Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin or Sermo Vulgaris, also Colloquial Latin, or Common Romance, was a range of non-standard sociolects of Latin spoken in the Mediterranean region during and after the classical period of the Roman Empire. It is distinct from Classical Latin, the standard and literary version of the language. Compared to Classical Latin, written documentation of Vulgar Latin appears less standardized. Works written in Latin during classical times and the earlier Middle Ages used prescribed Classical Latin rather than Vulgar Latin, with very few exceptions, thus Vulgar Latin had no official orthography of its own.
By its nature, Vulgar Latin varied greatly by region and by time period, though several major divisions can be seen. Vulgar Latin dialects began to significantly diverge from Classical Latin by the third century during the classical period of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, throughout the sixth century, the most widely spoken dialects were still similar to and mostly mutually intelligible with Classical Latin. In terms of regional differences for the whole Latin period, "we can only glimpse a tiny amount of divergence with the actual written data. In texts of all kinds, literary, technical, and all others, the written Latin of the first five or six centuries A.D. looks as if it were territorially homogeneous, even in its 'vulgar' register. It is only in the later texts, of the seventh and eighth centuries, that we are able to see in the texts geographical differences that seem to be the precursors of similar differences in the subsequent Romance languages."
In the Eastern Roman Empire, Latin gradually faded as the Court language over the course of the 6th century ; it was used in Justinian's, but during the reign of Heraclius in the early 7th century, Greek was made the official language. The Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkans north of Greece became heavily influenced by Greek and Slavic and also became radically different from Classical Latin and from the proto-Romance of Western Europe.
Thus the Latin of classical antiquity changed from being a "living natural mother tongue" to being a language foreign to all, which could not be used or understood even by Romance-speakers except as a result of deliberate and systematic study. If a date is wanted "we could say Latin 'died' in the first part of the eighth century", and after a long period 650–800 A.D. of rapidly accelerating changes. Even after the end of Classical Latin, people had no other names for the languages they spoke than Latin, lingua romana, or lingua romana rustica for 200–300 years. The Romance languages, such as Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish all evolved from Vulgar Latin and not from Classical Latin, but linguists prefer to distinguish the attested Vulgar Latin from the reconstructed model of Proto-Romance.
Origin of the term
The term "common speech", which later became "Vulgar Latin", was used by inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Subsequently, it became a technical term from Latin and Romance-language philology referring to the unwritten varieties of a Latinised language spoken mainly by Italo-Celtic 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 may also have spoken Vulgar Latin in certain contexts depending on their socioeconomic background. The term was first used improperly in that sense by the pioneers of Romance-language philology: François Juste Marie Raynouard and Friedrich Christian Diez.
In the course of his studies on the lyrics of songs written by the troubadours 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 signal work on the topic, "Grammar of the Romance Languages," after enumerating six Romance languages that he compared: Italian and Wallachian ; Spanish and Portuguese ; and Provençal and French, asserts that they had their origin in Latin – but "not from classical Latin," rather "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 was a prolific writer. His works have survived in large quantity, and serve as a standard of Latin. He and his contemporaries recognized the lingua Latina; but they also knew varieties of "speech" under the name '. Latin could be sermo Latinus, but there was also 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 in daily speaking and was perceived as lower-class.
These vocabulary items manifest no opposition to the written language. There was an opposition to higher-class, or family Latin 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 ' or '.
If one spoke in the lingua or sermo Latinus one merely spoke Latin, but if one spoke ' or ' one spoke good Latin, and formal Latin had ', the quality of good Latin, about it. After the fall of the empire and the transformation of spoken Latin into the early Romance languages, the only representative of the Latin language was written Latin, which became known as classicus, "classical" Latin. The original opposition was between formal or implied good Latin and informal or Vulgar Latin. The spoken/written dichotomy is entirely philological.
