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Vulgar Latin, also known as Colloquial, Popular, Spoken or Vernacular Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. ''Vulgar Latin'' as a term is both controversial and imprecise. Spoken Latin existed for a long time and in many places. Scholars have differed in opinion as to the extent of the differences, and whether Vulgar Latin was in some sense a different language. This was developed as a theory in the nineteenth century by Raynouard. At its extreme, the theory suggested that the written register formed an elite language distinct from common speech, but this is now rejected. The current consensus is that the written and spoken languages formed a continuity much as they do in modern languages, with speech tending to evolve faster than the written language, and the written, formalised language exerting pressure back on speech. ''Vulgar Latin'' is used in different ways by different scholars, applying it to indicate spoken Latin of differing types, or from different social classes and time periods. Nevertheless, interest in the shifts in the spoken forms remains very important to understand the transition from Latin or Late Latin through to
Proto-Romance Proto-Romance is the result of applying the comparative method to reconstruct the latest common ancestor of the Romance languages. To what extent, if any, such a reconstruction reflects a real ''état de langue'' is controversial. The closest real ...
and Romance languages. To make matters more complicated, evidence for spoken forms can be found only through examination of written
Classical Latin Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a Literary language, literary standard language, standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It formed parallel to Vulgar Latin around 75 BC out of Old Latin ...
,
Late Latin Late Latin is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity.Roberts (1996), p. 537. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the 3rd to 6th centuries CE, and continuing into the 7th century in ...
, or early Romance, depending on the time period.


History of the Vulgar Latin controversy

During the Classical period, Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as ''sermo plebeius'' or ''sermo vulgaris'', meaning "common speech". This could simply refer to unadorned speech without the use of rhetoric, or even plain speaking. The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the
Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...
, when
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
thinkers began to theorize that their own language originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from the literary Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect. The early 19th-century French linguist François-Just-Marie Raynouard is often regarded as the father of modern
Romance philology Romance studies or Romance philology (; ; ; ; ; ; ) is an academic discipline that covers the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of areas that speak Romance languages. Romance studies departments usually include the study of Spa ...
. Observing that the Romance languages have many features in common that are not found in Latin, at least not in "proper" or Classical Latin, he concluded that the former must have all had some common ancestor (which he believed most closely resembled
Old Occitan Old Occitan (, ), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is some ...
) that replaced Latin some time before the year 1000. This he dubbed ''la langue romane'' or "the Romance language". The first truly modern treatise on Romance linguistics and the first to apply the
comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards ...
was
Friedrich Christian Diez Friedrich Christian Diez (; 15 March 179429 May 1876) was a German philologist. The two works on which his fame rests are the ''Grammar of the Romance Languages'' (published 1836–1844), and the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Romance Languages ...
's seminal ''Grammar of the Romance Languages''. Researchers such as
Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (; 30 January 1861 – 4 October 1936) was a Swiss philologist of the Neogrammarian school of linguistics. Biography Meyer-Lübke, a nephew of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, was born in Dübendorf, Switzerland. He studied Indo ...
characterised Vulgar Latin as, to a great extent, a separate language that was more or less distinct from the written form. To Meyer-Lübke, the spoken Vulgar form was the genuine and continuous form, while Classical Latin was a kind of artificial idealised language imposed upon it; thus Romance languages were derived from the "real" Vulgar form, which had to be reconstructed from remaining evidence. Others that followed this approach divided Vulgar from Classical Latin by education or class. Other views of "Vulgar Latin" include defining it as uneducated speech, slang, or in effect,
Proto-Romance Proto-Romance is the result of applying the comparative method to reconstruct the latest common ancestor of the Romance languages. To what extent, if any, such a reconstruction reflects a real ''état de langue'' is controversial. The closest real ...
. The result is that the term "Vulgar Latin" is regarded by some modern philologists as essentially meaningless, but unfortunately very persistent:
the continued use of "Vulgar Latin" is not only no aid to thought, but is, on the contrary, a positive barrier to a clear understanding of Latin and Romance....

I wish it were possible to hope the term might fall out of use. Many scholars have stated that "Vulgar Latin" is a useless and dangerously misleading term ... To abandon it once and for all can only benefit scholarship.
Lloyd called to replace the use of "Vulgar Latin" with a series of more precise definitions, such as the spoken Latin of a particular time and place. Research in the twentieth century has in any case shifted the view to consider the differences between written and spoken Latin in more moderate terms. Just as in modern languages, speech patterns are different from written forms, and vary with education, the same can be said of Latin. For instance, philologist József Herman agrees that the term is problematic, and therefore limits it in his work to mean the innovations and changes that turn up in spoken or written Latin that were relatively uninfluenced by educated forms of Latin. Herman states:
it is completely clear from the texts during the time that Latin was a living language, there was never an unbridgeable gap between the written and spoken, nor between the language of the social elites and that of the middle, lower, or disadvantaged groups of the same society.
Herman also makes it clear that Vulgar Latin, in this view, is a varied and unstable phenomenon, crossing many centuries of usage where any generalisations are bound to cover up variations and differences.


