Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin (in Latin,
sermo vulgaris, "common speech") is a blanket term covering the
vernacular dialects of the
Latin language spoken mostly in the western
provinces of the
Roman Empire until those dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early
Romance languages — a distinction usually made around the
ninth century. This is not a discussion of
Latin profanity.
This spoken Latin differed from the
literary language of
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 been in place in spoken Latin, in at least its
basilectal forms, much earlier. Most definitions of "vulgar Latin" mean that it is a spoken language, rather than a written language, because the evidence suggests that spoken Latin broke up into divergent
dialects during this period. Because no one transcribed phonetically the daily speech of any Latin speakers during the period in question, students of Vulgar Latin must study it through indirect methods.
Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First, the
comparative method can reconstruct the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and note where they differ from classical Latin. Second, various
prescriptive grammar texts from the late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin users were likely to commit, providing insight into how Latin speakers used their language. Finally, the
solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also shed light on the spoken language of the writer.
 |
The Cantar de Mio Cid is the earliest text of reasonable length we have in Mediaeval Castilian, and marks the beginning of this language as distinct from Vulgar Latin |
The name "vulgar" simply means "common"; it is derived from the Latin word
vulgaris, meaning "common", or "of the people". "Vulgar Latin" to Latinists has a variety of meanings.
# It means the spoken Latin of the
Roman Empire. Classical Latin was always a rather artificial literary language; the Latin brought by Roman soldiers to
Gaul,
Iberia or
Dacia was not necessarily the Latin of
Cicero. By this definition, Vulgar Latin was a spoken language and "late" Latin was used for writing, its general style being slightly different from earlier "classic" standards.# It means the hypothetical ancestor of the
Romance languages ("Proto-Romance"). This is a language which cannot be directly known apart from through a few
graffiti inscriptions; it was Latin that had undergone a number of important sound shifts and changes, which can be
reconstructed from the changes that are evident in its descendants, the Romance vernaculars.# In an even more restrictive sense, 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 this hypothesis, southeastern
Italian,
Romanian, and
Dalmatian developed separately.# "Vulgar Latin" is sometimes used to describe the grammatical innovations found in a number of late Latin texts, such as the
fourth century Peregrinatio Aetheriae, a nun's account of a 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 that provide some evidence of spoken usage during the period in which they were written.
Some literary works in a lower
register of language from the Classical Latin period also give a glimpse into the world of Vulgar Latin. The works of
Plautus and
Terence, being
comedies with many characters who were
slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features, as does the recorded speech of the freedmen in the
Cena Trimalchionis by
Petronius Arbiter.
Vulgar Latin developed differently in the various provinces of the Roman Empire, thus gradually giving rise to modern
French,
Italian,
Spanish,
Portuguese,
Romanian,
Catalan and
Romansh. Although the official language, in all of these areas, was Latin, Vulgar Latin was what was popularly spoken until the new localized forms diverged sufficiently from Latin to emerge as separate
standard languages.
The third century AD is presumed to be an age in which much vocabulary was changing (i.e.,
equus →
caballus, etc.) and recently, some studies (which still perhaps need more scientific development) have suggested that pronunciations too started to diverge, supposedly even then becoming similar to modern local pronunciations, with the most spectacular (alleged) effect in the area of
Naples. However, these changes could not have been uniform across the Empire's territory, so the greatest differences were perhaps to be found among different forms of Vulgar Latin in different areas (some due to the acquisition of newer "local" roots). However it must be noted that most of this theory is based on reconstruction
a posteriori rather than on texts.
For several centuries after the
fall of the Western Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin continued to coexist with written Late Latin: for when people who spoke one of the Romance vernaculars set out to write using proper grammar and spelling, what they put down was language that at least paid lip service to the norms of classical Latin. However, at the third
Council of Tours in 813,
priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language in order to be comprehensible â€" either the
rustica lingua romanica, Vulgar Latin now recognisably distinct from the frozen Church Latin; or
German. This could be a documented moment of the evolution. Within the space of a lifetime after the Council of Tours, in 842, the
Oaths of Strasbourg, recording an agreement between two of
Charlemagne's heirs, were spoken in a Romance language that was obviously not Latin:
Extract of the full text which is at
Oaths of Strasbourg.