History
The original written Latin language was adapted from the actual spoken language of the Latins, with some minor modifications, long before the rise of the Roman Empire. As with many languages, over time the spoken vulgar language diverged from the written language, with the written language remaining somewhat static. During the classical period spoken Latin still remained largely common across the Empire, some minor dialectal differences notwithstanding.The collapse of the Western Roman Empire caused rapid changes. The former western provinces became increasingly isolated from the Eastern Roman Empire, leading to a rapid divergence between the Latin spoken on either side of the Adriatic north of a line that ran from northern Albania mid-way through Bulgaria but stopped short of the Black Sea coast which was Greek-speaking. In the West an even more complex transformation was occurring. A blending of cultures was occurring between the former Roman citizens who were fluent in the "proper" Latin speech, and many of the Gothic rulers who, though largely Latinised, tended to speak Latin poorly, speaking what could be considered a pidgin of Latin and their Germanic mother tongue, though this changed over time. Notable among those who spoke Latin well is Theodoric the Great, imperial regent of Italy who is reputed to have been illiterate based on his use of a stamp to sign documents. Since he lived as a hostage of Emperor Leo I at the Great Palace of Constantinople from 461 to 471 and was well-educated by Constantinople's best teachers, it is difficult to believe he did not know Greek and Latin.
The 'vulgar' or conversational Latin language that continued to evolve after the establishment of the successor kingdoms of the Roman State incorporated Germanic vocabulary, but with minimal influences from Germanic grammar. For a few centuries this language remained relatively common across most of Western Europe, though regional dialects were already developing. As early as 722, in a face to face meeting between Pope Gregory II, born and raised in Rome, and Saint Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon, Boniface complained that he found Pope Gregory's Latin speech difficult to understand, a clear sign of the transformation of Vulgar Latin in two regions of western Europe.
Although they had become more dissimilar over time, Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin were still viewed as the same language.
Similarly, while increasingly divergent, Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages were seen as the same tongue. At the Third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language – either in the rustica lingua romanica, or in the Germanic vernaculars – since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg, 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. József Herman states:
By the end of the first millennium, local speech had diverged to the point that distinct languages are recognizable; names were emerging for these; and some of the more geographically distant ones may have become mutually unintelligible. With the evolved Latin vernaculars viewed as different languages with local norms, specific orthographies were duly developed for some. Since all modern Romance varieties are continuations of this evolution, Vulgar Latin is not extinct but survives in variously evolved forms as today's Romance languages and dialects. In Romance-speaking Europe, recognition of the common origin of Romance varieties was replaced by labels recognizing and implicitly accentuating local differences in linguistic features. Some Romance languages evolved more than others. In terms of phonological structures, for example, a clear hierarchy from conservative to innovative is found in a comparison of modern Italian, Spanish and French.
The Oaths of Strasbourg offer indications of the state of Gallo-Romance toward the middle of the 9th century. While the language cannot be said with any degree of certainty to be Old French in the sense of the linear precursor to today's standard French, the abundance of Gallo-Romance features provides a glimpse of some particulars of Vulgar Latin's evolution on French soil.
| Gallo-Romance, AD 842 | Hypothetical Vulgar Latin of Paris, circa 7th c. AD, for comparison | English Translation |
| "Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in ayudha et in cadhuna cosa si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet. Et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karlo in damno sit." | "Por Deo amore et por chrestyano poblo et nostro comune salvamento de esto die en avante en quanto Deos sabere et podere me donat, sic salvarayo eo eccesto meon fradre Karlo, et en ayuda et en caduna causa, sic quomo omo per drecto son fradre salvare devet, en o qued illi me altrosic fatsyat, et ab Ludero nullo plagdo nonqua prendrayo, qui meon volo eccesto meon fradre Karlo en damno seat." | "For the love of God and for Christendom and our common salvation, from this day onwards, as God will give me the wisdom and power, I shall protect this brother of mine Charles, with aid or anything else, as one ought to protect one's brother, so that he may do the same for me, and I shall never knowingly make any covenant with Lothair that would harm this brother of mine Charles." |
Vocabulary
Vulgar Latin largely kept much of its classical vocabulary, albeit with some changes in spelling and case usage.Shifting usage of words
In many dialects of Vulgar Latin, new words were either created or gained greater popularity as the language developed. For example, equus , was replaced by caballu. Many words started to change or broaden their meaning. The Classical Latin word fabulare became a broad term for "to speak" in Vulgar Latin, encompassing narrare, loqui and other similar verbs.As Vulgar Latin lost its cases, the new caseless words often took their accusative forms after shifting spelling and pronunciation.
