Vulgar Latin
Encyclopedia
Vulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin
from which the Romance languages
developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography
. All written works used Classical Latin
, with very few exceptions (most notably sections of Gaius Petronius
' Satyricon
). It is sometimes also called colloquial
Latin, or Common Romance (particularly in the late stage).
The broad term Vulgar Latin should not be confused with the more specific term Proto-Romance, which refers specifically to the theoretical common ancestor to the modern Romance languages. As such Proto-Romance may have been only one of the Vulgar Latin languages and only a very late stage of that language branch.
, i.e. the latest stage common to all of the Romance languages. Because some of the less familiar Romance languages branched off early from the others (Sardinian
in particular, followed by Romanian
and related Eastern Romance languages
), it is also common to reconstruct later stages: e.g. Proto Continental Romance (after Sardinian branched off); Proto Italo-Western Romance (after Sardinian and Romanian branched off); and Proto Western Romance (after the branching-off of Sardinian, Romanian, and the central and southern Italian languages, including standard Italian
).
Proto-Romance and the other proto-languages are theoretical, unitary linguistic constructions. Vulgar Latin, on the other hand, is the actual speech of the common people during the late Roman Empire
. As a result, it is not simply theoretical but actually attested (if thinly), and is not unitary, with differences both over time and space. Hence, it's possible to speak of (e.g.) the loss of initial /j/ in unstressed syllables in the Vulgar Latin of Cantabria
(the area in northern Spain that gave birth to modern Spanish), but it's inaccurate to speak of a similar change in the "Proto-Romance of Cantabria".
philology
referring to the unwritten varieties of Latin spoken mainly by the uneducated and therefore illiterate populations governed by the Roman Republic
and the Roman Empire
. Traces of their language appear in some inscriptions, such as graffiti or advertisements. The educated population mainly responsible for classical Latin
might also have spoken Vulgar Latin in certain contexts depending on their background. The term was first used in that sense by the pioneers of Romance-language philology: François Juste Marie Raynouard
(1804–55) and Friedrich Christian Diez
(1794–1876).
In the course of his studies on the lyrics of songs written by the troubadour
s of Provence
, which had already been studied by Dante Alighieri
and published in De vulgari eloquentia
, Raynouard noticed that the Romance languages derived in part from lexical, morphological, and syntactic features that were Latin but were not preferred in classical Latin
. He hypothesized an intermediate phase and identified it with the Romana lingua, a term that in countries speaking Romance languages meant "nothing more or less than the vulgar speech as opposed to literary or grammatical Latin."
Diez, the principal founder of Romance-language philology, impressed by the comparative methods of Jakob Grimm in Deutsche Grammatik, which came out in 1819 and was the first to use such methods in philology, decided to apply them to the Romance languages and discovered Raynouard's work, Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours, published in 1821. Describing himself as a pupil of Raynouard, he went on to expand the concept to all Romance languages, not just the speech of the troubadours, on a systematic basis, thereby becoming the originator of a new field of scholarly inquiry.
Diez, in his flagship work on the topic, Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, first published in 1836–1843 and multiple times thereafter, after enumerating six Romance languages that he compared: Italian and Wallachian (i.e. Romanian) (east); Spanish and Portuguese (southwest); and Provençal and French (northwest), asserts that they had their origin in Latin, but nicht aus dem classischen Latein, "not in classical Latin," rather aus der römischen Volkssprache oder Volksmundart, "from the Roman popular language or popular dialect". These terms, as he points out later in the work, are a translation into German of Dante's vulgare latinum and Latinum vulgare, and the Italian of Boccaccio, latino volgare. These names in turn are at the end of a tradition extending to the Roman republic
.
The concepts and vocabulary from which vulgare latinum descend were known in the classical period and are to be found amply represented in the unabridged Latin dictionary, starting in the late Roman republic. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a prolific writer, whose works have survived in large quantity, and who serves as a standard of Latin, and his contemporaries in addition to recognizing the lingua Latina also knew varieties of "speech" under the name sermo. Latin could be sermo Latinus, but in addition was a variety known as sermo vulgaris, sermo vulgi, sermo plebeius and sermo quotidianus. These modifiers inform post-classical readers that a conversational Latin existed, which was used by the masses (vulgus) in daily speaking (quotidianus) and was lower-class (plebeius), although some plebeians were quite wealthy.
These vocabulary items manifest no opposition to the written language. There was an opposition to higher-class, or family, Latin (good family) in sermo familiaris and very rarely literature might be termed sermo nobilis. The supposed "sermo classicus" is a scholarly fiction unattested in the dictionary. All kinds of sermo were spoken only, not written. If one wanted to refer to what in post-classical times was called classical Latin one resorted to the concept of latinitas ("latinity") or latine (adverb). If one spoke in the lingua or sermo Latinus one merely spoke Latin, but if one spoke latine or latinius ("more Latinish") one spoke good Latin, and formal Latin had latinitas, the quality of good Latin, about it. After the fall of the empire and the death of spoken Latin its only representative then was written Latin, which became known as classicus, "classy" Latin. The original opposition was between formal or implied good Latin and informal or Vulgar Latin. The spoken/written dichotomy is entirely philological.
s and sociolect
s of the Latin language
throughout its range from the hypothetical prisca latinitas of unknown or poorly remembered times in early Latium to the death of Latin after the fall of the empire. Although making it clear that sermo vulgaris existed, the ancients said very little about it. Because it was not transcribed
, it can only be studied indirectly. Knowledge comes from these chief sources:
Vulgar Latin (proto-Romance) developed differently in the various provinces of the Roman Empire, gradually giving rise to the different Romance languages
. József Herman states:
At the third Council of Tours
in 813, priest
s were ordered to preach in the vernacular language – either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars – since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg
(842), a treaty between Charlemagne
's grandsons Charles the Bald
and Louis the German
, was proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinct from Latin.
