Romance linguistics


Romance linguistics is the study of linguistics of Romance languages.

Basic features

Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages:

Loss of the case system

The most significant changes between Classical Latin and Proto-Romance relate to the reduction or loss of the Latin case system, and the corresponding syntactic changes that were triggered.
The case system was drastically reduced from the six-case system of Classical Latin. Although five cases can be reconstructed for Vulgar Latin nouns, for Proto-Romance this had been reduced to three: nominative, accusative-ablative, and genitive-dative. This system is preserved best in pronouns. In the West, the genitive-dative disappeared with the genitive replaced by de + ablative and the dative by ad + accusative. This left only two cases: nominative and oblique. Some of the older Gallo-Romance languages preserved this two-case system well into the literary period, and in Ibero-Romance languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in Italian, a couple of examples are found which preserve the old nominative. In the East, a genitive-dative made entirely of dative forms was retained but the nominative and accusative-ablative eventually merged.
Concomitant with the loss of cases, freedom of word order was greatly reduced. Classical Latin had a generally verb-final but overall quite free word order, with a significant amount of word scrambling and mixing of left-branching and right-branching constructions. The Romance languages eliminated word scrambling and nearly all left-branching constructions, with most languages developing a rigid SVO, right-branching syntax. Some freedom, however, is allowed in the placement of adjectives relative to their head noun. In addition, some languages have an "accusative preposition" along with clitic doubling, which allows for some freedom in ordering the arguments of a verb.
The Romance languages developed grammatical articles where Latin had none. Articles are often introduced around the time a robust case system falls apart in order to disambiguate the remaining case markers and to serve as parsing clues that signal the presence of a noun.
This was the pattern followed by the Romance languages: In the Romance languages that still preserved a functioning nominal case system, only the combination of article and case ending serves to uniquely identify number and case. All Romance languages have a definite article and an indefinite article. Many also have a partitive article.
Latin had a large number of syntactic constructions expressed through infinitives, participles, and similar nominal constructs. Examples are the ablative absolute, the accusative-plus-infinitive construction used for reported speech, gerundive constructions, and the common use of reduced relative clauses expressed through participles. All of these are replaced in the Romance languages by subordinate clauses expressed with finite verbs, making the Romance languages much more "verbal" and less "nominal" than Latin. Under the influence of the Balkan sprachbund, Romanian has progressed the furthest, largely eliminating the infinitive.

Other changes

Vowels

Every language has a different set of vowels from every other. Common characteristics are as follows:
Most Romance languages have similar sets of consonants. The following is a combined table of the consonants of the five major Romance languages.
Key:
Notable changes:
Most instances of most of the sounds below that occur in all of the languages are cognate. However:
Word stress was rigorously predictable in classical Latin except in a very few exceptional cases, either on the penultimate syllable or antepenultimate syllable, according to the syllable weight of the penultimate syllable. Stress in the Romance Languages mostly remains on the same syllable as in Latin, but various sound changes have made it no longer so predictable. Minimal pairs distinguished only by stress exist in some languages, e.g. Italian Papa "Pope" vs. papà "daddy", or Spanish límite " limit", present subjunctive limite " limit" and preterite limité " limited".
Erosion of unstressed syllables following the stress has caused most Spanish and Portuguese words to have either penultimate or ultimate stress: e.g. Latin trēdecim "thirteen" > Spanish trece, Portuguese treze; Latin amāre "to love" > Spanish/Portuguese amar. Most words with antepenultimate stress are learned borrowings from Latin, e.g. Spanish/Portuguese fábrica "factory". This process has gone even farther in French, with deletion of all post-stressed vowels, leading to consistent, predictable stress on the last syllable: e.g. Latin Stephanum "Stephen" > Old French Estievne > French Étienne ; Latin juvenis "young" > Old French juevne > French jeune. This applies even to borrowings: e.g. Latin fabrica > French borrowing fabrique .
Other than French, the position of the stressed syllable generally falls on one of the last three syllables. Exceptions may be caused by clitics or certain verb endings, e.g. Italian telefonano "they telephone"; Spanish entregándomelo "delivering it to me"; Italian mettiamocene "let's put some of it in there"; Portuguese dávamos-vo-lo "we were giving it to you". Stress on verbs is almost completely predictable in Spanish and Portuguese, but less so in Italian.

