VULGAR LATIN

(Redirected from Late Latin)

Vulgar Latin, as in this political graffito at Pompeii, was the speech of ordinary people of the Roman Empire — different from the classical Latin used by the Roman elite.

'Vulgar Latin' (in Latin, ''sermo vulgaris'', "common speech") is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects and sociolects of the Latin language until those dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early Romance languages — a distinction usually made around the ninth century. It includes late Latin; the terms are often used synonymously. However, Vulgar Latin can also refer to vernacular speech from other periods, including the Classical period.
This spoken Latin came to differ from Classical Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have occurred in spoken Latin, in at least its basilectal forms, much earlier.

What was Vulgar Latin?

Gender: loss of the neuter

The loss of the noun case system

Prepositions multiply

What was Vulgar Latin?

The ''Cantar de Mio Cid'' (''Song of my Cid'') is the earliest text of reasonable length that exists in Medieval Spanish, and marks the beginning of this language as distinct from Vulgar Latin

The name "vulgar" simply means "common"; derived from the Latin word ''vulgaris'', meaning "common", or "of the people". "Vulgar Latin" has a variety of meanings:
# It means variation within Latin (socially, geographically, and chronologically) that differs from the perceived Classical literary standard. This typically excludes the language of the more educated, upper-classes which, although it does include variation, comes closest to the perceived standard.
# It means the spoken Latin of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin represents the literary register of Latin, based on the model of Ancient Literary Greek. It represented a selection from a variety of spoken forms. The Latin brought by Roman soldiers to Gaul, Iberia or Dacia was not identical to the Latin of Cicero, and differed from it in vocabulary, and later in the syntax and grammar as well.^[1] By this definition, Vulgar Latin was a spoken language and Classical Latin was used for writing, with the later style of literary Latin (dubbed "Late Latin") being slightly different from earlier "classic" standards.
# It means the hypothetical ancestor of the Romance languages ("Proto-Romance"). It cannot be directly known, except from a few graffiti inscriptions; it was a Latin that had undergone important sound shifts and changes — these can be reconstructed from the changes evident in its descendants, the Romance vernaculars.
# Even more restrictively, the name Vulgar Latin is sometimes given to the hypothetical proto-Romance of the Western Romance languages: the vernaculars found north and west of the La Spezia-Rimini Line, France, and the Iberian peninsula; and the poorly attested Romance speech of northwestern Africa. According to the hypothesis, southeastern Italian, Romanian, and Dalmatian developed separately.
# "Vulgar Latin" is sometimes used to describe the grammatical changes found in some late Latin texts, such as the fourth century ''Itinerarium Egeriae'', Egeria's account of her journey to Palestine and Mt. Sinai; or the works of St Gregory of Tours. Since written documentation of Vulgar Latin forms is scarce, these works are valuable to philologists, mainly because of the occasional presence of variations or errors in spelling, providing some evidence of spoken usage during the period in which they were written.^[2]
Most definitions of "Vulgar Latin" define it as a spoken, rather than a written, language. It is important to remember that "Vulgar Latin" is an abstract term, not the name of any particular dialect. The term itself predates the field of sociolinguistics, and was in some ways a precursor to sociolinguistics, which studies language variation associated with social variables, and which tends not to view variation as a strict standard/non-standard dichotomy (for example, Classical/Vulgar Latin) but as a large pool of variations. In light of fields such as sociolinguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics, Vulgar Latin can be seen as nearly synonymous to "language variation in Latin" (socially, geographically, and chronologically) that excludes the speech, and especially writings, of the upper, more-educated classes. It is because there are so many types of variation that definitions of Vulgar Latin differ so much.