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 languages for more information.Evidence of changes
Evidence of phonological changes can be seen in the late 3rd-century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe:- a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels in medial syllables ;
- the merger of unstressed pre-vocalic and short, probably as yod ;
- the levelling of the distinction between and and and ;
- regularization of irregular forms ;
- regularization and emphasis of gendered forms ;
- levelling of the distinction between and between vowels ;
- assimilation of plosive consonant clusters ;
- the substitution of diminutives for unmarked words ;
- the loss of syllable-final nasals before or their inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorrection ;
- the loss of, both initially and within the word ;
- simplification of .
Consonant development
The most significant consonant changes affecting Vulgar Latin were palatalization ; lenition, including simplification of geminate consonants ; and loss of final consonants.Loss of final consonants
The loss of final consonants was already under way by the 1st century AD in some areas. A graffiti at Pompeii reads, which in Classical Latin would read . On the other hand, this loss of final was not general. Old Spanish and Old French preserved a reflex of final up through 1100 AD or so, and modern French still maintains final in some liaison environments.Lenition of stops
Areas north and west of the La Spezia–Rimini Line lenited intervocalic to. This phenomenon is occasionally attested during the imperial period, but it became frequent by the 7th century. For example, in Merovingian documents, > rodatico.Simplification of geminates
Reduction of bisyllabic clusters of identical consonants to a single syllable-initial consonant also typifies Romance north and west of La Spezia-Rimini. The results in Italian and Spanish provide clear illustrations: > Italian secco, Spanish seco; > Italian ceppo, Spanish cepo; > Italian mettere, Spanish meter.Loss of word-final m
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, which in Classical Latin would be . This however can be explained in a different way, that the inscription simply fails to note the nasality of the final vowelsNeutralization of /b/ and /w/
Confusions between b and v show that the Classical semivowel, and intervocalic partially merged to become a bilabial fricative . Already by the 1st century AD, a document by one Eunus writes for and for. In most of the Romance varieties, this sound would further develop into, with the notable exception of the betacist varieties of Hispano-Romance: b and v represent the same phoneme in Modern Spanish, as well as in Galician, northern Portuguese, several varieties of Occitan and the northern dialects of Catalan.Consonant cluster simplification
In general, many clusters were simplified in Vulgar Latin. For example, reduced to, reflecting the fact that syllable-final was no longer phonetically consonantal. In some inscriptions, > mesis, or > cosul. Descendants of include Portuguese mês, Spanish and Catalan mes, Old French meis, Italian mese. In some areas, the clusters, , were assimilated to the second element:,,. Thus, some inscriptions have > onibus, > inditione, > bissit. Also, three-consonant clusters usually lost the middle element. For example: > imtores.Not all areas show the same development of these clusters, however. In the East, Italian has >, as in > otto or > notte ; while Romanian has > . By contrast, in the West, the weakened to. In French and Portuguese, this came to form a diphthong with the previous vowel, while in Spanish, the brought about palatalization of, which produced .
Also, many clusters including were simplified. Several of these groups seem to have never been fully stable. This dropping has resulted in the word developing as Italian parete, Romanian părete>perete, Portuguese parede, Spanish pared, or French paroi.
The cluster was simplified to in most instances before and. In 435, one can find the hypercorrective spelling quisquentis for . Modern languages have followed this trend, for example Latin has become Italian chi and French qui ; while became quien in Spanish and quem in Portuguese. However, has survived in front of in most areas, although not in French; hence Latin yields Spanish cuatro, Portuguese quatro, and Italian quattro, but French quatre, where the qu- spelling is purely etymological.