Nominal morphology

Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns can be marked for gender, number and case. Adjectives and pronouns must agree in all features with the noun they are bound to.

Number

The Romance languages inherited from Latin two grammatical numbers, singular and plural; the only trace of a dual number comes from Latin ambō > Spanish and Portuguese ambos, Old Romanian îmbi > Romanian ambii, Old French ambe, Italian ambedue, entrambi.

Gender

Most Romance languages have two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. The gender of animate nouns is generally natural, but for nonanimate nouns it is arbitrary.
Although Latin had a third gender, there is little trace of this in most languages. The biggest exception is Romanian, where there is a productive class of "neuter" nouns, which include the descendants of many Latin neuter nouns and which behave like masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural, both in the endings used and in the agreement of adjectives and pronouns. This behavior happens also in Italian with a restricted number of words. Another noteworthy exception is Asturian, which uses a neuter gender to refer to abstract, collective and uncountable entities. It appears in adjectives, possesives, one neuter article, one neuter pronoum and some nouns. Some of these neuter traces also feature in Spanish, such as ello.
Such nouns arose because of the identity of the Latin neuter singular -um with the masculine singular, and the identity of the Latin neuter plural -a with the feminine singular. A similar class exists in Italian, although it is no longer productive. A similar phenomenon may be observed in Albanian, and the category remains highly productive with a number of new words loaned or coined in the neuter hotel one hotel vs. hotele three hotels ).
Spanish also has vestiges of the neuter in the demonstrative adjectives: esto, eso, aquello, the pronoun ello and the article lo. Portuguese also has neuter demonstrative adjectives: "isto", "isso", "aquilo".
Remnants of the neuter, interpretable now as "a sub-class of the non-feminine gender", are vigorous in Italy in an area running roughly from Ancona to Matera and just north of Rome to Naples. Oppositions with masculine typically have been recategorized, so that neuter signifies the referent in general, while masculine indicates a more specific instance, with the distinction marked by the definite article. In Southeast Umbrian, for example, neuter lo pane is 'the bread', while masculine lu pane refers to an individual piece or loaf of bread. Similarly, neuter lo vinu is wine in general, while masculine lu vinu is a specific sort of wine, with the consequence that mass lo vinu has no plural counterpart, but lu vinu can take a sortal plural form li vini'', referring to different types of wine. Phonological forms of articles vary by locale.

Case

Latin had an extensive case system, where all nouns were declined in six cases and two numbers. Many adjectives were additionally declined in three genders, leading to a possible 6 × 2 × 3 = 36 endings per adjective. In practice, some category combinations had identical endings to other combinations, but a basic adjective like bonus "good" still had 14 distinct endings.
In all Romance languages, this system was drastically reduced. In most modern Romance languages, in fact, case is no longer marked at all on nouns, adjectives and determiners, and most forms are derived from the Latin accusative case. Much like English, however, case has survived somewhat better on pronouns.
Most pronouns have distinct nominative, accusative, genitive and possessive forms. Many also have a separate dative form, a disjunctive form used after prepositions, and a special form used with the preposition con "with".
"boy""girl""man""woman"
Singularchicochicahombremujer
Pluralchicoschicashombresmujeres