Sources

Evidence for the features of non-literary Latin comes from the following sources: * Explicit mention of certain constructions or pronunciation habits by Roman grammarians. * Recurrent grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic mistakes in Latin
epigraphy Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...
. **
Curse tablets A curse tablet (; ) is a small tablet with a curse written on it from the Greco-Roman world. Its name originated from the Greek and Latin words for "pierce" and "bind". The tablets were used to ask the gods, place spirits, or the deceased to perfo ...
, as a special kind of inscription. * The insertion, whether intentional or not, of colloquial terms or constructions into contemporary texts. Special interest is given to: ** Private letters and documents from an ordinary context such as business records, lists and school exercises; these are rare but
papyri Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, ''Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'' or ''papyruses'') can ...
from Egypt and tablets from
Hadrian's Wall Hadrian's Wall (, also known as the ''Roman Wall'', Picts' Wall, or ''Vallum Aelium'' in Latin) is a former defensive fortification of the Roman province of Roman Britain, Britannia, begun in AD 122 in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. Ru ...
have been found. ** Technical works on medicine, agriculture and similar, where the demand for grammatical accuracy was lower, such as the ''
Mulomedicina Chironis The ''Mulomedicina Chironis'' (literally, "Chiron's Medicine for Mules") is a 4th-century medical treatise on medicine for treating horses, written in Latin. Author The name of the author is stated to be a certain Chiron Centaurus, which was certa ...
'', a veterinary treatise. ** Christian texts, as many originated from marginalised communities; including early Bible translations and funeral inscriptions. **
Late Latin Late Latin is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity.Roberts (1996), p. 537. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the 3rd to 6th centuries CE, and continuing into the 7th century in ...
texts from the sixth century onwards, which show changes, or the absence thereof, in local Latin under the influence of new educational practices and social structures. * The pronunciation of Roman-era lexical borrowings into neighboring languages such as
Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...
,
Albanian Albanian may refer to: *Pertaining to Albania in Southeast Europe; in particular: **Albanians, an ethnic group native to the Balkans **Albanian language **Albanian culture **Demographics of Albania, includes other ethnic groups within the country ...
, or Welsh. * Modern Romance languages, the comparative analysis of which can be used to validate or disprove hypotheses about earlier changes in spoken Latin.


Fragmentation

An oft-posed question is why (or when, or how) Latin “fragmented” into several different languages. Current hypotheses contrast the centralizing and homogenizing socio-economic, cultural, and political forces that characterized the Roman Empire with the centrifugal forces that prevailed afterwards. By the end of the first century CE the Romans had seized the entire Mediterranean Basin and established hundreds of
colonies A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule, which rules the territory and its indigenous peoples separated from the foreign rulers, the colonizer, and their '' metropole'' (or "mother country"). This separated rule was often or ...
in the conquered provinces. Over time this—along with other factors that encouraged
linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and cultural assimilation, such as political unity, frequent travel and commerce, military service, etc.—led to Latin becoming the predominant language throughout the western Mediterranean. Latin itself was subject to the same assimilatory tendencies, such that its varieties had probably become more uniform by the time the Empire fell than they had been before it. That is not to say that the language had been static for all those years, but rather that ongoing changes tended to spread to all regions. The rise of the first Arab caliphate in the seventh century marked the definitive end of Roman dominance over the Mediterranean. It is from approximately that century onward that regional differences proliferate in Latin documents, revealing the fragmentation of Latin into the incipient Romance languages. Until then Latin appears to have been remarkably homogeneous, as far as can be judged from its written records, although careful statistical analysis reveals regional differences in the treatment of the vowel /ĭ/, and in the frequency of the merger of (original) intervocalic /b/ and /w/, by about the fifth century CE.


Phonological development


Consonantism


Loss of nasals

* Word-final /m/ was lost in polysyllabic words. In monosyllables it tended to survive as /n/. * /n/ was usually lost before
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
s, resulting in
compensatory lengthening Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered ...
of the preceding vowel (e.g. '' sponsa'' 'fiancée' > ''spōsa'').


Palatalization

Front vowel A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned approximately as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction th ...
s in hiatus (after a consonant and before another vowel) became which palatalized preceding consonants.


Fricativization

/w/ (except after /k/) and intervocalic /b/ merge as the bilabial fricative /β/.


Simplification of consonant clusters

* The cluster /nkt/ reduced to t * /kw/ delabialized to /k/ before
back vowel A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...
s. * /ks/ before or after a consonant, or at the end of a word, reduced to /s/.


Vocalism


Monophthongization

*/ae̯/ and /oe̯/ monophthongized to ːand ːrespectively by around the second century AD.


Loss of vowel quantity

The system of phonemic vowel length collapsed by the fifth century AD (see also ), leaving
quality Quality may refer to: Concepts *Quality (business), the ''non-inferiority'' or ''superiority'' of something *Quality (philosophy), an attribute or a property *Quality (physics), in response theory *Energy quality, used in various science discipli ...
differences as the distinguishing factor between vowels; the paradigm thus changed from /ī ĭ ē ĕ ā ă ŏ ō ŭ ū/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/. Concurrently, stressed vowels in open syllables lengthened.


Loss of near-close front vowel

Towards the end of the Roman Empire /ɪ/ merged with /e/ in most regions, although not in Africa or a few peripheral areas in Italy.