In Spanish, most words with consonant clusters in syllable-final position are loanwords from Classical Latin, examples are: transporte, transmitir, instalar, constante, obstante, obstruir, perspectiva, istmo. A syllable-final position cannot be more than one consonant in most dialects in colloquial speech, reflecting Vulgar Latin background. Realizations like,,,,,, and are very common, and in many cases, they are considered acceptable even in formal speech.
Vowel development
In general, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin, 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.System in Classical Latin
Classical Latin had 10 different vowel phonemes, grouped into five pairs of short-long,. It also had four diphthongs,, and the rare diphthongs. Finally, there were also long and short, representing, in Greek borrowings, which, however, probably came to be pronounced, even before Romance vowel changes started.At least since the 1st century AD, short vowels differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts, the short vowels being lower. Thus the vowel inventory is usually reconstructed as,,,,.
| Spelling | 1st cent. | 2nd cent. | 3rd cent. | 4th cent. |
Monophthongization
Many diphthongs had begun their monophthongization very early. It is presumed that by Republican times, had become in unstressed syllables, a phenomenon that would spread to stressed positions around the 1st century AD. From the 2nd century AD, there are instances of spellings with instead of. was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin and became during early Imperial times. Thus, one can find penam for.However, lasted much longer. While it was monophthongized to in areas of north and central Italy, it was retained in most Vulgar Latin, and it survives in modern Romanian. There is evidence in French and Spanish that the monophthongization of au occurred independently in those languages.
Loss of distinctive length and near-close mergers
Length confusions seem to have begun in unstressed vowels, but they were soon generalized. In the 3rd century AD, Sacerdos mentions people's tendency to shorten vowels at the end of a word, while some poets show inconsistencies between long and short vowels in versification. However, the loss of contrastive length caused only the merger of and while the rest of pairs remained distinct in quality:,,,,.Also, the near-close vowels and became more open in most varieties and merged with and respectively. As a result, the reflexes of Latin pira "pear" and vēra "true" rhyme in most Romance languages: Italian and Spanish pera, vera. Similarly, Latin nucem "walnut" and vōcem "voice" become Italian noce, voce, Portuguese noz, voz.
There was likely some regional variation in pronunciation, as the Romanian languages and Sardinian evolved differently. In Sardinian, all corresponding short and long vowels simply merged with each other, creating a 5-vowel system:. In Romanian, the front vowels ĕ, ĭ, ē, ī evolved like the Western languages, but the back vowels ŏ, ŭ, ō, ū evolved as in Sardinian. A few Southern Italian languages, such as southern Corsican, northernmost Calabrian and southern Lucanian, behave like Sardinian with its penta-vowel system or, in case of Vegliote and western Lucanian, like Romanian.
Phonologization of stress
The placement of stress generally did not change from Classical to Vulgar Latin, and except for reassignment of stress on some verb morphology most words continued to be stressed on the same syllable they were before. However, the loss of distinctive length disrupted the correlation between syllable weight and stress placement that existed in Classical Latin. Whereas in Classical Latin the place of the accent was predictable from the structure of the word, it was no longer so in Vulgar Latin. Stress had become a phonological property and could serve to distinguish forms that were otherwise homophones of identical phonological structure, as in Spanish canto 'I sing' vs. cantó 's/he sang'.Lengthening of stressed open syllables
After the Classical Latin vowel length distinctions were lost in favor of vowel quality, a new system of allophonic vowel quantity appeared sometime between the 4th and 5th centuries. Around then, stressed vowels in open syllables came to be pronounced long, and all the rest became short. For example, long venis, fori, cathedra ; but short vendo, formas. However, in some regions of Iberia and Gaul, all stressed vowels came to be pronounced long: for example, porta, tempus. In many descendants, several of the long vowels underwent some form of diphthongization, most extensively in Old French where five of the seven long vowels were affected by breaking.Grammar
Romance articles
It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed.Definite articles evolved from demonstrative pronouns or adjectives ; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ,, "that", in the Romance languages, becoming French ' and ', Catalan and Spanish ', ' and ', Occitan ' and ', Portuguese ' and ', and Italian ', ' and '. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from , "this" ; 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 and omul, possibly a result of being within 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 daemon sodalis peccati, in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Koine 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, 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 ', ', and so forth, which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes, Erat autem... beatissimus Anianus in supradicta civitate episcopus The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were no longer felt to be strong or specific enough.