The system of inflectional classes is also drastically reduced. The basic system is most clearly indicated in Spanish, where there are only three classes, corresponding to the first, second and third declensions in Latin: plural in -as, plural in -os, plural in -es. The singular endings exactly track the plural, except the singular -e is dropped after certain consonants.
The same system underlines many other modern Romance languages, such as Portuguese, French and Catalan. In these languages, however, further sound changes have resulted in various irregularities. In Portuguese, for example, loss of /l/ and /n/ between vowels produces various irregular plurals "; hotel – hotéis "hotel.
In French and Catalan, loss of /o/ and /e/ in most unstressed final syllables has caused the -os and -es classes to merge. In French, merger of remaining /e/ with final /a/ into, and its subsequent loss, has completely obscured the original Romance system, and loss of final /s/ has caused most nouns to have identical pronunciation in singular and plural, although they are still marked differently in spelling.
Noun inflection has survived in Romanian somewhat better than elsewhere. Determiners are still marked for two cases in both singular and plural, and feminine singular nouns have separate endings for the two cases. In addition, there is a separate vocative case, enriched with native development and Slavic borrowings and the combination of noun with a following clitic definite article produces a separate set of "definite" inflections for nouns.
The inflectional classes of Latin have also survived more in Romanian than elsewhere, e.g. om – oameni "man – men" ; corp – corpuri "body – bodies". " vs. lună – luni "moon"; frate – fraţi "brother" vs. carte – cărţi "book" vs. vale – văi "valley
In Italian, the situation is somewhere in between Spanish and Romanian. There are no case endings and relatively few classes, as in Spanish, but noun endings are generally formed with vowels instead of /s/, as in Romanian: amico – amici "friend ", amica – amiche "friend "; cane – cani "dog". The masculine plural amici is thought to reflect the Latin nominative plural -ī rather than accusative plural -ōs ; however, the other plurals are thought to stem from special developments of Latin -ās and -ēs.
CaseLatinSpanishOld FrenchOld SursilvanRomanian
Masculine singularNominativebonusbuenobuensbunsbun
Masculine singularVocativebonebuenobuensbunsbun
Masculine singularAccusativebonumbuenobuenbiVnbun
Masculine singularGenitivebonībuenobuenbiVnbun
Masculine singularDativebonōbuenobuenbiVnbun
Masculine singularAblativebonōbuenobuenbiVnbun
Masculine pluralNominativebonībuenosbuenbiVnibuni
Masculine pluralVocativebonībuenosbuenbiVnibuni
Masculine pluralAccusativebonōsbuenosbuensbunsbuni
Masculine pluralGenitivebonōrumbuenosbuensbunsbuni
Masculine pluralDativebonīsbuenosbuensbunsbuni
Masculine pluralAblativebonīsbuenosbuensbunsbuni
Feminine singularNominativebonabuenabuenebunabună
Feminine singularVocativebonabuenabuenebunabună
Feminine singularAccusativebonambuenabuenebunabună
Feminine singularGenitivebonaebuenabuenebunabune
Feminine singularDativebonaebuenabuenebunabune
Feminine singularAblativebonābuenabuenebunabune
Feminine pluralNominativebonaebuenasbuenesbunasbune
Feminine pluralVocativebonaebuenasbuenesbunasbune
Feminine pluralAccusativebonāsbuenasbuenesbunasbune
Feminine pluralGenitivebonārumbuenasbuenesbunasbune
Feminine pluralDativebonīsbuenasbuenesbunasbune
Feminine pluralAblativebonīsbuenasbuenesbunasbune

A different type of noun inflection survived into the medieval period in a number of western Romance languages. This inflection distinguished nominative from oblique, grouping the accusative case with the oblique, rather than with the nominative as in Romanian.
The oblique case in these languages generally inherits from the Latin accusative; as a result, masculine nouns have distinct endings in the two cases while most feminine nouns do not.
A number of different inflectional classes are still represented at this stage. For example, the difference in the nominative case between masculine li voisins "the neighbor" and li pere "the father", and feminine la riens "the thing" vs. la fame "the woman", faithfully reflects the corresponding Latin inflectional differences.
A number of synchronically quite irregular differences between nominative and oblique reflect direct inheritances of Latin third-declension nouns with two different stems, most with of which had a stress shift between nominative and the other forms: li ber – le baron "baron" ; la suer – la seror "sister" ; li prestre – le prevoire "priest" ; li sire – le seigneur "lord" ; li enfes – l'enfant "child".
A few of these multi-stem nouns derive from Latin forms without stress shift, e.g. li om – le ome "man". All of these multi-stem nouns refer to people; other nouns with stress shift in Latin have not survived. Some of the same nouns with multiple stems in Old French or Old Occitan have come down in Italian in the nominative rather than the accusative, suggesting that a similar system existed in pre-literary Italian.
The modern situation in Sursilvan is unique in that the original nominative/oblique distinction has been reinterpreted as a predicative/attributive distinction:
As described above, case marking on pronouns is much more extensive than for nouns. Determiners are also marked for case in Romanian.
Most Romance languages have the following sets of pronouns and determiners:
Unlike in English, a separate neuter personal pronoun generally does not exist, but the third-person singular and plural both distinguish masculine from feminine. Also, as described above, case is marked on pronouns even though it is not usually on nouns, similar to English. As in English, there are forms for nominative case, oblique case, and genitive case ; in addition, third-person pronouns distinguish accusative and dative. There is also an additional set of possessive determiners, distinct from the genitive case of the personal pronoun; this corresponds to the English difference between "my, your" and "mine, yours".