Evolution

Because no one transcribed phonetically the daily speech of Latin speakers during the period in question, students of Vulgar Latin must study it indirectly through other methods. Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First, the comparative method reconstructs the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and notes where they differ from classical Latin. Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin speakers were liable to commit, telling us how Latin speakers used their language. Third, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also reveal, in part, the author's spoken language.^[3]
Some literary works with a low register of Latin from the Classical Latin period also provide a glimpse into the world of early Vulgar Latin. The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features; so too does the recorded speech of freedmen in the ''Cena Trimalchionis'' by Petronius Arbiter.
The third century AD is presumed to be a turning point when much of the vocabulary was changing (e.g., ''equus'' → ''caballus'' "horse", etc.). Recently, some studies, perhaps in need of more scientific development, have suggested that pronunciations too started to diverge, supposedly then becoming similar to modern local pronunciations; the most spectacular (alleged) effect occurring in the area of Naples.
For many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Vulgar Latin continued to coexist with a written form of Late Latin, nowadays referred to as Medieval Latin; for when speakers of one of the Romance vernaculars set out to write with correct grammar and spelling, they attempted to emulate the norms of classical Latin. This scholarly Latin, "frozen" by Justinian's codifications of Roman law, on the one hand, and of the Church, on the other, was eventually unified by the medieval copyists; it continued to exist as a written language and a ''Dachsprache'' well beyond the Middle Ages.
Vulgar Latin developed differently in the various provinces of the Roman Empire, gradually giving rise to the modern languages — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Although the official language in these areas was Latin, Vulgar Latin was popularly spoken until the new localized forms diverged sufficiently from Latin, thus emerging as separate languages. However, despite the widening gulf between the spoken and written ("late") Latin, for the duration of the empire, up till the 8th century AD, there was never an unbridgeable gap between them. József Herman states:^[4]
Indeed, at the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language — either in the ''rustica lingua romanica'' (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars — since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation the Oaths of Strasbourg (842), recording a treaty between Charlemagne's grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German, were proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinguished from Latin. Consider the excerpt below:

Extract of the Oaths

From this point on, the Latin vernaculars began to be treated as separate languages in practice, developing local norms and orthographies of their own, and "Vulgar Latin" ceases to be a useful term. For further information, see Romance languages.

Phonology

Vowels

Letter		Pronunciation
Letter		Classical	Vulgar
ă	short A
ā	long A
ĕ	short E
ē	long E
ĭ	short I
ī	long I
ŏ	short O
ō	long O
ŭ	short V
ū	long V
y̆	short Y	>
ȳ	long Y	>
æ	AE
œ	OE
au	AV		>
(see International Phonetic Alphabet for an explanation of the symbols used);

One profound change that affected every Romance language was the reordering of the vowel system of classical Latin. Latin has ten distinct vowels: long and short versions of A, E, I, O, V, and three diphthongs, AE, OE and AV (four according to some, including VI).
There were also long and short versions of the Y, representing the sound in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced before Romance vowel changes started.
At some time during the imperial Latin period, all the vowels except /a/ began to differ by quality as well as by length. The long vowels became more close, while the short vowels became more open. So, for example, remained , but became ; remained , but became ; remained , but became ; and remained , but became . Thus, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin, which relied on phonemic vowel length, was newly modelled into a system in which vowel length distinctions lost phonemic importance, and distinctions of quality (more precisely, vowel height) became more prominent.
In effect, Latin went from:

i ī	u ū
e ē	o ō
a ā

to:


,	,

,

Next, long , and merged with short , and , respectively, in the West, yielding the seven vowel system of proto-Western-Romance. As a result for example, Latin ''pira'' "pear" (fruit) and ''vēra'' "true", came to rhyme in most of the daughter languages: Italian, French, and Spanish ''pera'', ''vera''; Old French ''poire'', ''voire''. Similarly, in the western Roman Empire, Latin ''nuce(m)'' ("nut", acc. sing) and ''vōce(m)'' ("voice") become Italian ''noce, voce'', Portuguese ''noz, voz'', and French ''noix, voix''. This change did not occur in Romanian (''nucă, voce''), or, of course, in Sardinian.^[5]
Apart from Sardinian, which preserved the position of the classical Latin vowels (but lost phonemic vowel length), what happened to Vulgar Latin can be summarized as in the table to the right.
The diphthongs AE and OE usually became and respectively. OE was always a rare phoneme in Classical Latin; in Old Latin times ''oinos'' ("one") regularly became ''unus''.¹ The results of Latin AE were also subject to at least some early changes; French ''proie'' ("spoils") presumes rather than from classical Latin ''praeda''. Latin AV was under some pressure to change in the Roman Republican period; a number of populist politicians adopted the spelling ''Clodius'' for the well known Roman name ''Claudius'', but this change was not universal, and marked as basilectal well into the early Empire. AV was initially retained, but was eventually reduced in many languages to after the original and experienced further changes. (Portuguese evolved only as far as until much more recently; Occitan and Romanian preserve .)⁵
Thus, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin (not counting diphthongs and the Greek Y), which relied on phonemic vowel length was newly modelled into a system in which vowel length distinctions were suppressed and alterations of vowel quality (vowel height, more specifically) became phonemic. Because of this change, the stress on accented syllables became much more pronounced in Vulgar Latin than in Classical Latin. This tended to cause unaccented syllables to become less distinct, while working further changes on the sounds of the accented syllables. The result was a system with seven stressed vowel phonemes (six in Romanian, five in Sardinian) and five unstressed vowel phonemes.
The results of short O and E proved to be unstable in the daughter languages, and tended to break up into diphthongs. Classical ''focus'' (accusative ''focum''), "hearth", became the general word in proto-Romance for "fire" (replacing ''ignis''), but its short 'O' sound became a diphthong — a different diphthong — in many daughter languages:

★ French: ''feu'' (now no longer a diphthong but )

★ Italian: ''fuoco''

★ Spanish: ''fuego''
In French and Italian, these changes occurred only in open syllables. Spanish, however, diphthongized in all circumstances, resulting in a simple five-vowel system in both stressed and unstressed syllables. In Portuguese, no diphthongization occurred at all (''fogo'' ). Romanian shows diphthongization of short E (''fier'' from Latin ''ferrum'') but not of short O (''foc''). Portuguese actually avoided some of the instability of its vowels by retaining the Latin distinction between long and short vowels to a certain extent in its system of closed and open vowels. Long Latin ''e'' and ''o'' generally became closed vowels in Portuguese (written ''ê'' and ''ô'' when accented), while the corresponding short vowels became open vowels in Portuguese (''é'' and ''ó'' when accented). The pronunciation of these vowels is the same as is indicated in the table of Vulgar Latin vowels to the right. Some vowel instability did occur, however, particularly with unstressed ''o'', which changes to , and unstressed ''e'', which changes to or .
In Catalan, the process was similar to that of Portuguese. The short Latin ''o'' turned into an open vowel, while short ''e'' eventually turned into a closed in Western dialects and a schwa in the Eastern ones. This schwa slowly evolved towards an open , although in most of the Balearic Islands the schwa is maintained even nowadays. Eastern dialects have some vocalic instability similar to that of Portuguese as well: unstressed and turn into a schwa (in some point of the evolution of the language, this change didn't affect in prestressed position, a pronunciation that is still kept alive in part of the Balearics), and, except in most of Majorca, unstressed and merge into .

Consonants

Palatalization of Latin , , and often was almost universal in vulgar Latin; the only Romance languages it did not affect were Dalmatian and some varieties of Sardinian. Thus Latin ''caelum'' ('sky', 'heaven'), pronounced beginning with , became Italian ''cielo'', , French ''ciel'', , Catalan ''cel'', , Spanish ''cielo'', or (depending on dialect) and Portuguese ''céu'', , beginning with sibilant consonants. The former semivowels written in Latin as V as in ''vinum'', pronounced , and I as in ''iocunda'', pronounced , came to be pronounced and , respectively. Between vowels, and often merged into an intermediate sound .^[6]
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.
In the Western Romance area, an epenthetic vowel was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with ''s'' and another consonant: thus Latin ''spatha'' ("sword") becomes Portuguese and Spanish ''espada'', Catalan ''espasa'', French ''épée''. Eastern Romance languages preserved euphony rules by adding the epenthesis in the preceding article when necessary instead, so Italian preserves feminine ''spada'' as ''la spada'', but changes the masculine ''
★ il spaghetto'' to ''lo spaghetto''.
Gender was remodelled in the daughter languages by the loss of final consonants.
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 final -M is 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 written ''Taurāsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cēpit'' ("He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium"). Final -M was, however, consistently written in the literary language, though it is often treated as silent for purposes of scansion in poetry.