Grammar


Romance articles

It is difficult to place the point in which the
definite article In grammar, an article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" ...
, absent in Latin but present in all 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 evolved from demonstrative
pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...
or
adjectives An adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, ...
(an analogous development is found in many Indo-European languages, including
Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
,
Celtic Celtic, Celtics or Keltic may refer to: Language and ethnicity *pertaining to Celts, a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia **Celts (modern) *Celtic languages **Proto-Celtic language *Celtic music *Celtic nations Sports Foot ...
and Germanic); compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective , , "that", in the
Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...
, becoming French and (Old French ''li'', ''lo'', ''la''), Catalan and Spanish , and , Occitan and , Portuguese and Galician and (elision of -l- is a common feature of Galician-Portuguese) and Italian , and . Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from , an intensive adjective (''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, e.g. ''lupul'' ("the wolf" – from *''lupum illum'') and ''omul'' ("the man" – ''*homo illum''),Vincent (1990). possibly a result of being within the Balkan sprachbund. The term may have evolved from its initial demonstrative function, broadening to convey
semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
prominence by directing the attention of the audience towards particular referents which the speaker intended to highlight. This usage of the term is found in the , which recounts the travels of the Christian pilgrim—and the author— Egeria: the author utilizes the demonstrative to mark words that are crucial to the meaning of the text. For instance, when noting the location of a cave by a church, Egeria clarifies that she is referring to "" ("that church"). The usage of typically occurs alongside nouns that have previously been identified with the text: Egeria, when describing a church near Mount Olivet, initially describes it merely as an "," but later refers to it as "." The usage of the demonstratives to denote prominent parts of discourse may have predicated the eventual transformation of the term into a definite article. Once speakers began prefacing sentences with the term, they began utilizing it in a manner similar to an article; therefore, the article-like features of the word eventually become normalized and then incorporated into the standard grammar of the language. In Late Latin writings, was often used by writers in relative clauses to establish the identity of subjects not previously mentioned in the text. The 7th-century ''
Chronicle of Fredegar The ''Chronicle of Fredegar'' is the conventional title used for a 7th-century Frankish chronicle that was probably written in Burgundy. The author is unknown and the attribution to Fredegar dates only from the 16th century. The chronicle begi ...
'' clarifies that it is discussing "" ("those men") before introducing a relative clause in which they are the subject. During this time period, the term also developed anaphoric functions as an extension of the original demonstrative usage: Late Latin authors would substitute more basic mentions of a referent with and added more descriptive information. For instance, the ''Chronicle of Fredegar'' refers to a "" ("queen") as "," meaning "that relative of the
Franks file:Frankish arms.JPG, Aristocratic Frankish burial items from the Merovingian dynasty The Franks ( or ; ; ) were originally a group of Germanic peoples who lived near the Rhine river, Rhine-river military border of Germania Inferior, which wa ...
. From this usage of the , in which it functioned help identify a specific referent, the term may have generalized to adopt more features associated with definite articles. One example of such a development appears in the writings of the 6th-century
Gallo-Roman Gallo-Roman culture was a consequence of the Romanization (cultural), Romanization of Gauls under the rule of the Roman Empire in Roman Gaul. It was characterized by the Gaulish adoption or adaptation of Roman culture, Roman culture, language ...
historian
Gregory of Tours Gregory of Tours (born ; 30 November – 17 November 594 AD) was a Gallo-Roman historian and Bishop of Tours during the Merovingian period and is known as the "father of French history". He was a prelate in the Merovingian kingdom, encom ...
, who wrote "," meaning "The holy
Eugenius Eugenius (died 6 September 394) was a Western Roman emperor from 392 to 394, unrecognized by the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius I. While Christian himself, Eugenius capitalized on the discontent in the West caused by Theodosius' religious p ...
was led to the king, and debated with that Arrian
bishop A bishop is an ordained member of the clergy who is entrusted with a position of Episcopal polity, authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance and administration of di ...
in defense of the Catholic faith." Within this passage, the
ablative In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages. It is used to indicate motion away from something, make comparisons, and serve various o ...
form of the pronoun, , is utilized to denote the Arrian bishop, however it appears to function for more like the English article "the" rather than the original Classical Latin : the sentence could be understood equally as well if rendered as "The holy Eugenius was led to the king, and debated with the Arrian
bishop A bishop is an ordained member of the clergy who is entrusted with a position of Episcopal polity, authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance and administration of di ...
in defense of the Catholic faith." 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 , , 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 no longer felt to be strong or specific enough.Harrington et al. (1997). The Latin pronoun , which was initially used to emphasize specific referents, also developed functions similar to a definite article. However, it retained some of its original emphatic properties: it was also used anaphorically to highlight prominent referents. In one 9th-10th century text from the
Diocese of Urgell The Diocese of Urgell (; ) is a Latin Church diocese of the Catholic Church in Catalonia (Spain) and the Principality of Andorra in the historical County of Urgell,Waiofar Waiofar, also spelled Waifar, Waifer or Waiffre (died 2 June 768), was the last independent Duke of Aquitaine from 745 to 768. He peacefully succeeded his father, Hunald I, after the latter entered a monastery. He also inherited the conflict with ...
) before—in the next sentence—being described as "" ("the very same Waiofar"). Other documents suggest that and may have eventually assumed practically identical meanings: the 11th-12th century text, the utilizes both terms like definite articles, mentioning "" and "," both meaning "the authority." In the less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with (originally an
interjection An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling, situation or reaction. It is a diverse category, with many different types, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curses (''da ...
: "behold!"), which also spawned Italian through , a contracted form of ''ecce eum''. This is the origin of Old French (*''ecce ille''), (*''ecce iste'') and (*''ecce hic''); Italian (*''eccum istum''), (*''eccum illum'') and (now mainly Tuscan) (*''eccum tibi istum''), as well as (*''eccu hic''), (*''eccum hac''); Spanish and Occitan and Portuguese (*''eccum ille''); Spanish and Portuguese (*''eccum hac''); Spanish and Portuguese (*''eccum hic''); Portuguese (*''eccum illac'') and (*''eccum inde''); Romanian (*''ecce iste'') and (*''ecce ille''), and many other forms. On the other hand, even in the
Oaths of Strasbourg The Oaths of Strasbourg were a military pact made on 14 February 842 by Charles the Bald and Louis the German against their older brother Lothair I, the designated heir of Louis the Pious, the successor of Charlemagne. One year later the Treaty ...
, dictated in Old French in AD 842, no demonstrative appears even in places where one would clearly be called for in all the later languages (''pro christian poblo'' – "for the Christian people"). Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal 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 are suffixed to the noun (or an adjective preceding it), as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the
North Germanic languages The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also r ...
. The numeral , (one) supplies the
indefinite article In grammar, an article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the ...
in all cases (again, this is a common semantic development across Europe). This is anticipated in Classical Latin;
Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, writer and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises tha ...
writes ''cum uno gladiatore nequissimo'' ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that ' was beginning to supplant in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.