Development from Latin

The Romance languages do not retain the Latin third-person personal pronouns, but have innovated a separate set of third-person pronouns by borrowing the demonstrative ille, and creating a separate reinforced demonstrative by attaching a variant of ecce "behold!" to the pronoun.
Similarly, in place of the genitive of the Latin pronouns, most Romance languages adopted the reflexive possessive, which then serves indifferently as both reflexive and non-reflexive possessive. Note that the reflexive, and hence the third-person possessive, is unmarked for the gender of the person being referred to. Hence, although gendered possessive forms do exist—e.g. Portuguese seu vs. sua —these refer to the gender of the object possessed, not the possessor.
The gender of the possessor needs to be made clear by a collocation such as French la voiture à lui/elle, Portuguese o carro dele/dela, literally "the car of him/her".
The same demonstrative ille is the source of the definite article in most Romance languages, which explains the similarity in form between personal pronoun and definite article. When the two are different, it is usually because of differing degrees of phonological reduction. Generally, the personal pronoun is unreduced, while the article has undergone various degrees of reduction, beginning with loss of one of the two original syllables, e.g. Spanish ella "she" < illa vs. la "the " < -la < illa, or masculine el, developed from il- < illud.

Clitic pronouns

Object pronouns in Latin were normal words, but in the Romance languages they have become clitic forms, which must stand adjacent to a verb and merge phonologically with it. Originally, object pronouns could come either before or after the verb; sound change would often produce different forms in these two cases, with numerous additional complications and contracted forms when multiple clitic pronouns cooccurred.
Catalan still largely maintains this system with a highly complex clitic pronoun system. Most languages, however, have simplified this system by undoing some of the clitic mergers and requiring clitics to stand in a particular position relative to the verb.
When a pronoun cannot serve as a clitic, a separate disjunctive form is used. These result from dative object pronouns pronounced with stress, or from subject pronouns.
Most Romance languages are null subject languages. The subject pronouns are used only for emphasis and take the stress, and as a result are not clitics. In French, however, verbal agreement marking has degraded to the point that subject pronouns have become mandatory, and have turned into clitics. These forms cannot be stressed, so for emphasis the disjunctive pronouns must be used in combination with the clitic subject forms. Friulian and the Gallo-Italian languages have actually gone further than this and merged the subject pronouns onto the verb as a new type of verb agreement marking, which must be present even when there is a subject noun phrase.

Familiar–formal distinction

In medieval times, most Romance languages developed a distinction between familiar and polite second-person pronouns, similar to the former English distinction between familiar "thou" and polite "you". This distinction was determined by the relationship between the speakers. As in English, this generally developed by appropriating the plural second-person pronoun to serve in addition as a polite singular. French is still at this stage, with familiar singular tu vs. formal or plural vous. In cases like this, the pronoun requires plural agreement in all cases whenever a single affix marks both person and number, but singular agreement elsewhere where appropriate.
Many languages, however, innovated further in developing an even more polite pronoun, generally composed of some noun phrases and taking third-person singular agreement. A plural equivalent was created at the same time or soon after, taking third-person plural agreement. Spanish innovated similarly, with usted from earlier vuestra merced.
In Portuguese and Spanish, the "extra-polite" forms in time came to be the normal polite forms, and the former polite second-person vos was displaced to a familiar form, either becoming a familiar plural or a familiar singular. In the latter case, it either competes with the original familiar singular tú, displaces it entirely, or is itself displaced. In the Spanish of the Americas, the gap created by the loss of familiar plural vos was filled by originally polite ustedes, with the result that there is no familiar/polite distinction in the plural, just as in the original tú/vos system.
A similar path was followed by Italian and Romanian. Romanian uses dumneavoastră "your lordship", while Italian the former polite phrase sua eccellenza "your excellency" has simply been supplanted by the corresponding pronoun Ella or Lei. As in European Spanish, the original second-person plural voi serves as familiar plural.
Portuguese innovated again in developing a new extra-polite pronoun o senhor "the sir", which in turn downgraded você. Hence, modern European Portuguese has a three-way distinction between "familiar" tu, "equalizing" você and "polite" o senhor.
Brazilian Portuguese, however, has diverged from this system, and most dialects simply use você as a general-purpose second-person pronoun, combined with te as the clitic object pronoun. The form o senhor is sometimes used in speech, but only in situations where an English speaker would say "sir" or "ma'am". The result is that second-person verb forms have disappeared, and the whole pronoun system has been radically realigned. However that is the case only in the spoken language of central and northern Brazil, with the northeastern and southern areas of the country still largely preserving the second-person verb form and the "tu" and "você" distinction.
Catalan still retains the plural form vós for formal distinction but it is falling out of use, and nowadays is usually seen in extremely formal circumstances or in writing. Instead, or is normally used orally, which functions just like Spanish and Portuguese usted/você.