Evidence of changes

Evidence of these and other changes can be seen in the late third 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 ("masculus non masclus");

★ the reduction of formerly syllabic /e/ and /i/ to /j/ ("vinea non vinia");

★ the levelling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/ ("coluber non colober") and /e/ and /i/ ("dimidius non demedius");

★ regularization of irregular forms ("glis non glirus");

★ regularization and emphasis of gendered forms ("pauper mulier non paupera mulier");

★ levelling of the distinction between /b/ and /v/ between vowels ("bravium non brabium");

★ the substitution of diminutives for unmarked words ("auris non oricla, neptis non nepticla")

★ the loss of syllable-final nasals ("mensa non mesa") or their inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorrection ("formosus non formunsus").
Many of the forms castigated in the ''Appendix Probi'' proved to be the productive forms in Romance; ''oricla'' (Classical Latin neuter plural ''auricula'') is the source of French ''oreille'', Catalan ''orella'', Spanish ''oreja'', Italian ''orecchio'', Romanian ''ureche'', Portuguese ''orelha'', "ear", not the classical Latin form.

Vocabulary

Classical Only	Classical & Romance	English
''brassica''	''caulis''	cabbage
''cruor''	''sanguis''	blood
''domus''	''casa''	house
''emere''	''comparare''	buy
''equus''	''caballus''	horse
''ferre'' (perfective stem ''tul-'')	''portare''	carry
''ludere''	''jocare''	play
''magnus''	''grandis''	big
''pulcher''	''bellus''	beautiful
''os'' (stem or-)	''bucca''	mouth
''scire''	''sapere''	know
''sidus'' (stem ''sider-'')	''stella''	star

Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary. Classical ''equus'', "horse", was consistently replaced by ''caballus'' (but note Romanian ''iapă'', Sardinian ''èbba'', Spanish ''yegua'', Catalan ''egua'' and Portuguese ''égua'' all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical ''equa'').
A very partial listing of words that are exclusively Classical, and those that were productive in Romance, is to be found in the table to the right.
Some of these words, dropped in Romance, were borrowed back as learned words from Latin itself. The vocabulary changes affected even the basic grammatical particles of Latin; there are many that vanish without a trace in Romance, such as ''an, at, autem, donec, enim, ergo, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quod, quoque, sed, utrum,'' and ''vel''.^[7]
On the other hand, since Vulgar Latin and Latin proper were for much of their history different registers of the same language, rather than different languages, some Romance languages preserve Latin words that usually were lost. For example, Italian ''ogni'' ("each/every") preserves Latin ''omnes''. Other languages use cognates of ''totus'' (accusative ''totum'') for the same meaning; for example ''tutto'' in Italian, ''tudo''/''todo'' in Portuguese, ''todo'' in Spanish, ''tot'' in Catalan, ''tout'' in French and ''tot'' in Romanian.
Frequently, Latin words reborrowed from the "higher" register of the language are found side by side with the evolved form. The (lack of) expected phonetic developments is a clue that one word has been borrowed. In Spanish, for example, Vulgar Latin ''fungus'' (accusative ''fungum''), "fungus, mushroom", became Italian ''fungo'', Catalan ''fong'', Portuguese ''fungo'' and Spanish ''hongo'', with the F > H that was usual in Spanish (cf. ''filius'' > Spanish ''hijo'', "son" or ''facere'' > Spanish ''hacer'', "to do"). But Spanish also had ''fungo'', which by its lack of the expected sound shift shows that it had been re-borrowed from the higher register of classical Latin.⁷
Sometimes, a classical Latin word was kept along side a Vulgar Latin word. In Vulgar Latin, classical ''caput'', "head", yielded to ''testa'' (originally "pot") in some forms of western Romance, including French and Italian. But Italian, French and Catalan kept the Latin word under the form ''capo'', ''chef'', and ''cap'' which retained many metaphorical meanings of "head", including "boss". The Latin word with the original meaning is preserved in Romanian ''cap'', together with ''ţeastă'', both meaning 'head' in the anatomical sense. Southern Italian dialects likewise preserve ''capo'' as the normal word for "head". Spanish and Portuguese have ''cabeza''/''cabeça'', derived from
★ ''capetia'', a modified form of ''caput'', while ''testa'' was retained in Portuguese as the word for "forehead". Overall, this demonstrates a common pattern observed in many circumstances -- peripheral dialects tend to be more conservative in some cases than central dialects.
Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such suffixes as ''-bilis'', ''-arius'', ''-itare'' and ''-icare'' grew apace. These changes occurred frequently to avoid irregular forms or to regularise genders.
Insight into the vocabulary changes of late Vulgar Latin in France can be seen in the ''Reichenau glosses'',^[8] written into the margins of a copy of the Vulgate Bible, which explain fourth-century Vulgate words no longer readily understood in the eighth century, when the glosses were likely written. These glosses are likely of French origin; some vocabulary items are specifically French.
These glosses show vocabulary replacement:

★ ''femur'' > ''coxa'' (Portuguese and Old Spanish ''coxa'', French ''cuisse'', Italian ''coscia'', Catalan ''cuixa'', Romanian ''coapsă'', "thigh")

★ ''arena'' > ''sabulo'' (Spanish ''arena'', Portuguese ''areia'', French ''sable'', Italian ''rena'' and ''sabbia'', "sand")

★ ''canere'' > ''cantare'' (Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan ''cantar'', French ''chanter'', Italian ''cantare'', Romanian ''cânta'', "to sing")
grammatical changes:

★ ''optimus'' (best) ''meliores'' (better) > ''meliores'' ("optimum" survived in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, French and Romanian as ''óptimo, ó(p) timo, òptim, ottimo'', ''optimal/optimum'' and ''optim'' respectively, which mean the best, whereas ''mejor'' and ''melhor'' mean better; Portuguese ''melhores'', Spanish ''mejores'', Catalan ''millors'', French ''meilleurs'', Italian ''migliori'', "better [plural]")

★ ''saniore'' > ''plus sano'' (French ''plus sain'', Italian ''più sano'', Romanian ''mai sănătos'', Catalan ''més sa'', Spanish ''más sano'', Portuguese ''mais são'' "healthier")
Germanic loan words:

★ ''turbas'' > ''fulcos'' (Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan ''turba'', French ''foule'', Italian ''folla'', "mob")

★ ''cementariis'' > ''mationibus'' (French ''maçons'', "stonemasons")

★ ''non perpercit'' > ''non sparniavit'' (French ''épargner'', "to spare")

★ ''galea'' > ''helme'' (French ''heaume'', Italian/Portuguese ''elmo'', Catalan ''elm'', Spanish ''yelmo'', "helmet")
and words whose meaning has changed:

★ ''in ore'' > ''in bucca'' (Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan ''boca'', French ''bouche'', Italian ''bocca'', "mouth")

★ ''rostrum'' > ''beccus'' (Spanish/Galician ''rostro'', and Portuguese ''rosto'' survived to mean "face". French ''bec'', Italian ''becco'', Catalan ''bec'', Spanish ''pico'', Portuguese ''bico'', "beak")

★ ''isset'' > ''ambulasset'' (French ''allait'', "he went"; Catalan ''anar'', Italian ''andare'', "to go")

★ ''liberos'' > ''infantes'' (French ''enfants'', "children"; Italian ''infantile'', "childish, infantile"; Portuguese ''infante'', "prince"; Spanish ''infante'', "child" but as a literary word and also "prince")

★ ''milites'' > ''servientes'' (French ''sergents'', "soldiers")

Grammar

The Romance articles

It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in some form in all of the Romance languages, arose; largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed.
Definite articles formerly were demonstrative pronouns or adjectives; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ''ille, illa, (illud)'', in the Romance languages, becoming French ''le'' and ''la'', Catalan and Spanish ''el'' and ''la'', and Italian ''il'' and ''la''. The Portuguese articles ''o'' and ''a'' are ultimately from the same source. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ''ipsu(m), ipsa'' (su, sa); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after the noun, eg. ''lupul'' ("the wolf") and ''omul'' ("the man" — from ''lupum illum'' and ''
★ hominem illum'').⁵
This pronoun 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.⁷
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 ciuitate episcopus'' ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were felt no longer to be specific enough.⁷ In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ''ecce'' (originally an interjection: "look!") or
★ ''eccu'', from Classical ''eccum'' ("look at it!"). 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 istum''), ''quello'' (
★ ''eccu illum'') and obsolescent ''codesto'' (
★ ''eccu tibi istum''); Spanish ''acá'' and Portuguese ''cá'', (
★ ''eccu hac''), Portuguese ''acolá'' (
★ ''eccu illac'') and ''aquém'' (
★ ''eccu inde''); 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 Deo amur'' — "for the love of God".) Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been too slangy 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 everywhere. This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes ''cum uno gladiatore nequissimo'' ("with a quite immoral gladiator"). This suggests that ''unus'' was beginning to supplant ''quidam'' in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the first century BC.