Loss of neuter gender

The three
grammatical genders In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...
of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages. The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion had already started in 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 Gaius Petronius Arbiter"Gaius Petronius Arbiter"
Britannica.com.
(; ; ; s ...
's work, one can find ''balneus'' for ("bath"), ''fatus'' for ("fate"), ''caelus'' for ("heaven"), ''amphitheater'' for ("amphitheatre"), ''vinus'' for ("wine"), and conversely, ''thesaurum'' for ("treasure"). Most of these forms occur in the speech of one man: Trimalchion, an uneducated Greek (i.e. foreign)
freedman A freedman or freedwoman is a person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, slaves were freed by manumission (granted freedom by their owners), emancipation (granted freedom as part of a larger group), or self- ...
. In modern Romance languages, the nominative ''s''-ending has been largely abandoned, and all substantives of the ''o''-declension have an ending derived from ''-um'': ''-u'', ''-o'', or ''-Ø''. E.g., masculine ("wall"), and neuter ("sky") have evolved to: Italian , ; Portuguese , ; Spanish , , Catalan , ; Romanian , ''cieru>''; French , . However, Old French still had ''-s'' in the nominative and ''-Ø'' in the accusative in both words: ''murs'', ''ciels'' ominative– ''mur'', ''ciel'' blique For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was productive; for others, the nominative/accusative form, (the two were identical in Classical Latin). Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French ''(le)'' , Catalan ''(la)'' , Occitan ''(lo)'' , Spanish ''(la)'' , Portuguese ''(o)'' , Italian language ''(il)'' , Leonese ''(el) lleche'' and Romanian ''(le)'' ("milk"), all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin nominative/accusative neuter or accusative masculine . In Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, /). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French , Leonese, Portuguese and Italian , Romanian ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative ''nomen'', rather than the oblique stem form *''nomin-'' (which nevertheless produced Spanish ).Vincent (1990). Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in -A or -IA; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as ("joy"), plural ''gaudia''; the plural form lies at the root of the French feminine singular ''(la)'' , as well as of Catalan and Occitan ''(la)'' (Italian ''la'' is a borrowing from French); the same for ("wood stick"), plural ''ligna'', that originated the Catalan feminine singular noun ''(la)'' , Portuguese ''(a)'' , Spanish ''(la)'' and Italian ''(la)'' . Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient neuter plural which is treated grammatically as feminine: e.g., : BRACCHIA "arm(s)" → Italian ''(il)'' : ''(le) braccia'', Romanian : ''brațe(le)''. Cf. also
Merovingian The Merovingian dynasty () was the ruling family of the Franks from around the middle of the 5th century until Pepin the Short in 751. They first appear as "Kings of the Franks" in the Roman army of northern Gaul. By 509 they had united all the ...
Latin ''ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant''. Alternations in Italian heteroclitic nouns such as ''l'uovo fresco'' ("the fresh egg") / ''le uova fresche'' ("the fresh eggs") are usually analysed as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in ''-a''. However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that is simply a regular neuter noun (, plural ''ova'') and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is ''-o'' in the singular and ''-e'' in the plural. The same alternation in gender exists in certain Romanian nouns, but is considered regular as it is more common than in Italian. Thus, a relict neuter gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian. In Portuguese, traces of the neuter plural can be found in collective formations and words meant to inform a bigger size or sturdiness. Thus, one can use ''(s)'' ("egg(s)") and ''(s)'' ("roe", "collection(s) of eggs"), ''(s)'' ("section(s) of an edge") and ''(s'') ("edge(s)"), ''(s)'' ("bag(s)") and ''(s'') ("sack(s)"), ''(s)'' ("cloak(s)") and ''(s)'' ("blanket(s)"). Other times, it resulted in words whose gender may be changed more or less arbitrarily, like / ("fruit"), / ("broth"), etc. 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 ("
pear Pears are fruits produced and consumed around the world, growing on a tree and harvested in late summer into mid-autumn. The pear tree and shrub are a species of genus ''Pyrus'' , in the Family (biology), family Rosaceae, bearing the Pome, po ...
tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian ''(il)'' and Romanian ; in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations ''(le)'' , ''(el)'' ; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the feminine derivations ''(a)'' , ''(la)'' . 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)'' , Romanian ''mânu>'', pl. / (reg.) ''mâni'', Catalan ''(la)'' , and Portuguese ''(a)'' , 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 still have neuter pronouns. French / / ("this"), Spanish / / ("this"), Italian: / / ("to him" /"to her" / "to it"), Catalan: , , , ("it" / ''this'' / ''this-that'' / ''that over there''); Portuguese: / / ("all of him" / "all of her" / "all of it"). In Spanish, a three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles , , and . The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: ''lo bueno'', literally "that which is good", from : good.