Articles

Latin had no articles as such. The closest definite article was the non-specific demonstrative is, ea, id meaning approximately "this/that/the". The closest indefinite articles were the indefinite determiners aliquī, aliqua, aliquod "some " and certus "a certain".
Romance languages have both indefinite and definite articles, but none of the above words form the basis for either of these. Usually the definite article is derived from the Latin demonstrative ille, but some languages have forms from ipse. The indefinite article everywhere is derived from the number ūnus.
Some languages, e.g. French and Italian, have a partitive article that approximately translates as "some". This is used either with mass nouns or with plural nouns—both cases where the indefinite article cannot occur. A partitive article is used whenever a bare noun refers to specific quantity of the noun, but not when a bare noun refers to a class in general. For example, the partitive would be used in both of the following sentences:
But neither of these:
The sentence "Men arrived today", however, means "some specific men arrived today" rather than "men, as a general class, arrived today". On the other hand, "I hate men" does mean "I hate men, as a general class" rather than "I hate some specific men".
As in many other cases, French has developed the farthest from Latin in its use of articles. In French, nearly all nouns, singular and plural, must be accompanied by an article or demonstrative pronoun.
Due to pervasive sound changes in French, most nouns are pronounced identically in the singular and plural, and there is often heavy homophony between nouns and identically pronounced words of other classes. For example, all of the following are pronounced : sain "healthy"; saint "saint, holy"; sein "breast"; ceins " tie around, gird"; ceint " ties around, girds"; ceint "tied around, girded"; and the equivalent noun and adjective plural forms sains, saints, seins, ceints. The article helps identify the noun forms saint or sein, and distinguish singular from plural; likewise, the mandatory subject of verbs helps identify the verb ceint. In more conservative Romance languages, neither articles nor subject pronouns are necessary, since all of the above words are pronounced differently. In Italian, for example, the equivalents are sano, santo, seno, cingi, cinge, cinto, sani, santi, seni, cinti, where all vowels and consonants are pronounced as written, and /s/ and /t͡ʃ/ are clearly distinct from each other.
Latin, at least originally, had a three-way distinction among demonstrative pronouns distinguished by distal value: hic 'this', iste 'that ', ille 'that ', similar to the distinction that used to exist in English as "this" vs. "that" vs. "yon". In urban Latin of Rome, iste came to have a specifically derogatory meaning, but this innovation apparently did not reach the provinces and is not reflected in the modern Romance languages. A number of these languages still have such a three-way distinction, although hic has been lost and the other pronouns have shifted somewhat in meaning. For example, Spanish has este "this" vs. ese "that " vs. aquel "that ". The Spanish pronouns derive, respectively, from Latin iste ipse accu-ille, where accu- is an emphatic prefix derived from eccum "behold ", possibly with influence from atque "and".
Reinforced demonstratives such as accu-ille arose as ille came to be used as an article as well as a demonstrative. Such forms were often created even when not strictly needed to distinguish otherwise ambiguous forms. Italian, for example, has both questo "this" and quello "that", in addition to dialectal codesto "that ". French generally prefers forms derived from bare ecce "behold", as in the pronoun ce "this one/that one" and the determiner ce/cet "this/that".
Reinforced forms are likewise common in locative adverbs, based on related Latin forms such as hic "this" vs. hīc "here", hāc "this way", and ille "that" vs. illīc "there", illāc "that way". Here again French prefers bare ecce while Spanish and Italian prefer eccum. In western languages such as Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, doublets and triplets arose such as Portuguese aqui, acá, cá " here". From these, a prefix a- was extracted, from which forms like aí "there " and ali "there " were created; compare Catalan neuter pronouns açò "this", això "that ", allò "that ".
Subsequent changes often reduced the number of demonstrative distinctions. Standard Italian, for example, has only a two-way distinction "this" vs. "that", as in English, with second-person and third-person demonstratives combined. In Catalan, however, a former three-way distinction aquest, aqueix, aquell has been reduced differently, with first-person and second-person demonstratives combined. Hence aquest means either "this" or "that "; on the phone, aquest is used to refer both to speaker and addressee.
Old French had a similar distinction to Italian, both of which could function as either adjectives or pronouns. Modern French, however, has no distinction between "this" and "that": ce/cet, cette < cest, ceste is only an adjective, and celui, celle < cel lui, celle is only a pronoun, and both forms indifferently mean either "this" or "that".