Gender: loss of the neuter

The genders

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 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 Arbiter, we find ''balneus'' for ''balneum'' "bath", ''fatus'' for ''fatum'' "fate", ''caelus'' for ''caelum'' "heaven", ''amphiteatrus'' for ''amphitheatrum'' "amphitheatre" and conversely the nominative ''thesaurum'' for ''thesaurus'' "treasure".
In modern Romance languages, the nominative ''s''-ending has been abandoned and all substantives of the ''o''-declension have an ending derived from -UM > ''-u''/''-o''/''-Ø'': MURUM > Italian and Spanish ''muro'', Catalan and French ''mur'' and CAELUM > Italian, Spanish ''cielo'', French ''ciel'', Catalan ''cel'', Sardinian ''kelu''. Old French still had ''-s'' in the nominative and ''-Ø'' in the accusative in ''both'' original genders (''murs'', ''ciels'').
For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was the productive form in Romance; for others, the nominative/accusative form, which was identical in Classical Latin, was the one that survived. Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French ''(le) lait'', Catalan ''(la) llet'', Spanish ''(la) leche'', Portuguese ''(o) leite'', Italian ''(il) latte'', and Romanian ''lapte(le)'' ("milk"), all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin nom./acc. neut. ''lacte'' or acc. masc. ''lactem'' (the standard nominative and accusative forms in classical Latin were ''lac''). Note also that in Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, ''lapte/lǎpturi''). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French ''nom'', Portuguese ''nome'', and Italian ''nome'' ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative ''nomen'', rather than the oblique stem form
★ ''nominem'' (which nevertheless produced Spanish ''nombre'').⁵

Typical Italian endings

	Nouns		Adj. & determiners
	sing.	plur.	sing.	plur.
m	''giardin'o'''	''giardin'i'''	''buon'o'''	''buon'i'''
f	''donn'a'''	''donn'e'''	''buon'a'''	''buon'e'''
n	''uov'o'''	''uov'a'''	''buon'o'''	''buon'e'''

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 ''braţ(ul)'' : ''braţe(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'' ("every", "everything").
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, and the same words can be preceded by either ''lo'' or ''el'', depending solely on the meaning assigned to them.
Some varieties of Astur-Leonese maintain endings for the three genders such as follows: ''bonu, bona, bono'' ("good").

The loss of the noun case system

Classical Latin
Nominative:	''rosa''
Accusative:	''rosam''
Genitive:	''rosae''
Dative:	''rosae''
Ablative:	''rosā''
Vulgar Latin
Nominative:	''rosa''
Accusative:	''rosa''
Genitive:	''rose''
Dative:	''rose''
Ablative:	''rosa''

The sound changes that were occurring in Vulgar Latin made the noun case system of Classical Latin harder to sustain, and ultimately spelled doom for the system of Latin declensions. 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 from AE /ai/ to E entailed for a typical first declension noun (''see table'').
The complete elimination of case happened only gradually. Old French still maintained a nominative/oblique distinction (called ''cas-sujet''/''cas-régime''); this disappeared in the course of the 12th or 13th centuries, depending on the dialect. Old Occitan also maintained a similar distinction, as did many of the Rhaeto-Romance languages until only a few hundred years ago. Romanian still preserves a separate genitive/dative case along with vestiges of a vocative case.
The distinction between singular and plural was marked in two ways in the Romance languages. North and west of the La Spezia-Rimini line, which runs through northern Italy, the singular was usually distinguished from the plural by means of final -''s'', which was present in the old accusative plurals in masculine and feminine nouns of all declensions. South and east of the La Spezia-Rimini Line, the distinction was marked by changes of final vowels, as in contemporary standard Italian and Romanian. This preserves and generalizes distinctions that were marked on the nominative plurals of the first and second declensions.

Prepositions multiply

Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntax purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in numbers, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish ''donde'', "where", from Latin ''de'' + ''unde'', or French ''dès'', "since", from ''de'' + ''ex'' or ''dans'', "in" from ''de intus'', "from the inside", while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese ''desde'' is ''de'' + ''ex'' + ''de''. Spanish ''después'' and Portuguese ''depois'', "after" represents ''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 three represent ''de'' + ''foris'' (Romanian "afară" ''ad'' + ''foris''), and we find St Jerome writing ''si quis de foris venerit'' ("if anyone goes outside").⁷
Samples:
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:'

★
★ ''Iacōbus patrï librum dat.''—James is giving his father a/the book.