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From approximately this point on, the Latin vernaculars began to be viewed as separate languages, developing local norms and, for some, orthographies
of their own, so that Vulgar Latin must be regarded not as extinct – since all modern Romance varieties are its continuation – but as replaced conceptually and terminologically by multiple labels recognizing regional differences in linguistic features.
es, written on the margins of a copy of the Vulgate
Bible (written in Classical Latin though intended for the vulgus), suggesting that the 4th-century words of the Bible were no longer readily understood in the 8th century, when the glosses were likely written. These glosses demonstrate typical vocabulary differences between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin in Gallo-Romance
:
Grammatical changes:
Germanic loan words:
And words whose meaning has changed:
for more information.
, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe:
Many of the forms castigated in the Appendix Probi proved to be the productive forms in Romance; e.g., oricla (Classical Latin auricula) is the source of French oreille, Catalan orella, Spanish oreja, Italian orecchia, Romanian ureche, Portuguese orelha, "ear", not the Classical Latin form.
(which affected all areas except Sardinia
); lenition
(which affected the areas north and west of the La Spezia-Rimini line
); and loss of final consonants. The loss of final consonants was already underway by the 1st century AD in some areas. A graffito
at Pompeii
reads quisque ama valia, which in Classical Latin would read quisquis amat valeat ("may whoever loves be strong/do well"). (The change from valeat to valia is also an early indicator of the development of /j/ (yod
), which played such an important part in the development of palatalization
.) On the other hand, this loss of final /t/ was not general. Old Spanish and Old French
preserved a reflex of final /t/ up through 1100 AD or so, and modern French still maintains final /t/ in some liaison environments.
system. Classical Latin had five short vowels, ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ, and five long vowels
, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, each of which was an individual phoneme
, and four diphthong
s, ae, oe, au and eu (five according to some authors, including ui). There were also long and short versions of y, representing the rounded vowel
[y(ː)] in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced [i(ː)] even before Romance vowel changes started.
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. So, for example ē was pronounced close-mid
/eː/ while ĕ was pronounced open-mid
/ɛ/, and ī was pronounced close
/iː/ while ĭ was pronounced near-close
/ɪ/. The diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced /ai/ and /oi/ in earlier Latin, had also begun their monophthong
isation to /ɛ/ and /e/, respectively. Oe was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin; in Old Latin
, oinos (one) regularly became unus.
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 (but not Modern French "vrai"). Similarly, Latin nux ("nut", acc. sing nucem) 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 was likely some regional variation in pronunciation, as the Eastern Romance languages
and Sardinian
evolved differently. In Sardinian, for instance, ĭ and ŭ became more close, merging with their long counterparts ī and ū; as a result, all corresponding short and long vowels simply merged with each other. In Romanian
, the front vowels ĕ, ĭ, ē, ī evolved like the Western languages (the majority of languages, as described above), but the back vowels ŏ, ŭ, ō, ū evolved as in Sardinian. There are also small sets of remnant dialects in southern Italy that behave like Sardinian or Romanian.
In general, 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.
, 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 pronoun
s or adjective
s; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, (illud), in the Romance languages
, becoming French le and la, Catalan and Spanish el and la, and Italian il and la. The Portuguese articles o and a are ultimately from the same source. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from 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, e.g. lupul ("the wolf") and omul ("the man" – from lupum illum and *homo illum), possibly a result of its membership in the Balkan sprachbund.
This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina
Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille dæmon sodalis peccati ("The devil is a companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Greek
, which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.
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. 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. 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 acela (*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 (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 ninth century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles can be suffixed to the noun, as in other members of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages
.
The numeral unus, una (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases. This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero
writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.
The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages. In Latin, gender is partly a matter of inflection
, i.e. there are different declensional paradigms associated with the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, and partly a matter of agreement
, i.e. nouns of a certain gender require forms of the same gender in adjectives and pronouns associated with them.
The loss of final consonants led to a remodelling of the gender system
.
In Classical Latin, the endings -us and -um distinguished masculine from neuter nouns in the second declension
; with both -s and -m gone, the neuters merged with the masculines, a process that is complete in Romance. By contrast, some neuter plurals such as gaudia, "joys", were re-analysed
as feminine singulars. The loss of the final m was a process which seems to have begun by the time of the earliest monuments of the Latin language. The epitaph
of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus
, who died around 150 BC, reads TAVRASIA CISAVNA SAMNIO CEPIT, which in Classical Latin would be Taurāsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cēpit, "He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium". (Note that in the Latin alphabet
, the letters u and v, i and j were not distinguished until the early modern period. Upper-case u and j did not exist, while lower-case j and v were only graphic variations of i and u, respectively.) This however can be explained in a different way, that the inscription simply fails to note the nasality of the final vowels (like in the established custom of writing COS. for consul). See the Consonants section above.
The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases absorbed by the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The syntactical confusion starts already in the Pompeian
graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum "dead body" and hoc locum for hunc locum "this place" (-us was normally a masculine ending, and -um a neuter ending). The morphological confusion shows primarily in the adoption of the nominative ending -us (-Ø after -r) in the o-declension: in Petronius
, we find balneus for balneum "bath", fatus for fatum "fate", caelus for caelum "heaven", amphitheater for amphitheatrum "amphitheatre", vinus for vinum "wine" and conversely the nominative thesaurum for thesaurus "treasure". Notably, most of these forms occur in the speech of one man: Trimalchion.
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 (masc.) > Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish muro, Catalan and French mur and CAELUM (neut.) > Italian, Spanish cielo, French ciel, Portuguese céu, Romanian "cer", 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 language (il) latte, Leonese
(el) lleche 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, Leonese, Portuguese and Italian nome, Romanian nume ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative nomen, rather than the oblique stem form *nominem (which nevertheless produced Spanish nombre).
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.
Alternations such as l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") / le uova fresche ("the fresh eggs") in Italian are usually analysed as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in -a (heteroclisis). However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that uovo is simply a regular neuter noun (< ovum, plural ova) and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is -o in the singular and -e in the plural. Thus, neuter nouns can arguably be said to persist in Italian, and also Romanian.
These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, the names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin pirus ("pear
tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian (il) pero and Romanian păr(ul); in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations (le) poirier, (el) peral; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the feminine derivations (a) pereira, (la) perera. Fagus ("beech
"), another feminine noun ending in -us, is preserved in some languages as a masculine, e.g. Romanian fag(ul) or Catalan (el) faig; other dialects have replaced it with its adjectival forms fageus or fagea ("made of beechwood"), whence Italian (il) faggio, Spanish (el) haya, and Portuguese (a) faia.