Verbal morphology

Verbs have many conjugations, including in most languages:
Several tenses and aspects, especially of the indicative mood, have been preserved with little change in most languages, as shown in the following table for the Latin verb dīcere, and its descendants.
The main tense and mood distinctions that were made in classical Latin are generally still present in the modern Romance languages, though many are now expressed through compound rather than simple verbs. The passive voice, which was mostly synthetic in classical Latin, has been completely replaced with compound forms.
For a more detailed illustration of how the verbs have changed with respect to classical Latin, see Romance verbs.
Note that in Catalan, the synthetic preterite is predominantly a literary tense, except in Valencian; but an analytic preterite persists in speech, with the same meaning. In Portuguese, a morphological present perfect does exist but has a different meaning.
The following are common features of the Romance languages that are different from Classical Latin:

Loanwords

Romance languages have borrowed heavily, though mostly from other Romance languages. However, some, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and French, have borrowed heavily from other language groups. Vulgar Latin borrowed first from indigenous languages of the Roman empire, and during the Germanic folk movements, from Germanic languages, especially Gothic; for Eastern Romance languages, during Bulgarian Empires, from Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian. Notable examples are *blancus "white", replacing native albus ; *guerra "war", replacing native bellum; and the words for the cardinal directions, where cognates of English "north", "south", "east" and "west" replaced the native words septentriō, merīdiēs, oriens, and occidens. Some Celtic words were incorporated into the core vocabulary, partly for words with no Latin equivalent, but in some cases replacing Latin vocabulary. Many Greek loans also entered the lexicon, e.g. spatha "sword" ; cara "face" ; colpe "blow" ; cata "each" ; common suffixes *-ijāre/-izāre, -ista.