★ 'Vulgar Latin:'

★
★ ''´Jacọmọs ´lẹvrọ a ´patre ´dọnat.''—James is giving a/the book to his father.
Just as in the disappearing dative case, colloquial Latin sometimes replaced the disappearing genitive case with the preposition ''de'' followed by the ablative.

★ 'Classical Latin:'

★
★ ''Iacōbus mihi librum patris dat.''—James is giving me his father's book.

★ 'Vulgar Latin:'

★
★ ''´Jacọmọs mẹ ´lẹvrọ dẹ ´patre ´dọnat.''—James is giving me the book of (belonging to) his father.
or

★ 'Vulgar Latin:'

★
★ ''´Jacọmọs ´lẹvrọ dẹ ´patre a ´mẹ ´dọnat.''—James is giving the book of (belonging to) his father to me.

Adverbs

Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbs from adjectives: ''carus'', "dear", formed ''care'', "dearly"; ''acriter'', "fiercely", from ''acer''; ''crebro'', "often", from ''creber''. All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin, where adverbs were invariably formed by a feminine ablative form modifying ''mente'', which was originally the ablative of ''mentis'', and so meant "with a _____ mind". So ''velox'' ("quick") instead of ''velociter'' ("quickly") gave ''veloce mente'' (originally "with a quick mind", "quick-mindedly")
This explains the nigh-invariable rule to form regular adverbs in almost all Romance languages: add the suffix -''ment(e)'' to the feminine form of the adjective. This originally separate word becomes a suffix in Romance. This change was well under way as early as the first century B.C., and the construction appears several times in Catullus, most famously in Catullus 8:

Verbs

The verb forms were much less affected by the phonetic losses that eroded the noun case systems; indeed, an active verb in Spanish (or other modern Romance language) will still strongly resemble its Latin ancestor. One factor that gave the system of verb inflections more staying power was the fact that the strong stress accent of Vulgar Latin, replacing the light stress accent of Classical Latin, frequently caused different syllables to be stressed in different conjugated forms of a verb. As such, although the word forms continued to evolve phonetically, the distinctions among the conjugated forms did not erode (much).
For example, in Latin the words for "I love" and "we love" were, respectively, ''amō'' and ''amāmus''. Because a stressed A gave rise to a diphthong in some environments in Old French, that daughter language had ''(j')'ai'me'' for the former and ''(nous) 'a'mons'' for the latter. Though several phonemes have been lost in each case, the different stress patterns helped to preserve distinctions between them, if perhaps at the expense of irregularising the verb. Regularising influences have countered this effect in some cases (the modern French form is ''nous aimons''), but some modern verbs have preserved the irregularity, such as ''je v'ie'ns'' ("I come") versus ''nous v'e'nons'' ("we come").⁵
Another set of changes already underway by the first century AD was the loss of certain final consonants. A graffito at Pompeii reads ''quisque ama valia'', which in Classical Latin would read ''quisquis amat valeat'' ("may whoever loves be strong/do well").⁷ In the perfect tense, 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 , and the sound was in many cases dropped; it did not participate in the sound shift from to . Thus Latin ''amaui'', ''amauit'' ("I loved; he/she loved") in many areas became proto-Romance
★ ''amai'' and
★ ''amaut'', yielding for example Spanish ''amé'', ''amó'', Portuguese ''amei'', ''amou''. This suggests that in the spoken language, these changes in conjugation preceded the loss of .⁵
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 and , which caused future tense forms such as ''amabit'' to become identical to perfect tense 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":

★ French: '''j'aimerai''' (''je'' + ''aimer'' + ''ai'') < ''aimer'' ["to love"] + ''ai'' ["I have"].

★ Portuguese: '''amarei''' (''amar'' + [''h'']''ei'') < ''amar'' ["to love"] + ''hei'' ["I have"]

★ Spanish and Catalan: '''amaré''' (''amar'' + [''h'']''e'') < ''amar'' ["to love"] + ''he'' ["I have"].

★ Italian: '''amerò''' (''amar'' + [''h'']''o'') < ''amare'' ["to love"] + ''ho'' ["I have"].
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 Portuguese, which in these tenses allows clitic object pronouns to be incorporated as infixes between the root of the verb and its ending: "I will love" (''eu'') ''amarei'', but "I will love you" ''amar-te-ei'', from ''amar'' + ''te'' ["you"] + (''eu'') ''hei'' = ''amar'' + ''te'' + [''h'']''ei'' = ''amar-te-ei''.
Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, that 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.

