ages of Latin v • d • e
	—75 BC	75 BC – 200	200 – 900	200 – 1300	1300 – 1600	1600 – 1900	1900 – present
	Old Latin	Classical Latin	Vulgar Latin	Medieval Latin	Renaissance Latin	New Latin	Recent Latin
See also: History of Latin, Latin literature, Vulgar Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin, Romance languages, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Old Latin (also called Early Latin or Archaic Latin) refers to the Latin language in the period before the age of Classical Latin; that is all Classical Latin is the form of the Latin language used by the ancient Romans 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 Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries particularly The term New Latin or Neo-Latin is used to describe a form the Latin language used between the end of the Medieval Latin period (c Latin is a member of the family of Italic languages, and its alphabet the Latin alphabet, emerged from the Old Italic alphabets which Latin literature, the body of written works in the Latin language remains an enduring legacy of the culture of Ancient Rome. Ecclesiastical Latin (sometimes called Church Latin) is the Latin dialect as used in documents of the Roman Catholic Church and in its Latin liturgies The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum ( CIL) is a comprehensive collection of ancient Latin Inscriptions It forms an authoritative source

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