Loss of oblique cases

The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions. Some of the causes include: the loss of final ''m'', the merger of ''ă'' with ''ā'', and the merger of ''ŭ'' with ''ō'' (see tables). Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced. There also seems to be a marked tendency to confuse different forms even when they had not become homophonous (like the generally more distinct plurals), which indicates that nominal declension was shaped not only by phonetic mergers, but also by structural factors. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin shifted from a markedly
synthetic language A synthetic language is a language that is characterized by denoting syntactic relationships between words via inflection or agglutination. Synthetic languages are statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio relative to an ...
to a more analytic one. The
genitive case In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive ca ...
died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by "de" + noun (which originally meant "about/concerning", weakened to "of") as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining genitive forms are some pronouns, certain fossilized expressions and some proper names. For example, French ("Thursday") < Old French ''juesdi'' < Vulgar Latin ""; Spanish ''es'' ("it is necessary") < "est "; and Italian ("earthquake") < "" as well as names like ''Paoli'', ''Pieri''. The
dative case In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this examp ...
lasted longer than the genitive, even though
Plautus Titus Maccius Plautus ( ; 254 – 184 BC) was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by Livius Andro ...
, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction "ad" + accusative. For example, "ad carnuficem dabo". The
accusative case In grammar, the accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "he ...
developed as a prepositional case, displacing many instances of the
ablative In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages. It is used to indicate motion away from something, make comparisons, and serve various o ...
. Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case. Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely confused in inscriptions. Even though Gaulish texts from the 7th century rarely confuse both forms, it is believed that both cases began to merge in Africa by the end of the empire, and a bit later in parts of Italy and Iberia. Nowadays, Romanian maintains a two-case system, while
Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th Old Occitan Old Occitan (, ), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is some ...
had a two-case subject-oblique system. This Old French system was based largely on whether or not the Latin case ending contained an "s" or not, with the "s" being retained but all vowels in the ending being lost (as with ''veisin'' below). But since this meant that it was easy to confuse the singular nominative with the plural oblique, and the plural nominative with the singular oblique, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and Middle French adopted one case (usually the oblique) for all purposes. Today, Romanian is generally considered the only Romance language with a surviving case system. However, some dialects of
Romansh retain a special predicative form of the masculine singular identical to the plural: ''il bien vin'' ("the good wine") vs. ''il vin ei buns'' ("the wine is good"). This "predicative case" (as it is sometimes called) is a remnant of the Latin nominative in ''-us''.


Wider use of prepositions

The loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntax">syntactic In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency ...
purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish , "where", from Latin + (which in Romanian literally means "from where"/"where from"), or French , "since", from + , while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese is ''de'' + ''ex'' + ''de''. Spanish and Portuguese , "after", represent ''de'' + ''ex'' + . Some of these new compounds appear in literary texts during the late empire; French , Spanish ''de'' and Portuguese ''de'' ("outside") all represent ''de'' + (Romanian – ''ad'' + ''foris''), and we find
Jerome Jerome (; ; ; – 30 September 420), also known as Jerome of Stridon, was an early Christian presbyter, priest, Confessor of the Faith, confessor, theologian, translator, and historian; he is commonly known as Saint Jerome. He is best known ...
writing ''stulti, nonne qui fecit, quod de foris est, etiam id, quod de intus est fecit?'' (Luke 11.40: "ye fools, did not he, that made which is without, make that which is within also?"). In some cases, compounds were created by combining a large number of particles, such as the Romanian ("just recently") from ''ad'' + ''de'' + ''in'' + ''illa'' + ''hora''. Classical Latin: :''Marcus patrī librum dat.'' "Marcus is giving isfather /thebook." Vulgar Latin: :''*Marcos da libru a patre.'' "Marcus is giving /thebook to isfather." Just as in the disappearing dative case, colloquial Latin sometimes replaced the disappearing genitive case with the preposition ''de'' followed by the ablative, then eventually the accusative (oblique). Classical Latin: :''Marcus mihi librum patris dat.'' "Marcus is giving me isfather's book. Vulgar Latin: :''*Marcos mi da libru de patre.'' "Marcus is giving me hebook of isfather."


Pronouns

Unlike in the nominal and adjectival inflections, pronouns kept a great part of the case distinctions. However, many changes happened. For example, the of ''ego'' was lost by the end of the empire, and ''eo'' appears in manuscripts from the 6th century.


Adverbs

Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...
s from
adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...
s: , "dear", formed , "dearly"; , "fiercely", from ; , "often", from . All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin. An alternative formation with a feminine
ablative In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages. It is used to indicate motion away from something, make comparisons, and serve various o ...
form modifying (originally the ablative of ''mēns'', and so meaning "with a ... mind") gave rise to a widespread rule for forming adverbs in many Romance languages: adding the suffix -''ment(e)'' to the feminine form of the adjective. So ("quick") instead of ("quickly") gave ''veloci mente'' (originally "with a quick mind", "quick-mindedly"), and ''-mente'' became a productive suffix for forming adverbs in Romance such as Italian , Spanish 'clearly'. The development of an originally autonomous form (the noun ''mente'', meaning 'mind') into a suffix (although remaining in free lexical use in other contexts e.g. Italian ''venire in mente'' 'come to mind') is a textbook case of
grammaticalization Grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a linguistic process in which words change from representing objects or actions to serving grammatical functions. Grammaticalization can involve content words, such as noun ...
.