In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ', which also spawned Italian ' through ', a contracted form of ecce eum. This is the origin of Old French ', ' and ' ; Italian ', ' and ', as well as ', ' ; Spanish and Occitan ' and Portuguese ' ; Spanish ' and Portuguese ' ; Spanish ' and Portuguese ' ; Portuguese ' and ' ; Romanian ' and ', 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. Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles are suffixed to the noun, as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages.
The numeral , una supplies the indefinite article in all cases. This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo. This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant ' in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.
Loss of neuter gender
The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages.The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion had already started in Pompeian graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum, and hoc locum for hunc locum. The morphological confusion shows primarily in the adoption of the nominative ending -us in the o-declension.
In Petronius' work, one can find balneus for , fatus for ', caelus for ', amphitheater for ', vinus for ', and conversely, thesaurum for '. Most of these forms occur in the speech of one man: Trimalchion, an uneducated Greek freedman.
In modern Romance languages, the nominative s-ending has been largely abandoned, and all substantives of the o-declension have an ending derived from -um: -u, -o, or -Ø. E.g., masculine ', and neuter ' have evolved to: Italian ', '; Portuguese ', '; Spanish ', ', Catalan ', '; Romanian ', cieru>; French ', '. However, Old French still had -s in the nominative and -Ø in the accusative in both words: murs, ciels – mur, ciel .
For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was productive; for others, the nominative/accusative form,. Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French , Catalan , Occitan , Spanish , Portuguese , Italian language , Leonese lleche and Romanian ', all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin nominative/accusative neuter ' or accusative masculine '. In Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine. Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French ', Leonese, Portuguese and Italian ', Romanian ' all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative nomen, rather than the oblique stem form *nominem.
Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in -A or -IA; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as ', plural gaudia; the plural form lies at the root of the French feminine singular , as well as of Catalan and Occitan ; the same for ', plural ligna, that originated the Catalan feminine singular noun , and Spanish . Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient neuter plural which is treated grammatically as feminine: e.g., : BRACCHIA "arm" → Italian : braccia, Romanian ' : brațe. Cf. also Merovingian Latin ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant.
Alternations in Italian heteroclitic nouns such as l'uovo fresco / le uova fresche are usually analysed as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in -a. However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that ' is simply a regular neuter noun and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is -o in the singular and -e in the plural. The same alternation in gender exists in certain Romanian nouns, but is considered regular as it is more common than in Italian. Thus, a relict neuter gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian.
In Portuguese, traces of the neuter plural can be found in collective formations and words meant to inform a bigger size or sturdiness. Thus, one can use /ovos and /ovas, /bordos and /bordas, /sacos and /sacas, /mantos and /mantas. Other times, it resulted in words whose gender may be changed more or less arbitrarily, like /, /, etc.
These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, the names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin ', a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian and Romanian '; in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations , ; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the feminine derivations , .
As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension noun manus, another feminine noun with the ending -us, Italian and Spanish derived , Romanian mânu> pl mâini/, Catalan , and Portuguese , which preserve the feminine gender along with the masculine appearance.
Except for the Italian and Romanian heteroclitic nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but still have neuter pronouns. French / / , Spanish / / , Italian: / / , Catalan: ', ', ', ' ; Portuguese: / / .
In Spanish, a three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles ', ', and '. The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno, literally "that which is good", from ': good.
Loss of oblique cases
The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions. Some of the causes include: the loss of final m, the merger of ă with ā, and the merger of ŭ with ō. Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced.| Classical | Vulgar | Modern Romanian | |
| nominative | caepa, cēpa | *cépa | ceapă |
| accusative | caepam, cēpam | *cépa | ceapă |
| ablative | caepā, cēpā | *cépa | ceapă |
| dative | caepae, cēpae | *cépe | cepe |
| genitive | caepae, cēpae | *cépe | cepe |
| Classical | Vulgar | Old French | |
| nominative | mūrus | *múros | murs |
| accusative | mūrum | *múru | mur |
| ablative | mūrō | *múro | mur |
| dative | mūrō | *múro | mur |
| genitive | mūrī | *múri | mur |
There also seems to be a marked tendency to confuse different forms even when they had not become homophonous, which indicates that nominal declension was shaped not only by phonetic mergers, but also by structural factors. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin shifted from a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic one.