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.
Leonese
keeps three genders with the same finish for masculine and neuter, clarified with the articles: (el) bonu, (la) bona, (lu) bonu ("good").
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 declension
s. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, vulgar Latin moved from being a markedly synthetic language
to a more analytic language where word order is a necessary element of syntax. Consider what the loss of final /m/, the loss of phonemic vowel length, and the sound shift of ae from /ai/ to /ɛ/ entailed for a typical first declension noun (see table).
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 donde, "where", from Latin de + unde, or French dès, "since", from de + ex, 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 Jerome
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 adineauri ("just recently") from ad + de + in + illa + hora.
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:
Vulgar Latin:
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:
Vulgar Latin:
s from adjective
s: carus, "dear", formed care, "dearly"; acriter, "fiercely", from acer; crebro, "often", from creber. All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin, where adverbs were invariably formed by a feminine ablative
form modifying mente, which was originally the ablative of mens, and so meant "with a _____ mind". So velox ("quick") instead of velociter ("quickly") gave veloci 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.
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 /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/.
Another major systemic change was to the future tense
, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. This may have been due to phonetic merger of intervocalic /b/ and /w/, which caused future tense forms such as amabit to become identical to perfect forms such as amauit, introducing unacceptable ambiguity. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb habere, *amare habeo, literally "to love I have". This was contracted into a new future suffix in Western Romance forms which can be seen in the following modern examples of "I will love":
An innovative conditional
(distinct from the subjunctive
) also developed in the same way (infinitive + conjugated form of habere). The fact that the future and conditional endings were originally independent words is still evident in literary Portuguese, which in these tenses allows clitic
object pronouns to be incorporated as infix
es between the root of the verb and its ending: "I will love" (eu) amarei, but "I will love you" amar-te-ei, from amar + te ["you"] + (eu) hei = amar + te + [h]ei = amar-te-ei.
Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, 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.
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.
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 at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin should have been *(h)omo stat in foro, "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 widespread, 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".)
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
from which the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
. All written works used Classical Latin
Classical Latin
Classical Latin in simplest terms is the socio-linguistic register of the Latin language regarded by the enfranchised and empowered populations of the late Roman republic and the Roman empire as good Latin. Most writers during this time made use of it...
, with very few exceptions (most notably sections of Gaius Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...
' Satyricon
Satyricon
Satyricon is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as a certain Titus Petronius...
). It is sometimes also called colloquial
Colloquialism
A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...
Latin, or Common Romance (particularly in the late stage).
The broad term Vulgar Latin should not be confused with the more specific term Proto-Romance, which refers specifically to the theoretical common ancestor to the modern Romance languages. As such Proto-Romance may have been only one of the Vulgar Latin languages and only a very late stage of that language branch.
Proto-Romance
Vulgar Latin is often confused with Proto-Romance. Proto-Romance is a proto-languageProto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
, i.e. the latest stage common to all of the Romance languages. Because some of the less familiar Romance languages branched off early from the others (Sardinian
Sardinian language
Sardinian is a Romance language spoken and written on most of the island of Sardinia . It is considered the most conservative of the Romance languages in terms of phonology and is noted for its Paleosardinian substratum....
in particular, followed by Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
and related Eastern Romance languages
Eastern Romance languages
The Eastern Romance languages in their narrow conception, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin. Some classifications include the Italo-Dalmatian languages; when Italian is...
), it is also common to reconstruct later stages: e.g. Proto Continental Romance (after Sardinian branched off); Proto Italo-Western Romance (after Sardinian and Romanian branched off); and Proto Western Romance (after the branching-off of Sardinian, Romanian, and the central and southern Italian languages, including standard Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
).
Proto-Romance and the other proto-languages are theoretical, unitary linguistic constructions. Vulgar Latin, on the other hand, is the actual speech of the common people during the late Roman Empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
. As a result, it is not simply theoretical but actually attested (if thinly), and is not unitary, with differences both over time and space. Hence, it's possible to speak of (e.g.) the loss of initial /j/ in unstressed syllables in the Vulgar Latin of Cantabria
Cantabria
Cantabria is a Spanish historical region and autonomous community with Santander as its capital city. It is bordered on the east by the Basque Autonomous Community , on the south by Castile and León , on the west by the Principality of Asturias, and on the north by the Cantabrian Sea.Cantabria...
(the area in northern Spain that gave birth to modern Spanish), but it's inaccurate to speak of a similar change in the "Proto-Romance of Cantabria".
Origin of the term
The term "vulgar speech" later called "Vulgar Latin" was used by the Romans themselves. Subsequently it became a technical term from Latin and Romance-languageRomance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
referring to the unwritten varieties of Latin spoken mainly by the uneducated and therefore illiterate populations governed by the Roman Republic
Roman Republic
The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...
and the Roman Empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
. Traces of their language appear in some inscriptions, such as graffiti or advertisements. The educated population mainly responsible for classical Latin
Classical Latin
Classical Latin in simplest terms is the socio-linguistic register of the Latin language regarded by the enfranchised and empowered populations of the late Roman republic and the Roman empire as good Latin. Most writers during this time made use of it...
might also have spoken Vulgar Latin in certain contexts depending on their background. The term was first used in that sense by the pioneers of Romance-language philology: François Juste Marie Raynouard
François Juste Marie Raynouard
François Juste Marie Raynouard was a French dramatist and academic.He was born at Brignoles in Provence, trained for the bar, and practised at Draguignan. In 1791 he went to Paris as deputy to the Legislative Assembly, but after the fall of the Girondists, whom he followed, he went into hiding...
(1804–55) and Friedrich Christian Diez
Friedrich Christian Diez
Friedrich Christian Diez , German philologist, was born at Gießen, in Hessen-Darmstadt.He was educated first at the gymnasium and then at the university of his native town and Göttingen...
(1794–1876).