Verbs

In general, the verbal system in the Romance languages changed less from Classical Latin than did the nominal system. The four conjugational classes generally survived. The second and third conjugations already had identical imperfect tense forms in Latin, and also shared a common present participle. Because of the merging of short ''i'' with long ''ē'' in most of Vulgar Latin, these two conjugations grew even closer together. Several of the most frequently-used forms became indistinguishable, while others became distinguished only by stress placement: These two conjugations came to be conflated in many of the Romance languages, often by merging them into a single class while taking endings from each of the original two conjugations. Which endings survived was different for each language, although most tended to favour second conjugation endings over the third conjugation. Spanish, for example, mostly eliminated the third conjugation forms in favour of the second conjugation forms. French and Catalan did the same, but tended to generalise the third conjugation infinitive instead. Catalan in particular almost eliminated the second conjugation ending over time, reducing it to a small relic class. In Italian, the two infinitive endings remained separate (but spelled identically), while the conjugations merged in most other respects much as in the other languages. However, the third-conjugation third-person plural present ending survived in favour of the second conjugation version, and was even extended to the fourth conjugation. Romanian also maintained the distinction between the second and third conjugation endings. In the perfect, 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 rather than containing a semivowel , and in other cases the sound was simply dropped. We know this because it did not participate in the sound shift from to . 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 . Another major systemic change was to the
future tense In grammar, a future tense ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French ''achètera'', mea ...
, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb , *''amare habeo'', literally "to love I have" (cf. English "I have to love", which has shades of a future meaning). 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": * (''je'' + ''aimer'' + ''ai'') ← ''aimer'' to love"+ ''ai'' I have" * Portuguese and (''amar'' + 'h'''ei'') ← ''amar'' to love"+ ''hei'' I have"*
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...
and (''amar'' + 'h'''e'') ← ''amar'' to love"+ ''he'' I have" * (''amar'' + 'h'''o'') ← ''amare'' to love"+ ''ho'' I have" The first historical attestation of this new future can be found in a 7th-century Latin text, the ''
Chronicle of Fredegar The ''Chronicle of Fredegar'' is the conventional title used for a 7th-century Frankish chronicle that was probably written in Burgundy. The author is unknown and the attribution to Fredegar dates only from the 16th century. The chronicle begi ...
'' A periphrastic construction of the form 'to have to' (late Latin ''habere ad'') used as future is characteristic of Sardinian: * ''Ap'a istàre'' < ''apo a istàre'' 'I will stay' * ''Ap'a nàrrere'' < ''apo a nàrrer'' 'I will say' An innovative conditional (distinct from the
subjunctive The subjunctive (also known as the conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unrealit ...
) 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 literary Portuguese, which in these tenses allows
clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
object pronouns to be incorporated 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 Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese, personal pronouns can still be omitted from verb phrases as in Latin, as the endings are still distinct enough to convey that information: ''venio'' > Sp ''vengo'' ("I come"). In French, however, all the endings are typically homophonous except the first and second person (and occasionally also third person) plural, so the pronouns are always used (''je viens'') except in the imperative. 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 A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or ''patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing ...
was utterly lost in Romance, being replaced with
periphrastic In linguistics and literature, periphrasis () is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periph ...
verb forms—composed of the verb "to be" plus a passive participle—or impersonal reflexive forms—composed of a verb and a passivizing pronoun. 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 are the verbs expressing the concept "to go". Consider three particular verbs in Classical Latin expressing concepts of "going": , , and *''ambitare''. 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 ''ambitare''. Italian instead merged ''vadere'' and ''ambitare'' into the verb . At the extreme French merged three Latin verbs with, for example, the present tense deriving from ''vadere'' and another verb ''ambulare'' (or something like it) and the future tense deriving from ''ire''. Similarly the Romance distinction between the Romance verbs for "to be", and , was lost in French as these merged into the verb . In Italian, the verb inherited both Romance meanings of "being essentially" and "being temporarily of the quality of", while specialized into a verb denoting location or dwelling, or state of health.