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 ajudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il me altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid numquam prindrai, qui, meon vol, cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.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.
Late Latin, still based in Rome, presumably reflected these acquisitions, recording what was changing in a nearer area — fairly identifiable with Italy. Formal Latin was then "frozen" by the codifications of
Roman law on one side (
Justinian) and of the Church on the other side, finally unified by the medieval copyists and since then forever separated from already independent Romance vulgar idioms. The written language continued to exist as
mediaeval Latin. The Romance vernaculars were recognised as separate languages, and began to develop local norms and
orthographies of their own. "Vulgar Latin" ceases to be a useful name for either language.
Vulgar Latin is then a collective name for a group of derived dialects with local — not necessarily common — characteristics, that do not make a "language", at least in a classical sense. It could perhaps be described as a sort of "magmatic" undefined matter that slowly locally crystallized into the several early forms of each Romance language, that consequently find their ultimate proper ancestry in formal Latin. Vulgar Latin was therefore an intermediate point of the evolution, not a source.
Vowels
| Letter | Pronunciation | | Classical | Vulgar |
|---|
| A, a | short A | | |
|---|
| Ä€, Ä | long A | | |
|---|
| e, e | short E | | |
|---|
| Ä', Ä" | long E | | |
|---|
| I, i | short I | | |
|---|
| Ī, ī | long I | | |
|---|
| O, o | short O | | |
|---|
| Ō, Š| long O | | |
|---|
| U, u | short V | | |
|---|
| Ū, ū | long V | | |
|---|
| Y, y | short Y | | |
|---|
| Y, y | long Y | | |
|---|
| Ae, ae | AE | | |
|---|
| Oe, oe | OE | | |
|---|
| Au, au | AV | | |
|---|
| (see International Phonetic Alphabet for an explanation of the symbols used); |
|
One profound change that affected every Romance language reordered the
vowel system of classical Latin. Latin had 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 Greek borrowing, Y. Apart from
Sardinian, what happened to Vulgar Latin can be summarized as in the table to the right.
The diphthongs AE and OE became and respectively. 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 .)
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 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:
fuegoIn 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 [e] in Western dialects and a schwa in the Eastern ones. This schwa slowly evolved towards an open [É›], although in most of the Balearic Islands the schwa is mantained even nowadays. Eastern dialects have some vocalic instability similar to that of Portuguese as well: unstressed /e/ and /a/ turn into a schwa (in some point of the evolution of the language, this change didn't affect /e/ in prestressed position, a pronunciation that is still kept alive in part of the Balearics), and, except in most of Majorca, unstressed /o/ and /u/ merge into [u].
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 French
ciel, , Catalan
cel, , Spanish
cielo, and Portuguese
céu, , beginning with . 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 or often merged into an intermediate sound .
Note that in the
Latin alphabet, the letters U and V, I and J, were only graphic variations that were not distinguished until the early modern period, and lower-case letters did not exist.
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
TaurÄsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cÄ"pit ("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 (
MASCVLVS NON MASCLVS);
*the reduction of formerly syllabic /e/ and /i/ to /j/ (
VINEA NON VINIA);
*the levelling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/ (
COLVBER NON COLOBER) and /e/ and /i/ (
DIMIDIVS NON DEMEDIVS);
*regularization of irregular forms (
GLIS NON GLIRIS);
*regularization and emphasis of gendered forms (
PAVPER MVLIER NON PAVPERA MVLIER);
*levelling of the distinction between /b/ and /v/ between vowels (
BRAVIVM NON BRABIVM);
*the substitution of diminutives for unmarked words (
AVRIS NON ORICLA, NEPTIS NON NEPTICLA)
*the loss of syllable-final nasals (
MENSA NON MESA) or their inappropriate insertion as a form of
hypercorrection (
FORMOSVS NON FORMVNSVS).