The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by + noun as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining genitive forms are some pronouns, many fossilized combinations like sayings, some proper names, and certain terms related to the church. For example, French ' < Old French juesdi < Vulgar Latin ; Spanish es < ; terms like, ; and Italian ' < as well as names like Paoli, Pieri.
The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction + accusative. For example,.
The accusative case developed as a prepositional case, displacing many instances of the ablative. Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case.
Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely confused in inscriptions. Even though Gaulish texts from the 7th century rarely confuse both forms, it is believed that both cases began to merge in Africa by the end of the empire, and a bit later in parts of Italy and Iberia. Nowadays, Romanian maintains a two-case system, while Old French and Old Occitan had a two-case subject-oblique system.
This Old French system was based largely on whether or not the Latin case ending contained an "s" or not, with the "s" being retained but all vowels in the ending being lost. But since this meant that it was easy to confuse the singular nominative with the plural oblique, and the plural nominative with the singular oblique, along with the final "s" becoming silent, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and French adopted one case for all purposes, leaving the Romanian the only one to survive to the present day.
Wider use of prepositions
Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntactic purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish ', "where", from Latin ' + ', or French ', "since", from ' + ', while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese ' is de + ex + de. Spanish ' and Portuguese ', "after", represent de + ex + '.Some of these new compounds appear in literary texts during the late empire; French ', Spanish de and Portuguese de all represent de + ', and we find Jerome writing stulti, nonne qui fecit, quod de foris est, etiam id, quod de intus est fecit?. In some cases, compounds were created by combining a large number of particles, such as the Romanian ' from ad + de + in + illa + hora.
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, then eventually the accusative.
Classical Latin:
Vulgar Latin:'''
Pronouns
Unlike in the nominal and adjectival inflections, pronouns kept great part of the case distinctions. However, many changes happened. For example, the of ego was lost by the end of the empire, and eo appears in manuscripts from the 6th century.Adverbs
Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbs from adjectives: ', "dear", formed ', "dearly"; ', "fiercely", from '; ', "often", from '. All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin, where adverbs were invariably formed by a feminine ablative form modifying ', which was originally the ablative of mēns, and so meant "with a... mind". So ' instead of ' gave veloci menteThis explains the widespread rule for forming adverbs in many Romance languages: add the suffix -ment to the feminine form of the adjective. The development illustrates a textbook case of grammaticalization in which an autonomous form, the noun meaning 'mind', while still in free lexical use in e.g. Italian venire in mente 'come to mind', becomes a productive suffix for forming adverbs in Romance such as Italian ', Spanish 'clearly', with both its source and its meaning opaque in that usage other than as adverb formant.
Verbs
In general, the verbal system in the Romance languages changed less from Classical Latin than did the nominal system.The four conjugational classes generally survived. The second and third conjugations already had identical imperfect tense forms in Latin, and also shared a common present participle. Because of the merging of short i with long ē in most of Vulgar Latin, these two conjugations grew even closer together. Several of the most frequently-used forms became indistinguishable, while others became distinguished only by stress placement:
These two conjugations came to be conflated in many of the Romance languages, often by merging them into a single class while taking endings from each of the original two conjugations. Which endings survived was different for each language, although most tended to favour second conjugation endings over the third conjugation. Spanish, for example, mostly eliminated the third conjugation forms in favour of second conjugation forms.
French and Catalan did the same, but tended to generalise the third conjugation infinitive instead. Catalan in particular almost completely eliminated the second conjugation ending over time, reducing it to a small relic class. In Italian, the two infinitive endings remained separate, while the conjugations merged in most other respects much as in the other languages. However, the third-conjugation third-person plural present ending survived in favour of the second conjugation version, and was even extended to the fourth conjugation. Romanian also maintained the distinction between the second and third conjugation endings.