In the course of his studies on the lyrics of songs written by the troubadour
Troubadour
A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
s of Provence
Provence
Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
, which had already been studied by Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
and published in De vulgari eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia is the title of an essay by Dante Alighieri, written in Latin and initially meant to consist of four books, but abandoned in the middle of the second. It was probably composed shortly after Dante went into exile; internal evidence points to a date between 1302 and 1305...
, Raynouard noticed that the Romance languages derived in part from lexical, morphological, and syntactic features that were Latin but were not preferred in classical Latin
Classical Latin
Classical Latin in simplest terms is the socio-linguistic register of the Latin language regarded by the enfranchised and empowered populations of the late Roman republic and the Roman empire as good Latin. Most writers during this time made use of it...
. He hypothesized an intermediate phase and identified it with the Romana lingua, a term that in countries speaking Romance languages meant "nothing more or less than the vulgar speech as opposed to literary or grammatical Latin."
Diez, the principal founder of Romance-language philology, impressed by the comparative methods of Jakob Grimm in Deutsche Grammatik, which came out in 1819 and was the first to use such methods in philology, decided to apply them to the Romance languages and discovered Raynouard's work, Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours, published in 1821. Describing himself as a pupil of Raynouard, he went on to expand the concept to all Romance languages, not just the speech of the troubadours, on a systematic basis, thereby becoming the originator of a new field of scholarly inquiry.
Diez, in his flagship work on the topic, Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, first published in 1836–1843 and multiple times thereafter, after enumerating six Romance languages that he compared: Italian and Wallachian (i.e. Romanian) (east); Spanish and Portuguese (southwest); and Provençal and French (northwest), asserts that they had their origin in Latin, but nicht aus dem classischen Latein, "not in classical Latin," rather aus der römischen Volkssprache oder Volksmundart, "from the Roman popular language or popular dialect". These terms, as he points out later in the work, are a translation into German of Dante's vulgare latinum and Latinum vulgare, and the Italian of Boccaccio, latino volgare. These names in turn are at the end of a tradition extending to the Roman republic
Roman Republic
The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...
.
The concepts and vocabulary from which vulgare latinum descend were known in the classical period and are to be found amply represented in the unabridged Latin dictionary, starting in the late Roman republic. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a prolific writer, whose works have survived in large quantity, and who serves as a standard of Latin, and his contemporaries in addition to recognizing the lingua Latina also knew varieties of "speech" under the name sermo. Latin could be sermo Latinus, but in addition was a variety known as sermo vulgaris, sermo vulgi, sermo plebeius and sermo quotidianus. These modifiers inform post-classical readers that a conversational Latin existed, which was used by the masses (vulgus) in daily speaking (quotidianus) and was lower-class (plebeius), although some plebeians were quite wealthy.
These vocabulary items manifest no opposition to the written language. There was an opposition to higher-class, or family, Latin (good family) in sermo familiaris and very rarely literature might be termed sermo nobilis. The supposed "sermo classicus" is a scholarly fiction unattested in the dictionary. All kinds of sermo were spoken only, not written. If one wanted to refer to what in post-classical times was called classical Latin one resorted to the concept of latinitas ("latinity") or latine (adverb). If one spoke in the lingua or sermo Latinus one merely spoke Latin, but if one spoke latine or latinius ("more Latinish") one spoke good Latin, and formal Latin had latinitas, the quality of good Latin, about it. After the fall of the empire and the death of spoken Latin its only representative then was written Latin, which became known as classicus, "classy" Latin. The original opposition was between formal or implied good Latin and informal or Vulgar Latin. The spoken/written dichotomy is entirely philological.
Sources
It cannot be supposed that the spoken language was a distinct and persistent language so that the citizens of Rome would be regarded as bilingual. Instead, Vulgar Latin is a blanket term covering the popular dialectDialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s and sociolect
Sociolect
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect or social dialect is a variety of language associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, etc....
s of the Latin language
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
throughout its range from the hypothetical prisca latinitas of unknown or poorly remembered times in early Latium to the death of Latin after the fall of the empire. Although making it clear that sermo vulgaris existed, the ancients said very little about it. Because it was not transcribed
Transcription (linguistics)
Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...
, it can only be studied indirectly. Knowledge comes from these chief sources:
- SolecismSolecismIn traditional prescriptive grammar, a solecism is something perceived as a grammatical mistake or absurdity, or even a simply non-standard usage. The word was originally used by the Greeks for what they perceived as mistakes in their language...
s, especially in Late LatinLate LatinLate Latin is the scholarly name for the written Latin of Late Antiquity. The English dictionary definition of Late Latin dates this period from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD extending in Spain to the 7th. This somewhat ambiguously defined period fits between Classical Latin and Medieval Latin...
texts. - Mention of it by ancient grammarians, including prescriptive grammar texts from the Late Latin period condemning linguistic "errors" that represent spoken Latin.
- The comparative methodComparative methodIn 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, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
, which reconstructs Proto-Romance, a hypothetical vernacular proto-languageProto-languageA proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
from which the Romance languages descended. - Some literary works written in a lower registerRegister (linguistics)In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal...
of Latin provide a glimpse into the world of Vulgar Latin in the classical period: the dialogues of the plays of PlautusPlautusTitus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...
and TerenceTerencePublius Terentius Afer , better known in English as Terence, was a playwright of the Roman Republic, of North African descent. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave, educated him and later on,...
, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, and the speech of freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter
History
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
. József Herman states:
At the third Council of Tours
Council of Tours
In the medieval Roman Catholic church there were several Councils of Tours, that city being an old seat of Christianity, and considered fairly centrally located in France. Athenius, Bishop of Rennes, took part in the First Council of Tours in AD 461...
in 813, priest
Priest
A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities...
s were ordered to preach in the vernacular language – either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars – since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg
Oaths of Strasbourg
The Oaths of Strasbourg were several historical documents which included mutual pledges of allegiance between Louis the German , ruler of East Francia, and his brother Charles the Bald , ruler of West Francia...