Copula

The copula (that is, the verb signifying "to be") of Classical Latin was . This evolved to *''essere'' in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix ''-re'' to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian and French through Proto-Gallo-Romance *''essre'' and Old French as well as Spanish and Portuguese (Romanian ''a'' derives from ''fieri'', which means "to become"). In Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb , which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand", to denote a more temporary meaning. That is, *''essere'' signified the ''esse''nce, while ''stare'' signified the ''state.'' ''Stare'' evolved to Spanish and Portuguese and Old French (both through *''estare''), Romanian "a sta" ("to stand"), using the original form for the noun ("stare"="state"/"starea"="the state"), 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: ''vir est in foro'', meaning "the man is in/at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin could have been *''(h)omo stat in foro'', "the man stands in/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 semantically transparent assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from ''esse'' to ''stare'' became more widespread. In the Iberian peninsula ''esse'' ended up only denoting natural qualities that would not change, while ''stare'' was applied to transient qualities and location. In Italian, ''stare'' is used mainly for location, transitory state of health (''sta male'' 's/he is ill' but ''è gracile'' 's/he is puny') and, as in Spanish, for the eminently transient quality implied in a verb's progressive form, such as ''sto scrivendo'' to express 'I am writing'. The historical development of the ''stare'' + ablative gerund progressive tense in those Romance languages that have it seems to have been a passage from a usage such as ''sto pensando'' 'I stand/stay (here) in thinking', in which the ''stare'' form carries the full semantic load of 'stand, stay' to
grammaticalization Grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a linguistic process in which words change from representing objects or actions to serving grammatical functions. Grammaticalization can involve content words, such as noun ...
of the construction as expression of progressive aspect (Similar in concept to the Early Modern English construction of "I am a-thinking"). The process of reanalysis that took place over time bleached the semantics of ''stare'' so that when used in combination with the gerund the form became solely a grammatical marker of subject and tense (e.g. ''sto'' = subject first person singular, present; ''stavo'' = subject first person singular, past), no longer a
lexical verb In linguistics a lexical verb or main verb is a member of an open class of verbs that includes all verbs except auxiliary verbs. Lexical verbs typically express action, state, or other predicate meaning. In contrast, auxiliary verbs express gram ...
with the semantics of 'stand' (not unlike the auxiliary in compound tenses that once meant 'have, possess', but is now semantically empty: ''j'ai écrit'', ''ho scritto'', ''he escrito'', etc.). Whereas ''sto scappando'' would once have been semantically strange at best (?'I stay escaping'), once grammaticalization was achieved, collocation with a verb of inherent mobility was no longer contradictory, and ''sto scappando'' could and did become the normal way to express 'I am escaping'. (Although it might be objected that in sentences like Spanish ''la catedral está en la ciudad'', "the cathedral 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 cathedral ''stands'' in the city").


Word order typology

Classical Latin in most cases adopted an SOV word order in ordinary prose, although other word orders were employed, such as in poetry, euphony, focus, or emphasis, enabled by
inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
al marking of the grammatical function of words. However, word order in most of the modern Romance languages generally adopted a standard SVO word order. Relics of SOV word order still survive in the placement of
clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
object pronouns (e.g. Spanish 'I love you').


Vocabulary


Lexical turnover

Over the centuries, spoken Latin lost certain words in favour of coinages; in favour of borrowings from neighbouring languages such as
Gaulish Gaulish is an extinct Celtic languages, Celtic language spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language of the Celts of Gaul (now France, Luxembourg, Belgium, ...
, Germanic, or
Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
; or in favour of other Latin words that had undergone
semantic shift Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from t ...
. The “lost” words often continued to enjoy some currency in
literary Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, ...
Latin, however. A commonly-cited example is the replacement of the highly irregular (
suppletive In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflection, inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irre ...
) verb ''ferre'', meaning 'to carry', with the entirely regular ''portare''. Similarly, the verb '' loqui'', meaning 'to speak', was replaced by a variety of alternatives such as the native '' fabulari'' and '' narrare'' or the Greek borrowing '' parabolare''. Classical Latin
particles In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...
fared poorly, with all of the following vanishing in the course of its development to Romance: an, at, autem, donec, enim, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quoad, quoque, sed, sive, utrum, vel.


Semantic drift

Many words experienced a shift in meaning. Some notable cases are ''
civitas In Ancient Rome, the Latin term (; plural ), according to Cicero in the time of the late Roman Republic, was the social body of the , or citizens, united by Roman law, law (). It is the law that binds them together, giving them responsibilitie ...
'' ('citizenry' ''→'' 'city', replacing '' urbs''); ''focus'' ('hearth' ''→'' 'fire', replacing '' ignis''); ''manducare'' ('chew' ''→'' 'eat', replacing '' edere''); ''
causa ''Causa'' is a genus of air-breathing land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusks in the family Helicidae Helicidae is a large, diverse family of western Palaearctic, medium to large-sized, air-breathing land snails, sometimes cal ...
'' ('subject matter' ''→'' 'thing', competing with '' res''); ''mittere'' ('send' → 'put', competing with '' ponere''); ''necare'' ('murder' ''→'' 'drown', competing with '' submergere''); ''pacare'' ('placate' ''→'' 'pay', competing with '' solvere''), and '' totus'' ('whole' ''→'' 'all, every', competing with '' omnis'').Harrington et al. 1997: 7–10


See also


Transition from Latin to Romance languages

*
Palatalization in the Romance languages Palatalization (sound change), Palatalization in the Romance languages encompasses various historical sound changes which caused consonants to develop a Palatal consonant, palatal articulation or secondary articulation, as well as certain further d ...
* Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance *
Proto-Romance Proto-Romance is the result of applying the comparative method to reconstruct the latest common ancestor of the Romance languages. To what extent, if any, such a reconstruction reflects a real ''état de langue'' is controversial. The closest real ...
language *
Common Romanian Common Romanian (), also known as Ancient Romanian (), or Proto-Romanian (), is a comparatively reconstructed Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Istro-Roma ...
, reconstructed proto-language **
Daco-Roman The term Daco-Roman describes the Romanization (cultural), Romanized culture of Dacia under the rule of the Roman Empire. Etymology The Daco-Roman mixing theory, as an origin for the Romanian people, was formulated by the earliest Romanian scho ...
culture (not language) **
Thraco-Roman The term Thraco-Roman describes the Romanization (cultural), Romanized culture of Thracians under the rule of the Roman Empire. The Odrysian kingdom of Thrace became a Roman client kingdom c. 20 BC, while the Greek city-states on the Black Sea coa ...
culture (not language) * Romance copula * Dialects of Latin