In the perfect, many languages generalized the -aui ending most frequently found in the first conjugation. This led to an unusual development; phonetically, the ending was treated as the diphthong rather than containing a semivowel, and in other cases the sound was simply dropped. We know this because it did not participate in the sound shift from to. Thus Latin amaui, amauit in many areas became proto-Romance *amai and *amaut, yielding for example Portuguese amei, amou. This suggests that in the spoken language, these changes in conjugation preceded the loss of.
Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb ', *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":
- j'aimerai ← aimer + ai .
- Portuguese and amarei ← amar + hei
- Spanish and amaré ← amar + he .
- amerò ← amare + ho .
- Ap'a istàre < apo a istàre 'I will stay'
- Ap'a nàrrere < apo a nàrrer 'I will say'
In Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, personal pronouns can still be omitted from verb phrases as in Latin, as the endings are still distinct enough to convey that information: venio > Sp vengo. In French, however, all the endings are typically homophonous except the first and second person plural, so the pronouns are always used except in the imperative.
Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, which has now survived 6000 years of known evolution, the synthetic passive voice 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 are the verbs expressing the concept "to go". Consider three particular verbs in Classical Latin expressing concepts of "going": ', ', and *ambitare. In Spanish and Portuguese ire and vadere merged into the verb ir, which derives some conjugated forms from ire and some from vadere. andar was maintained as a separate verb derived from ambitare.
Italian instead merged vadere and ambitare into the verb '. At the extreme French merged three Latin verbs with, for example, the present tense deriving from vadere and another verb ambulare and the future tense deriving from ire.
Similarly the Romance distinction between the Romance verbs for "to be", ' and ', was lost in French as these merged into the verb '. In Italian, the verb ' inherited both Romance meanings of "being essentially" and "being temporarily of the quality of", while specialized into a verb denoting location or dwelling, or state of health.
Copula
The copula of Classical Latin was '. This evolved to *essere in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix -re to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian ' and French ' through Proto-Gallo-Romance *essre and Old French ' as well as Spanish and Portuguese '.In Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb ', which originally meant "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 ' and Old French ', 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 in/at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin could have been *omo stat in foro, "the man stands in/at the marketplace", replacing the est with stat, because "standing" was what was perceived as what the man was actually doing.
The use of stare in this case was still semantically transparent assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from esse to stare became more widespread. In the Iberian peninsula esse ended up only denoting natural qualities that would not change, while stare was applied to transient qualities and location. In Italian, stare is used mainly for location, transitory state of health and, as in Spanish, for the eminently transient quality implied in a verb's progressive form, such as sto scrivendo to express 'I am writing'.
The historical development of the stare + gerund progressive in those Romance languages that have it seems to have been a passage from a usage such as sto pensando 'I stand/stay thinking', in which the stare form carries the full semantic load of 'stand, stay' to grammaticalization of the construction as expression of progressive aspect. The process of reanalysis that took place over time bleached the semantics of stare so that when used in combination with the gerund the form became solely a grammatical marker of subject and tense, no longer a lexical verb with the semantics of 'stand'. Whereas sto scappando would once have been semantically strange at best, once grammaticalization was achieved, collocation with a verb of inherent mobility was no longer contradictory, and sto scappando could and did become the normal way to express 'I am escaping'..
Word order typology
Classical Latin in most cases adopted an SOV word order in ordinary prose, although other word orders were allowed, such as in poetry, due to its inflectional nature. However, word order in the modern Romance languages generally adopted a standard SVO word order. Fragments of SOV word order still survive in the placement of clitic object pronouns.History of specific Romance languages
- Sicilian
- Catalan phonology
- History of French
- History of Italian
- History of Portuguese
- History of the Spanish language
- Latin to Romanian sound changes
- Old French
Citations
Works consulted
; GeneralTransitions to Romance languages
- Ledgeway, Adam. From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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