(842), a treaty between Charlemagne
Charlemagne
Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
's grandsons Charles the Bald
Charles the Bald
Charles the Bald , Holy Roman Emperor and King of West Francia , was the youngest son of the Emperor Louis the Pious by his second wife Judith.-Struggle against his brothers:He was born on 13 June 823 in Frankfurt, when his elder...
and Louis the German
Louis the German
Louis the German , also known as Louis II or Louis the Bavarian, was a grandson of Charlemagne and the third son of the succeeding Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious and his first wife, Ermengarde of Hesbaye.He received the appellation 'Germanicus' shortly after his death in recognition of the fact...
, was proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinct from Latin.
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
of their own, so that Vulgar Latin must be regarded not as extinct – since all modern Romance varieties are its continuation – but as replaced conceptually and terminologically by multiple labels recognizing regional differences in linguistic features.
Vocabulary
Vulgar Latin featured a large vocabulary of words that were productive in Romance.The Reichenau Glosses
Insight into the vocabulary of late Vulgar Latin in France can be seen in the Reichenau GlossGloss
A gloss is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text, or in the reader's language if that is different....
es, written on the margins of a copy of the Vulgate
Vulgate
The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was largely the work of St. Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of the old Latin translations...
Bible (written in Classical Latin though intended for the vulgus), suggesting that the 4th-century words of the Bible were no longer readily understood in the 8th century, when the glosses were likely written. These glosses demonstrate typical vocabulary differences between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin in Gallo-Romance
Gallo-Romance languages
The Gallo-Romance branch of Romance languages include French and the other langue d'oïl dialects, Occitan , Catalan, Franco-Provençal, Gallo-Italic, and other languages - Other possible classifications :...
:
- ager > campus "field" (French champ, Italian/Spanish/Portuguese campo, Catalan camp, Romanian câmp, but Portuguese in toponyms and, above all, Galician in common use retain agra and diminutive agrela for "fields of collective ownership" and Romanian sometimes agru "field")
- aper "boar" > salvaticus (for (porcus) silvaticus "wild pig", Old French salvage "wild pig")
- arena "sand" > sabulo (French sable, Italian sabbia, Catalan sorra, Portuguese saibro "sand"; but Spanish and Sardinian arena, Galician area, Portuguese areia "sand").
- canere "to sing" > cantare (French chanter, Portuguese/Galician/Spanish/Catalan cantar, Italian cantare, Romanian cânta, "to sing", frequentativeFrequentativeIn grammar, a frequentative form of a word is one which indicates repeated action. The frequentative form can be considered a separate, but not completely independent word, called a frequentative...
of canere) - caseum > formaticum "cheese" (French fromage, Italian formaggio, Catalan formatge "cheese", post-classical, from formare, "to form"; but Portuguese queijo, Sardinian casu, Spanish queso, Romanian caş, Italian dialect cacio "cheese")
- clivium "mountain" > montania (French montagne, Spanish montaña, Italian montagna, Portuguese montanha, Romanian munte)
- flare > suflare (French souffler, Italian soffiare, Portuguese soprar, Romanian sufla, Spanish soplar, "to blow", from flare with prefix sub)
- forum > mercatum "market" (French marché, Italian mercato, Portuguese/Spanish mercado, Catalan mercat "market". Forum gave birth to Italian foro "law court", Spanish fuero "jurisdiction", Portuguese/Galician foro "jurisdiction", Catalan fur "jurisdiction")
- gecor (=jecur) "liver" > ficato (French foie, Italian fegato, Spanish higado, Portuguese fígado, Romanian ficat)
- hiems > hibernus (French hiver, Italian inverno, Spanish invierno, Portuguese inverno, Catalan hivern, Romanian iarnă, "winter", adjective of hiems)
- ita > sic (French, sometimes, si, Italian sì, Spanish sí, Portuguese sim "yes", Romanian şi "and")
- lamento > ploro (French pleurer, Spanish llorar, Portuguese/Galician chorar, Catalan plorar "to weep", Romanian ploaie "rain". Lamento gave birth to Portuguese/Spanish lamentar, Italian lamentare, French lamenter.)
- liberos "children" > infantes (French enfants, Catalan infants "children"; Italian infante "infant"; Portuguese infante "prince"; Spanish infante "child", but as a literary word also "prince")
- lebes "boiler" > chaldaria (French chaudière, Italian caldaia, Spanish caldera, Portuguese/Galician caldeira, Romanian căldare)
- mares (nom. mas) > masculi (French mâle, Italian maschio, Portuguese/Spanish macho, Catalan mascle, Romanian mascul, "male", diminutiveDiminutiveIn language structure, a diminutive, or diminutive form , 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...