Many of the forms castigated in the
Appendix Probi proved to be the productive forms in Romance;
oricla is the source of French
oreille, Catalan
orella, Spanish
oreja, Italian
orecchio, Romanian
ureche, Portuguese
orelha, "ear", not the classical Latin form.
| Classical Only | Classical & Romance!English | | sidus (root sider-) | stella | star |
| cruor | sanguis | blood |
| pulcher | bellus | beautiful |
| ferre (perfective root tul-) | portare | carry |
| ludere | jocare | play |
| os | bucca | mouth |
| brassica | caulis | cabbage |
| domus | casa | house |
| magnus | grandis | big |
| emere | comparare | buy |
| equus | caballus | horse |
Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary. Classical
equus, "
horse", was consistently replaced by
caballus, "nag" (but note Romanian
iapă, Sardinian
èbba, Spanish
yegua, Catalan
egua and Portuguese
égua all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical
equa).Classical
aequor, "sea", yielded to
mare universally. 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.
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 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
fongo and Spanish
hongo, with the F > H that was usual in Spanish (cf.
filius > Spanish
hijo, "son" or
facere > Spanish
hacer, "to do"). But
hongo shares its semantic space with
fungo, which by its lack of the expected sound shift displays that it has been re-borrowed from the higher register of classical Latin.
Sometimes, a classical Latin word was kept along side a Vulgar Latin word. In Vulgar Latin, classical
caput, "head", yielded to
testa (originally "pot", a metaphor common throughout Western Europe — cf. English
cup with
German Kopf) 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 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 [
1], 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:
*
FEMVR >
coxa (Portuguese and Old Spanish
coxa, French
cuisse, Italian
coscia, Catalan
cuixa, Romanian
coapsă, "thigh")
*
ARENA >
sabulo (Spanish "arena", Portuguese "areia", French
sable, Italian
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, and French as
optimo, ótimo, òptim, ottimo and
optimal/optimum 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:
*
TVRBAS >
fulcos (Spanish "turbia", 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
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")
*
ROSTRVM >
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, "to go")
*
LIBEROS >
infantes (French
enfants, "children")
*
MILITES >
servientes (French
sergents, "soldiers")
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
synthetic language to an
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 /ae/ 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.
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 it arose in seldom was written 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
adjective; 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
*homo illum).
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 has a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute.
Aetheria uses
ipse similarly:
per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.
Another indication of the weakening of the demonstratives can be inferred from the fact that at this time, legal and similar texts begin to swarm with
prædictus,
supradictus, and so forth (all meaning, essentially, "aforesaid"), which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes,
Erat autem. . . beatissimus Anianus in supradicta ciuitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were felt no longer to be specific enough. In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with
ecce (originally an
interjection: "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); Portuguese
acá/cá, (
eccu hac),
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.
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 three
grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in the Romance languages (though see below). In Latin gender is partly a matter of
agreement, i.e. certain nouns take certain forms of the adjectives and pronouns, and partly a matter of
inflection, i.e. there are different paradigms associated with the masculine/feminine on the one hand and the neuter on the other.
The classical Latin neuter was normally 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". 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",
amphiteater for
amphitheatrum "amphitheatre" and conversely the nominative
thesaurum for
thesaurus "treasure".
In Modern Romance, the nominative
s-ending has been abandoned and all substantives of the
o-declension have the ending
-UM >
-u/
-o/
-Ø:
MURUM > Italian and Spanish
muro, Catalan and French
mur and
CAELUM > Italian, Spanish
cielo, French
ciel, Catalan
cel. 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, identical in Classical Latin, was the form that survived. Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the Roman Empire 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 form in classical Latin was
lac. Note also that Spanish assigned it to the feminine gender, while French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian made it masculine. 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 used in Spanish
nombre.
Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in
-A or
-IA; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as
gaudium, plural
gaudia (
joy(s)); the plural form lies at the root of French feminine singular
la joie, as well as Catalan and Occitan
la joia (Italian
la gioia is a borrowing from French); same for
lignum, plural
ligna (
wood stick(s)) that originated Catalan feminine singular
la llenya, or Spanish
la leña. Some Romance languages still have a special plural form of the old neuters which is treated as a feminine syntactically: 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.
Forms such as Italian
l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") /
le uova fresche ("the fresh eggs") are usually explained away by saying that they are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, and that they have an irregular plural in
-a (heteroclisis). However, it is also consistent with the facts 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 Romanian.
These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, names of
trees were usually feminine gender, 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 masculines in Italian (
(il) pero) and Romanian (
păr(ul)); in French and Spanish it has been replaced by the masculine derivations
(le) poirier,
(el) peral, in Portuguese or Catalan by the feminine derivation
(a) pereira,
(la) perera).