Texts

* Reichenau Glosses, 8th century *
Oaths of Strasbourg The Oaths of Strasbourg were a military pact made on 14 February 842 by Charles the Bald and Louis the German against their older brother Lothair I, the designated heir of Louis the Pious, the successor of Charlemagne. One year later the Treaty ...
, 9th century *
Veronese Riddle The Veronese Riddle () is a riddle written in either Medieval Latin or early Romance languages, Romance on the Verona Orational, probably in the 8th or early 9th century, by a Nicene Christianity, Christian monastery, monk from Verona, in norther ...
, 8th/9th century * Glosas Emilianenses, 10th/11th century


Romance languages

*
Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...
**
Gallo-Italic languages The Gallo-Italic, Gallo-Italian, Gallo-Cisalpine or simply Cisalpine languages constitute the majority of the Romance languages of northern Italy: Piedmontese, Lombard, Emilian, Ligurian, and Romagnol. In central Italy they are spoken in th ...
**
Gallo-Romance languages The Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages includes in the narrowest sense the ''langues d'oïl'' and Franco-Provençal. However, other definitions are far broader and variously encompass the Occitan or Occitano-Romance, Gallo-Italic o ...
**
Iberian Romance languages The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languages Iberian languages is also used as a more inclusive term for all languages spoken on the Iberian Peninsula, which in antiquity included the non-Indo-European Iberian language. are ...
***
Catalan phonology The Catalan phonology (or Valencian phonology) has a certain degree of dialectal variation. Although there are two standard varieties, one based on Central Catalan, Central Eastern dialect and another one based on South-Western or Valencian lang ...


History of specific Romance languages

* History of French **
Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th -4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ...
* History of Italian * History of Portuguese * History of the Romanian language , History of Romanian * Sicilian language#History, History of Sicilian * History of the Spanish language , History of Spanish


Other

*
Vulgate The Vulgate () is a late-4th-century Bible translations into Latin, Latin translation of the Bible. It is largely the work of Saint Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels used by the Diocese of ...
, 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible *
British Latin British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire, Latin became the principal language of the elite and in the urban areas of t ...


References


Citations


Works consulted

; General * * * * * * Carlton, Charles Merritt. 1973. ''A linguistic analysis of a collection of Late Latin documents composed in Ravenna between A.D. 445–700''. The Hague: Mouton. * * * * * Gouvert, Xavier. 2016. Du protoitalique au protoroman: Deux problèmes de reconstruction phonologique. In: Buchi, Éva & Schweickard, Wolfgang (eds.), ''Dictionnaire étymologique roman'' 2, 27–51. Berlin: De Gruyter. * * * * * * * Leppänen, V., & Alho, T. 2018. On the mergers of Latin close-mid vowels. Transactions of the Philological Society 116. 460–483. * * * Nandris, Grigore. 1951. The development and structure of Rumanian. ''The Slavonic and East European Review'', 30. 7–39. * * Pei, Mario. 1941. ''The Italian language''. New York: Columbia University Press. * Pei, Mario & Gaeng, Paul A. 1976. ''The story of Latin and the Romance languages''. New York: Harker & Row. * * * * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. ''A history of the Byzantine state and society''. Stanford University Press. * * * * * *


Transitions to Romance languages

; To Romance in general * * * * Ledgeway, Adam (2012). ''From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. * * (esp. parts 1 & 2, ''Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages''; ''The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages'') * * ; To French * * * * * * ; To Italian * * ; To Spanish * * * * * ; To Portuguese * * * ; To Occitan * ; To Sardinian *


Further reading

* Adams, James Noel. 1976. ''The Text and Language of a Vulgar Latin Chronicle (Anonymus Valesianus II).'' London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies. * Adams, James Noel. 1977. ''The Vulgar Latin of the letters of Claudius Terentianus.'' Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press. * Adams, James Noel. 2013. ''Social Variation and the Latin Language.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Burghini, Julia, and Javier Uría. 2015. "Some neglected evidence on Vulgar Latin 'glide suppression': Consentius, 27.17.20 N." ''Glotta; Zeitschrift Für Griechische Und Lateinische Sprache'' 91: 15–26. . * Jensen, Frede. 1972. ''From Vulgar Latin to Old Provençal.'' Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a not-for-profit university press associated with the University of North Carolina. It was the first university press founded in the southern United States. It is a mem ...
. * Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 2006. Vulgar Latin: Comparative Castration (and Comparative Theories of Syntax). ''Style'' 40, nos. 1–2: 56–61. . * Rohlfs, Gerhard. 1970. ''From Vulgar Latin to Old French: An Introduction to the Study of the Old French Language.'' Detroit:
Wayne State University Press Wayne State University Press (or WSU Press) is a university press that is part of Wayne State University Wayne State University (WSU) is a public university, public research university in Detroit, Michigan, United States. Founded in 186 ...
. * Scarpanti, Edoardo. 2012. ''Saggi linguistici sul latino volgare.'' Mantova: Universitas Studiorum. . * Weiss, Michael. 2009. ''Outline of the historical and comparative grammar of Latin.'' Ann Arbor, MI: Beechstave. * *


External links

* * * {{Authority control Latin language in ancient Rome Forms of Latin Gallo-Roman culture *