of mas) - necetur > occidetur (Italian uccidere, Spanish occiso, "dead person", Romanian ucide, "to kill". Necetur gave birth to Italian annegare, Portuguese/Spanish anegar, Romanian îneca "to drown")
- pingues > grassi "fat" (French gras, Italian grasso, Romanian gras, Portuguese/Galician graxo, Catalan gras "fat", post-classical, possibly from crassus "fat, thick, stout". Pingues > Italian expression terra pingue "rich soil")
- oppidis > civitatibus (French cité, Italian città, Portuguese/Galician cidade, Sardinian tzitade, Spanish ciudad, Catalan ciutat, Romanian cetate, "city")
- oves "sheeps" > berbices (Romanian berbec "ram", French brebis "ewes", but Spanish oveja, and Romanian oi "ewes")
- pulchra > bella (French beau / belle, Italian/Spanish bello, Portuguese belo, Catalan bell "beautiful", diminutive of bonus "good". Pulcro gave birth to Spanish pulcro "tidy, neat")
- sortilegus "sorcerer" > sorcerus (Latinization from French sorcier)
- tenet "boredom" "difficulty" > anoget (Old French anoie > French ennui ; inodio > Italian noia, Spanish enojo)
- umo > terra (French terre, Italian/Portuguese/Galician/Catalan terra, Spanish tierra, Romanian ţară, but also humă, "ground")
- ungues > ungulas "fingernail" (French ongle, Italian unghia, Spanish uña, Portuguese unha, Galician both uña and unlla, Romanian unghie, Catalan ungla "fingernail", diminutive of unguis)
- vim > fortiam (French force, Spanish fuerza, Portuguese força, Catalan força "force", Romanian foarte "very (much); intense", post-classical, from fortis, "strong")
- si vis > si voles (French tu veux, Italian (tu) vuoi, Catalan (tu) vols, Romanian (tu) vrei or (tu) vei, "you want", 2nd personal singular of *volere, "to want", regularized form of velle)
- viscera "entrails" "guts" > intralia (French entrailles, Spanish entrañas)
Grammatical changes:
- optimos > meliores (Portuguese melhor, Galician mellor, Spanish mejor, Catalan millor, French meilleur, Italian migliore "best", originally "better". Reborrowed Spanish óptimo, Portuguese óptimo, Italian ottimo, French optimal, Catalan òptim, with the sense of "excellent" or "optimal")
- saniore > plus sano (French plus sain, Italian più sano, Spanish más sano, Catalan més sa, Portuguese mais são, Romanian mai sănătos)
Germanic loan words:
- turbas > fulcos (French foule, Italian folla "mob", but Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan/Romanian turba "mob")
- cementariis (structor) > mationibus (mac(h)io > French maçon > Spanish masón "stonemason")
- galea > helme "helmet" (French heaume, Italian/Portuguese/Galician elmo, Catalan elm, Spanish yelmo "helmet")
- coturnix > quaccola (French caille, Italian quaglia "quail", but Spanish codorniz, Portuguese codorna "quail")
- fulvus > brunus "brown", "dark" (French/Romanian brun, Catalan bru, Spanish/Italian/Galician bruno "brown/dark")
- pignus "proof, token, pledge" > wadius (French gage, but Italian pegno)
And words whose meaning has changed:
- in ore (nom. os) > in bucca (Portuguese/Galician/Spanish/Catalan boca, French bouche, Italian bocca "mouth", originally "cheek", Romanian bucă with the sense of "cheek" and "buttock")
- emit > comparavit (Italian comprare, Spanish/Portuguese/Galician comprar, Romanian cumpăra, Catalan comprar "to buy", originally "to arrange, settle")
- rerum (nom. res) > causarum (French chose, Italian/Spanish/Catalan cosa, Portuguese/Galician coisa/cousa "thing", originally "cause". Rerum gave birth to French rien, Catalan res "nothing")
- rostrum > beccus (French bec, Italian becco, Catalan bec, Spanish pico, Portuguese/Galician bico "beak", post-classical, from Gaulish. Rostro gave birth to Italian rostro "beak", Spanish/Galician rostro, and Portuguese rosto "face", Romanian rost "mouth" and a rosti "to pronounce", "to tell")
- 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
There was no single pronunciation of Vulgar Latin, and the pronunciation of Vulgar Latin in the various Latin-speaking areas is indistinguishable from the earlier history of the phonology of the Romance languages. See the article on Romance languagesRomance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
for more information.
Evidence of changes
Evidence of phonological changes can be seen in the late 3rd century Appendix ProbiAppendix Probi
The Appendix Probi is a palimpsest appended to the Instituta Artium, a work written in the third or fourth century AD by the grammarian Valerius Probus. The text only survives in a manuscript of the seventh or eighth century...
, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe:
- a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels ("masculus non masclus");
- the merger between pre-vocalic /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");
- regularizationRegularization (linguistics)In linguistics, regularization is a phenomenon in language acquisition and language development, whereby irregular forms in morphology, syntax, etc., are replaced by regular ones. Examples are "gooses" instead of "geese" in child speech and replacement of the Middle English plural form for "cow",...
of irregular forms ("glis non glirus"); - regularization and emphasis of gendered forms ("pauper mulier non paupera mulier");
- levelling of the distinction between /b/ and /w/ 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 hypercorrectionHypercorrectionIn linguistics or usage, hypercorrection is a non-standard usage that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of grammar or a usage prescription...
("formosus non formunsus"). - the loss of /h/, both initially ("hostiae non ostiae") and within the word ("adhuc non aduc").
Many of the forms castigated in the Appendix Probi proved to be the productive forms in Romance; e.g., oricla (Classical Latin auricula) is the source of French oreille, Catalan orella, Spanish oreja, Italian orecchia, Romanian ureche, Portuguese orelha, "ear", not the Classical Latin form.
Consonant development
The most significant consonant changes affecting Vulgar Latin were palatalizationPalatalization
In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
(which affected all areas except Sardinia
Sardinia
Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...
); lenition
Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
(which affected the areas north and west of the La Spezia-Rimini line
La Spezia-Rimini Line
The La Spezia–Rimini Line , in the linguistics of the Romance languages, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it...
); and loss of final consonants. The loss of final consonants was already underway by the 1st century AD in some areas. A graffito
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
at Pompeii
Pompeii
The city of Pompeii is a partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Along with Herculaneum, Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning...
reads quisque ama valia, which in Classical Latin would read quisquis amat valeat ("may whoever loves be strong/do well"). (The change from valeat to valia is also an early indicator of the development of /j/ (yod
Yod
A yod is a rare astrological aspect involving any celestial body of astrological importance. In astrology a yod is said to form whenever one planet forms quincunxes to another two planets that are separated by only a sextile . If each point of the yod were traced across an astrological chart it...
), which played such an important part in the development of palatalization
Palatalization
In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
.) On the other hand, this loss of final /t/ was not general. Old Spanish and Old French
Old French
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...
preserved a reflex of final /t/ up through 1100 AD or so, and modern French still maintains final /t/ in some liaison environments.
Vowel development
One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its vowelVowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
system. Classical Latin had five short vowels, ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ, and five long vowels
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, each of which was an individual phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
, and four diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s, ae, oe, au and eu (five according to some authors, including ui). There were also long and short versions of y, representing the rounded vowel
Close front rounded vowel
The close front rounded vowel, or high front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is y...
[y(ː)] in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced [i(ː)] even before Romance vowel changes started.
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. So, for example ē was pronounced close-mid
Close-mid vowel
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 of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel...
/eː/ while ĕ was pronounced open-mid
Open-mid vowel
An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel...
/ɛ/, and ī was pronounced close
Close vowel
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 possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...
