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Vulgar Latin (in Latin, ''sermo vulgaris'') 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 assigned to about the Ninth Century . 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 Basilect al 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 Dialect s 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 Solecism s and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also shed light on the spoken language of the writer. WHAT WAS VULGAR LATIN? , 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 occassional 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 Slave s, 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 '', '' Oc '', or ''Si''). The third century AD is presumed to be the age in which much vocabulary was changing (i.e., ''equus'' → ''caballus'', etc.). 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 in 813 , Priest s were ordered to preach in the vernacular language in order to be comprehensible — 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. PHONOLOGY Vowels One profound change that affected every Romance language reordered the s, 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: 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'' , and unstressed ''e'', which changes to or . Consonants Palatalization of Latin , , and often was almost universal in vulgar Latin; the only Romance dialect it did not affect was some varieties of Sardinian . Thus Latin ''caelum'', pronounced beginning with , became French ''ciel'', , Catalan ''cel'', , 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 (and later in some areas, Typographic ) variations that were not distinguished until the early modern period, and lower-case letters did not exist. In the Western Romance area, an 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:
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. VOCABULARY 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'', 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 Particle s 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 ''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.
Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such Suffix es 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 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:
grammatical changes:
Germanic loan words:
and words whose meaning has changed:
GRAMMAR The loss of the noun case system The sound changes that were occurring in Vulgar Latin made the Noun Case system of Classical Latin harder to sustain, and ultimately spelled doom for the system of Latin Declension s. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, vulgar Latin moved from being a 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.
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 Text s 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.
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, Spanish ''muro'', French ''mur'' and CAELUM > Italian, Spanish ''cielo'', French ''ciel''. Old French still had ''-s'' in the nominative and ''-Ø'' in the accusative in ''both'' original genders (''murs'', ''ciels'').
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'' (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 Tree s 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. 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: ''el, la, ho'' ("him", "her", "it"); 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 Preposition s 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.
Just as in the disappearing dative case, colloquial Latin sometimes replaced the disappearing genitive case with the preposition ''de'' followed by the ablative.
or
Adverbs Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made 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, noli Nec 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 {Link without Title} : 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, ''āmo'' and ''amāmus''. 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) '''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")/ ''nous v'''e'''nons'' ("we come").
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 Verb s—forms of "to be" plus a passive participle—or impersonal Reflexive forms.
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'' + (eu) ''hei'' = ''amar+te+[h ei'' = ''amar-te-ei''. (Old Spanish behaved similarly.) SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
REFERENCES
- Vulgar Latin should not be confused with Pig Latin . |