Fagus ("
beech"), another feminine noun in masculine dress, is preserved in some dialects as a masculine, e.g. Romanian
fag(ul) or Catalan
(el) faig; other dialects have replaced it with its adjective forms
fageus or
fagea ("made of beechwood"), thus Italian
(il) faggio, Spanish
(el) haya, and Portuguese
(a) faia.
As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension
manus ("hand"), another feminine noun with a "masculine" ending, Italian and Spanish derived
(la) mano, Catalan
(la) mà , and Portuguese
(a) mão, which preserves its feminine gender even though it remains masculine in appearance.
| Typical Italian endings | | - | Nouns | Adj. & determiners |
| sing. | plur. | sing. | plur. |
| m | giardino | giardini | buono | buoni |
| f | donna | donne | buona | buone |
| (n | uovo | uova | buono | buone) |
Except for the Italian and Romanian "heteroclitic" nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but all have 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" m., "every" f., "everything").
Some varieties of
Astur-Leonese maintain endings for the three genders such as follows:
bonu, bona, bono ("good").
(Note: Spanish has a neuter gender of sorts with the neuter article 'Lo', usually used with nouns denoting abstract categories: "lo bueno", i.e. that or everything which is 'good', from
bueno: good; "lo importante", i.e. that or everything 'important'. "Sabes LO TARDE que es?", literally "Do you know 'that which is late' that it is?", or more idiomatically: "Do you know how late it is?" from
tarde: late. As far as pronouns, Spanish also has a neuter singular
ello, aside from the well cited
él, ella.)
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 "afara"
ad +
foris), and we find St
Jerome writing
si quis de foris venerit ("if anyone goes outside").
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:*
IacÅbus patrÄ« librum dat.â€"James is giving his father a/the book.
*
Vulgar Latin:*
´Jacá»má»s ´lẹvrá» a ´ppatre ´dá»nat.â€"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:*
IacÅbus mihi librum patris dat.â€"James is giving me his father's book.
*
Vulgar Latin:*
´Jacá»má»s mẹ ´lẹvrá» dẹ ´patre ´dá»nat.â€"James is giving me the book of (belonging to) his father.
or
*
Vulgar Latin:*
´Jacá»má»s ´lẹvrá» dẹ ´patre a ´mmẹ ´dá»nat.â€"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 VIII:
Nunc iam illa non vult; tu, quoque, impotens, noliNec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive,
Sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.("Now she doesn't want you anymore; you, too, should not want her, neither chase her as she flees, nor pine in misery: but carry on obstinately [obstinate-mindedly]: get over it!")
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,
Ämo and
amÄmus. Because a stressed A gave rise to a diphthong in some environments in Old French, that daughter language had
(j')aime for the former and
(nous) amons 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 viens ("I come")/
nous venons ("we come").
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"). 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 /awi/, and the /w/ sound was in many cases dropped; it did not participate in the sound shift from /w/ to /v/. 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 /w/.
Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, the
passive voice was utterly lost in Romance, which entailed its replacement with
auxiliary verbsâ€"forms of "to be" plus a passive participleâ€"or impersonal
reflexive forms.
Another major systemic change was to the
future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. This may have been due to phonetic merger of intervocalic /b/ and /v/, 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 "I have to love". This was contracted into a new future suffix in Romance forms which can be seen in the following modern examples of "I will love":
*
French:
j'aimerai (
je +
aimer +
ai) <
aimer ["to love"] +
J'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"].
The origins of the future suffix as an independent word is particularly evident in Portuguese, which sometimes adds direct and indirect pronouns as infixes in the future tense: "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. (Old Spanish behaved similarly.)
*
Cantar de Mio Cid*
Veronese Riddle*
Demonstrative*
An Introduction to Vulgar Latin by C.H. Grandgent
*
Latin at the End of the Imperial Age by Dag Norberg
* N. Vincent: "Latin", in
The Romance Languages, M. Harris and N. Vincent, eds., (Oxford Univ. Press. 1990), ISBN 0-19-520829-3
* K. P. Harrington, J. Pucci, and A. G. Elliott,
Medieval Latin (2nd ed.), (Univ. Chicago Pres, 1997) ISBN 0-226-31712-9
-Vulgar Latin should not be confused with
Pig Latin.