Copula

Main articles: Romance 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''. (Spanish and Portuguese ''ser'' derive from ''sedere'', which means "to sit", and 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 ''esse''nce, while ''stare'' signified the ''sta''te. ''stare'' evolved to Spanish and Portuguese ''estar'' and Old French ''ester'' (both through
★ ''estare''), while Italian retained the original form.
The semantic shift that underlies this evolution is more or less as follows: A speaker of Classical Latin might have said (hypothetically, Classical Latin was nearly fully restricted to writing and reserved for rhetorical purposes): ''vir est in foro'', meaning "the man is at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin should have been
★ ''(h)omo stat in foru'', replacing the ''est'' (from ''esse'') with ''stat'' (from ''stare''), because "standing" was what was perceived as what the man was actually doing. The use of ''stare'' in this case was still actually correct assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from ''essere'' to ''stare'' became more wide-spread, and, in the end, ''essere'' only denoted natural qualities that would not change. (Although it might be objected that in sentences like Spanish ''la catedral está en la ciudad'', "the church is in the city" this is also unlikely to change, but all locations are expressed through ''estar'' in Spanish.)
In French, the evolved forms of the two verbs, ''estre'' and ''ester'' merged in the late Middle Ages, as the "s" disappeared from words beginning in ''est-'', as this phenomenon produced Modern French ''être'' and an obscure form
★ ''éter'', which eventually merged.

References

1. L. R. Palmer The Latin Language (repr. Univ. Oklahoma 1988, ISBN 0-8061-2136-X
2. Leonard. R. Palmer, ''The Latin Language'' (1954, repr. Univ. Oklahoma 1988, ISBN 0-8061-2136-X)
3. Charles H. Grandgent, ''An Introduction to Vulgar Latin'' (Heath & Co., 1907)
4. József Herman Vulgar Latin (repr. Penn State Press 2000, ISBN 0-271-02001-6
5. N. Vincent: "Latin", in ''The Romance Languages'', (M. Harris and N. Vincent, eds., Oxford Univ. Press. 1990, ISBN 0-19-520829-3)
6. Mildred K. Pope, ''From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman Phonology and Morphology.'' (Manchester University Press, 1934)
7. K. P. Harrington, J. Pucci, and A. G. Elliott, Medieval Latin (2nd ed., Univ. Chicago Pres, 1997, ISBN 0-226-31712-9)
8. ''The Reichenau Glosses''

External links

★ ''An Introduction to Vulgar Latin'' by C.H. Grandgent

★ ''Latin at the End of the Imperial Age'' by Dag Norberg

★ Verbix Conjugate Vulgar Latin verbs.

This article provided by Wikipedia. To edit the contents of this article, click here for original source.

	Comfort Suites
	Holiday Market Travel
	Walden Tours
	Sheraton Suites Philadelphia Airport
	Tauck World Discovery

	Cobblers Cove
	Sheraton Princess Kaiulani
	Sheraton Philadelphia University City
	Sheraton Bucks County Hotel
	Tauck World Discovery
	Fallsview Casino Resort
	Golden Gate Casino
	Caesars Windsor
	Sheraton Harrisburg Hershey Hotel
	Sheraton Society Hill

	Tips for Toronto Travellers: Fly Cheap from Buffalo Airport
	Celebrating Thanksgiving & the Harvest All Over the World
	First Gay Heli Ski Week Launched by Canadian Mountain Holidays
	Lake Elementaita: Retreat to a Paradise of Flamingoes in Kenya
	10 Tips Every Business Traveller Should Know
	Celebrate Rabbie Burns & Culture at Homecoming Scotland 2009

Home

Blogs

Trip Deals

Hotel Deals

Jobs

Videos

Articles

Directory

Languages

VULGAR LATIN

What was Vulgar Latin?

Evolution

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Evidence of changes

Vocabulary

Grammar

The Romance articles

Gender: loss of the neuter

The loss of the noun case system

Prepositions multiply

Adverbs

Verbs

Copula

References

Further reading

See also

External links

Customer Service

Most Popular

Useful

Find

Username:	Password:

	or Sign up here