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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 Dialect s and Sociolect s 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 Basilect al forms, much earlier. WHAT WAS VULGAR LATIN? '') 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.L. R. Palmer The Latin Language (repr. Univ. Oklahoma 1988, ISBN 0-8061-2136-X 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.Leonard. R. Palmer, ''The Latin Language'' (1954, repr. Univ. Oklahoma 1988, ISBN 0-8061-2136-X) 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 Solecism s and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also reveal, in part, the author's spoken language.Charles H. Grandgent, [http://books.google.com/books?id=_OzEl6nLsGIC&pg=PA5&lpg=PR4 ''An Introduction to Vulgar Latin''] (Heath & Co., 1907) 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 Slave s, 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 Language s. 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:József Herman Vulgar Latin (repr. Penn State Press 2000, ISBN 0-271-02001-6 Indeed, at the third Council Of Tours in 813, Priest s 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: 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 See Also: Latin spelling and pronunciation Latin regional pronunciation Vowels One profound change that affected every Romance language was the reordering of the s, 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: 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.N. Vincent: "Latin", in ''The Romance Languages'', (M. Harris and N. Vincent, eds., Oxford Univ. Press. 1990, ISBN 0-19-520829-3) 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''. 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 Republic an 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 Basilect al 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 .) 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: 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 Consonant s. 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 .Mildred K. Pope, ''From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman Phonology and Morphology.'' (Manchester University Press, 1934) 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.
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'' (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 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 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''.K. P. Harrington, J. Pucci, and A. G. Elliott, Medieval Latin (2nd ed., Univ. Chicago Pres, 1997, ISBN 0-226-31712-9) 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.
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 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.
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 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.
On the other hand, even in the 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 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'').
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 Tree s 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 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 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 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 "afară" ''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 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')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") versus ''nous v'''e'''nons'' ("we come").
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 Infix es 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'' + (''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 See Also: Romance copula
REFERENCES Further reading
Various books cover the changes between Latin and specific Romance languages, including:
SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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