/iː/ while ĭ was pronounced near-close
Near-close vowel
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 to a close vowel, but slightly less constricted. Near-close vowels are sometimes described as lax variants of the fully close vowels...
/ɪ/. The diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced /ai/ and /oi/ in earlier Latin, had also begun their monophthong
Monophthong
A monophthong is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation....
isation to /ɛ/ and /e/, respectively. Oe was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin; in Old Latin
Old Latin
Old Latin refers to the Latin language in the period before the age of Classical Latin; that is, all Latin before 75 BC...
, oinos (one) regularly became unus.
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
Old French
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...
poire, voire (but not Modern French "vrai"). Similarly, Latin nux ("nut", acc. sing nucem) 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 was likely some regional variation in pronunciation, as the Eastern Romance languages
Eastern Romance languages
The Eastern Romance languages in their narrow conception, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin. Some classifications include the Italo-Dalmatian languages; when Italian is...
and Sardinian
Sardinian language
Sardinian is a Romance language spoken and written on most of the island of Sardinia . It is considered the most conservative of the Romance languages in terms of phonology and is noted for its Paleosardinian substratum....
evolved differently. In Sardinian, for instance, ĭ and ŭ became more close, merging with their long counterparts ī and ū; as a result, all corresponding short and long vowels simply merged with each other. In Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
, the front vowels ĕ, ĭ, ē, ī evolved like the Western languages (the majority of languages, as described above), but the back vowels ŏ, ŭ, ō, ū evolved as in Sardinian. There are also small sets of remnant dialects in southern Italy that behave like Sardinian or Romanian.
In general, 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
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
distinctions lost phonemic
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
importance, and qualitative distinctions of height became more prominent.
Romance articles
It is difficult to place the point in which the definite articleDefinite Article
Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...
, 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 pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s or adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, (illud), in the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, becoming French le and la, Catalan and Spanish el and la, and Italian il and la. The Portuguese articles o and a are ultimately from the same source. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from 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, e.g. lupul ("the wolf") and omul ("the man" – from lupum illum and *homo illum), possibly a result of its membership in the Balkan sprachbund.
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
Vetus Latina
Vetus Latina is a collective name given to the Biblical texts in Latin that were translated before St Jerome's Vulgate Bible became the standard Bible for Latin-speaking Western Christians. The phrase Vetus Latina is Latin for Old Latin, and the Vetus Latina is sometimes known as the Old Latin Bible...
Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille dæmon sodalis peccati ("The devil is a companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.
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. In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ecce (originally an interjection
Interjection
In grammar, an interjection or exclamation is a word used to express an emotion or sentiment on the part of the speaker . Filled pauses such as uh, er, um are also considered interjections...
: "behold!"), which also spawned Italian ecco. This is the origin of Old French cil (*ecce ille), cist (*ecce iste) and ici (*ecce hic); Spanish aquel and Portuguese aquele (*eccu ille); Italian questo (*eccu 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 acela (*ecce ille), and many other forms.
On the other hand, even in the Oaths of Strasbourg
Oaths of Strasbourg
The Oaths of Strasbourg were several historical documents which included mutual pledges of allegiance between Louis the German , ruler of East Francia, and his brother Charles the Bald , ruler of West Francia...
, 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 ninth century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles can be suffixed to the noun, as in other members of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages
North Germanic languages
The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages, the languages of Scandinavians, 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 numeral unus, una (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases. This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.
Loss of neuter
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
, i.e. there are different declensional paradigms associated with the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, and partly a matter of agreement
Agreement (linguistics)
In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
, i.e. nouns of a certain gender require forms of the same gender in adjectives and pronouns associated with them.
The loss of final consonants led to a remodelling of the gender system
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
.
In Classical Latin, the endings -us and -um distinguished masculine from neuter nouns in the second declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
; with both -s and -m gone, the neuters merged with the masculines, a process that is complete in Romance. By contrast, some neuter plurals such as gaudia, "joys", were re-analysed
Back-formation
In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889...
as feminine singulars. The loss of the final m was a process which seems to have begun by the time of the earliest monuments of the Latin language. The epitaph
Epitaph
An epitaph is a short text honoring a deceased person, strictly speaking that is inscribed on their tombstone or plaque, but also used figuratively. Some are specified by the dead person beforehand, others chosen by those responsible for the burial...
of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus
Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus
Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus was one of the two elected Roman consuls in 298 BC. He led the Roman army to victory against the Etruscans near Volterra...
, who died around 150 BC, reads TAVRASIA CISAVNA SAMNIO CEPIT, which in Classical Latin would be Taurāsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cēpit, "He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium". (Note that in the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, 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.) This however can be explained in a different way, that the inscription simply fails to note the nasality of the final vowels (like in the established custom of writing COS. for consul). See the Consonants section above.
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
Pompeii
The city of Pompeii is a partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Along with Herculaneum, Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning...
graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum "dead body" and hoc locum for hunc locum "this place" (-us was normally a masculine ending, and -um a neuter ending). The morphological confusion shows primarily in the adoption of the nominative ending -us (-Ø after -r) in the o-declension: in Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...
, we find balneus for balneum "bath", fatus for fatum "fate", caelus for caelum "heaven", amphitheater for amphitheatrum "amphitheatre", vinus for vinum "wine" and conversely the nominative thesaurum for thesaurus "treasure". Notably, most of these forms occur in the speech of one man: Trimalchion.
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 (masc.) > Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish muro, Catalan and French mur and CAELUM (neut.) > Italian, Spanish cielo, French ciel, Portuguese céu, Romanian "cer", 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 language (il) latte, Leonese
Leonese language
The Leonese language is the endonym term used to refer to all vernacular Romance dialects of the Astur-Leonese linguistic group in the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora; Astur-Leonese also includes the dialects...
(el) lleche 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, Leonese, Portuguese and Italian nome, Romanian nume ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative nomen, rather than the oblique stem form *nominem (which nevertheless produced Spanish nombre).
| 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.