Lexical innovation

Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Nouns, and sometimes adjectives, were often replaced by diminutives, e.g. auris "ear" > auricula > oricla ; avis "bird" > avicellus > aucellu ; caput "head" > capitium ; vetus "old" > vetulus > veclus. Sometimes augmentative constructions were used instead: piscis "fish" > Old French peis > peisson > French poisson. Verbs were often replaced by frequentative constructions: canere "to sing" > cantāre; iacere "to throw" > iactāre > *iectāre ; iuvāre > adiūtāre ; vēnārī "hunt" > replaced by *captiāre "to hunt", frequentative of capere "to seize".
Many Classical Latin words became archaic or poetic and were replaced by more colloquial terms: equus "horse" > caballus ; domus "house" > casa ; ignis "fire" > focus ; strāta "street" > rūga or callis . In some cases, terms from common occupations became generalized: invenīre "to find" replaced by afflāre ; advenīre "to arrive" gave way to plicāre, elsewhere arripāre . The same thing sometimes happened to religious terms, due to the pervasive influence of Christianity: loquī "to speak" succumbed to parabolāre or fabulārī ~ fābellāre, based on Jesus' way of speaking in parables.
Many prepositions were used as verbal particles to make new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian estrarre, Aromanian astragu, astradziri "to extract" from Latin ex- "out of" and trahere "to pull", or to augment already existing words, e.g. French coudre, Italian cucire, Portuguese coser "to sew", from cōnsuere "to sew up", from suere "to sew", with total loss of the bare stem. Many prepositions and commonly became compounded, e.g. de ex > French dès "as of", ab ante > Italian avanti "forward". Some words derived from phrases, e.g. Portuguese agora, Spanish ahora "now" < hāc hōrā "at this hour"; French avec "with" < Old French avuec < apud hoc "with that"; Spanish tamaño, Portuguese tamanho "size" < tam magnum "so big"; Italian codesto "this, that" < Old Italian cotevesto < eccum tibi istum approx. "here's that thing of yours"; Portuguese você "you" < vosmecê < vossemecê < Galician-Portuguese vossa mercee "your mercy".
A number of common Latin words that have disappeared in many or most Romance languages have survived either in the periphery or in remote corners, or as secondary terms, sometimes differing in meaning. For example, Latin caseum "cheese" in the periphery, but in the central areas has been replaced by formāticum, originally "moulded " edere "to eat ", which survives as Spanish/Portuguese comer but elsewhere is replaced by mandūcāre, originally "to chew". In some cases, one language happens to preserve a word displaced elsewhere, e.g. Italian ogni "each, every" < omnes, displaced elsewhere by tōtum, originally "whole" or by a reflex of Greek κατά ; Friulian vaî "to cry" < flere "to weep"; Serbo-Croatian otijemna "sail pole" < Dalmatian < antenna "yardarm". Sardinian in particular preserves many words entirely lost elsewhere, e.g. eja "yes" < etiam "also/yes/indeed", emmo "yes" < immo "rather/yes/no", mannu "big" < magnus, nàrrere "to say" < narrāre "to tell", and domo "house" < domō "at home". Sardinian preserves some words that were already archaic in Classical Latin, e.g. àchina "grape" < acinam, while Sicily and Calabria typically have forms with initial /r/: ràcina''.

Latinisms

During the Middle Ages, scores of words were borrowed directly from Classical Latin, either in their original form or in a somewhat nativized form. These resulted in many doublets—pairs of inherited and learned words—such as those in the table below:
LatinRomanceInheritedLatinism
fragilis "fragile"Frenchfrêle "frail"fragile "fragile"
fabrica "craft, manufacture"Frenchforge "forge"fabrique "factory"
fabricaSpanishfragua "forge"fábrica "factory"
fabricaRomanianfăură "blacksmith "fabrică "factory"
lēgālis "legal"Frenchloyal "loyal"légal "legal"
lēgālisSpanishleal "loyal"legal "legal"
advōcātus "advocate "Frenchavoué "solicitor "avocat "barrister "
polīre "to polish"Portuguesepuir "to wear thin"polir "to polish"
locālis "place"Portugueselugar "place"local "place"

Sometimes triplets arise: Latin articulus "joint" > Portuguese artículo "joint, knuckle", artigo "article", artelho "ankle". In many cases, the learned word simply displaced the original popular word: e.g. Spanish crudo "crude, raw" ; French légume "vegetable" ; Portuguese flor "flower". The learned loan always sounds more like the original than the inherited word does, because regular sound change has been bypassed; likewise, the learned word usually has a meaning closer to that of the original. In French, the stress of the modern form of the learned loan may be on the "wrong" syllable vis-à-vis Latin, whereas the stress of the inherited word always corresponds to the Latin stress: e.g. Latin :wikt:vipera#Latin|vipera vs. French :wikt:vipère#French|vipère, learned loan, and guivre/:wikt:vouivre#French|vouivre, inherited.
Borrowing from Classical Latin has produced a large number of suffix doublets. Examples from Spanish : -ción vs. -zon; -cia vs. -za; -ificar vs. -iguar; -izar vs. -ear; -mento vs. -miento; -tud vs. -dumbre ; -ículo vs. -ejo; etc. Similar examples can be found in all the other Romance languages.
This borrowing also introduced large numbers of classical prefixes in their original form and reinforced many others. Many Greek prefixes and suffixes also found their way into the lexicon: tele-, poli-/poly-, meta-, pseudo-, -scope/scopo, -logie/logia/logía, etc.