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
Pear
The pear is any of several tree species of genus Pyrus and also the name of the pomaceous fruit of these trees. Several species of pear are valued by humans for their edible fruit, but the fruit of other species is small, hard, and astringent....
tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian (il) pero and Romanian păr(ul); in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations (le) poirier, (el) peral; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the feminine derivations (a) pereira, (la) perera. Fagus ("beech
Beech
Beech is a genus of ten species of deciduous trees in the family Fagaceae, native to temperate Europe, Asia and North America.-Habit:...
"), another feminine noun ending in -us, is preserved in some languages as a masculine, e.g. Romanian fag(ul) or Catalan (el) faig; other dialects have replaced it with its adjectival forms fageus or fagea ("made of beechwood"), whence Italian (il) faggio, Spanish (el) haya, and Portuguese (a) faia.
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.
Leonese
Leonese language
The Leonese language is the endonym term used to refer to all vernacular Romance dialects of the Astur-Leonese linguistic group in the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora; Astur-Leonese also includes the dialects...
keeps three genders with the same finish for masculine and neuter, clarified with the articles: (el) bonu, (la) bona, (lu) bonu ("good").
Loss of cases
| 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 declension
Latin declension
Latin is an inflected language, and as such has nouns, pronouns, and adjectives that must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five declensions, which are numbered and grouped by ending and...
s. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, vulgar Latin moved from being a markedly synthetic language
Synthetic language
In linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language...
to a more analytic language where word order is a necessary element of syntax. Consider what the loss of final /m/, the loss of phonemic vowel length, and the sound shift of ae from /ai/ to /ɛ/ entailed for a typical first declension noun (see table).
Wider use of prepositions
Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntacticSyntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
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 donde, "where", from Latin de + unde, or French dès, "since", from de + ex, 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 Jerome
Jerome
Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...
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 adineauri ("just recently") from ad + de + in + illa + hora.
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:
- Marcus patrī librum dat. "Marcus is giving [his] father [a/the] book."
Vulgar Latin:
- Marcus da libru a patre. "Marcus 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:
- Marcus mihi librum patris dat. "Marcus is giving me [his] father's book.
Vulgar Latin:
- Marcus mi da libru de patre. "Marcus is giving me [the] book of [his] father."
Adverbs
Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbAdverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....
s from adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s: carus, "dear", formed care, "dearly"; acriter, "fiercely", from acer; crebro, "often", from creber. All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin, where adverbs were invariably formed by a feminine ablative
Ablative case
In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ...
form modifying mente, which was originally the ablative of mens, and so meant "with a _____ mind". So velox ("quick") instead of velociter ("quickly") gave veloci 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.
Verbs
In general, the verbal system in the Romance languages evolved less from Classical Latin than did the nominal system.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 /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/.
Another major systemic change was to the future tense
Future tense
In grammar, a 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 , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. This may have been due to phonetic merger of intervocalic /b/ and /w/, which caused future tense forms such as amabit to become identical to perfect forms such as amauit, introducing unacceptable ambiguity. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb habere, *amare habeo, literally "to love I have". This was contracted into a new future suffix in Western Romance forms which can be seen in the following modern examples of "I will love":
- FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
: j'aimerai (je + aimer + ai) < aimer ["to love"] + ai ["I have"]. - PortuguesePortuguese languagePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
and GalicianGalician languageGalician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...
: amarei (amar + [h]ei) < amar ["to love"] + hei ["I have"] - SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and CatalanCatalan languageCatalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
: amaré (amar + [h]e) < amar ["to love"] + he ["I have"]. - ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
: amerò (amar + [h]o) < amare ["to love"] + ho ["I have"].
An innovative conditional
Conditional mood
In linguistics, the conditional mood is the inflectional form of the verb used in the independent clause of a conditional sentence to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event, that is contingent on another set of circumstances...
(distinct from the subjunctive
Subjunctive mood
In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in subordinate clauses to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred....
) 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
Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
object pronouns to be incorporated as infix
Infix
An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem . It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the end of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix.-Indonesian:...
es between the root of the verb and its ending: "I will love" (eu) amarei, but "I will love you" amar-te-ei, from amar + te ["you"] + (eu) hei = amar + te + [h]ei = amar-te-ei.
Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, which has now survived 6000 years of known evolution, the synthetic passive voice
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
was utterly lost in Romance, being replaced with periphrastic verb forms—composed of the verb "to be" plus a passive participle—or impersonal reflexive
Reflexive verb
In grammar, a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient are the same. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself...
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 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
The copula (that is, the verb signifying "to be") of Classical Latin was esse. This evolved to *essere in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix -re to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian essere and French être through Proto-Gallo-Romance *essre and Old French estre as well as Spanish and Portuguese ser (Romanian a fi derives from fieri which means "to become"). However, in Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb stare, which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand" to denote a more temporary meaning. That is, *essere signified the essence, while stare signified the state. Stare evolved to Spanish and Portuguese estar and Old French ester (both through *estare), while Italian and Romanian 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 at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin should have been *(h)omo stat in foro, "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 widespread, 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".)
See also
- Oaths of StrasbourgOaths of StrasbourgThe Oaths of Strasbourg were several historical documents which included mutual pledges of allegiance between Louis the German , ruler of East Francia, and his brother Charles the Bald , ruler of West Francia...
- Romance copulaRomance copulaThe copula or copulae in all Romance languages largely derive from the Latin verbs "to be" ; "to stand" ; and "to sit"...
- Romance languagesRomance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
- Veronese RiddleVeronese RiddleThe Veronese Riddle is a riddle, apparently half-Italian, half-Latin, written on the margin of a parchment, on the Verona Orational, probably in the 8th or early 9th century, by a Catholic monk from Verona, a city in the Veneto region, in Northern Italy. It was a very popular riddle in the Middle...
History of specific Romance languages
- Catalan phonology
- History of FrenchHistory of FrenchFrench is a Romance language that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France....
- History of Italian
- History of Portuguese
- History of the Spanish languageHistory of the Spanish languageThe language known today as Spanish is derived from a dialect of spoken Latin that developed in the north-central part of the Iberian Peninsula in what is now northern Spain. Over the past 1,000 years, the language expanded south to the Mediterranean Sea, and was later transferred to the Spanish...
- Latin to Romanian sound changes
- Old FrenchOld FrenchOld French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...