Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular[1] or Colloquial Latin,[2] refers to a range of informal sociolects of Latin spoken as a native language from the first century b.c. onward in the late Roman Republic and then the Empire, at first only in Italy and later also in heavily romanized provinces such as Hispania, Gaul, Illyria, Thrace, and Africa. Its more formal and literary counterpart was Classical Latin, which was standardized at the beginning of this period.

Vulgar Latin
sermo vulgaris
Pronunciation[ˈs̠ɛrmo βʊlˈɡaːrɪs̠]
Native to
EraAntiquity; developed into Romance languages 6th to 9th centuries
Early form
Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3–
lat-vul
Glottologvulg1234
Latin-speaking or otherwise heavily Latin-influenced areas in the Late Roman Empire, highlighted in red.

It is difficult to tell when its pronunciation began to diverge on a regional basis since informal features were generally masked in texts of all kinds—literary, technical, etc.—resulting in a language that looks essentially homogenous for the first five or six centuries AD across the Roman Empire.[3] Nevertheless, careful statistical analysis reveals a number of regional differences toward the end of this period, for instance in the treatment of mid-vowels and in the timing of the intervocalic /b/-/w/ merger.[4]

The first signs of a decisive split between written and spoken Latin appear around the start of the ninth century in France, during the Carolingian Renaissance. Beginning in France, and only later in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, Ecclesiastical Latin appears to have taken on a careful letter-by-letter pronunciation distinct from that of early spoken Romance.[5]

The Latin spoken in the Balkans north of the Jireček Line came to be heavily influenced by Greek and later by Slavic languages as well from the migration period onward. This, together with the resulting isolation from the West, resulted in Balkan Romance having several words and features not shared with the other branches.[6][7]

Origin of the term

The term itself was first used by the pioneers of Romance-language philology: François Juste Marie Raynouard (1761–1836) and Friedrich Christian Diez (1794–1876).

In the course of his studies on the lyrics of songs written by the troubadours of Provence,[8] which had already been discussed by Dante Alighieri in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, Raynouard noticed that many of the features of Romance languages corresponded to ones that were found in Latin itself, but were marginal or stigmatized in 'proper' writing. He hypothesized an intermediate 'mixed' phase and identified it with the romana lingua, a term sometimes used in early medieval sources to distinguish spoken Romance from written Latin.[9]

Impressed by the comparative methods used for the first time by Jakob Grimm in his Deutsche Grammatik (1819), Diez decided to apply them to the Romance languages as well and in the process stumbled upon Raynouard's aforementioned work. Describing himself as a pupil of the latter, Diez went on to broaden the comparison to include all of the major Romance languages[10] (namely Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Occitan, and French) in his Grammar of the Romance Languages.[11] He concluded that all of these originated not in the polished Classical variety of Latin but rather in "the popular Roman speech or dialect."[12] These terms, as he points out later in the work, are a direct translation of Dante's vulgare latinum or latinum vulgare and Boccaccio's latino volgare.[13]

During the Classical period, the Romans themselves acknowledged that Latin had different sociolects and deemed the lower-class varieties sermo plebeius or sermo vulgaris ("common speech"), among other terms.[14]

Sources

Knowledge about informal spoken registers of Latin comes from such sources as:[15][16]

  • Recurrent grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic mistakes, especially in Late Latin texts or inscriptions.
  • Explicit mention, and sometimes condemnation, of certain constructions or pronunciation habits by Roman grammarians.
  • Proto-Romance, an abstracted skeletal approximation of Latin speech reconstructed by comparing the Romance languages.
  • The pronunciation of early borrowings from Latin into neighboring languages such as Basque, Albanian, or Germanic languages.
  • Pre-Classical texts such as the plays of Plautus and Terence, as well as the speech of certain lower-class characters in Classical literature, most famously that of the ex-slave Trimalchio in Petronius' Satyricon.

History
An extract of the Oaths of Strasbourg, the earliest known Gallo-Romance text.

The original written Latin language (what is today referred to as Classical Latin) was adapted from the actual spoken language of the Latins, with some minor modifications, long before the rise of the Roman Empire. As with many languages, over time the spoken vulgar language diverged from the written language, with the written language remaining somewhat static. During the classical period spoken (Vulgar) Latin still remained largely common across the Empire, some minor dialectal differences notwithstanding.

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire caused rapid changes. The former western provinces became increasingly isolated from the Eastern Roman Empire, leading to a rapid divergence between the Latin spoken on either side of the Adriatic north of a line that ran from northern Albania mid-way through Bulgaria but stopped short of the Black Sea coast which was Greek-speaking. In the West an even more complex transformation was occurring. A blending of cultures was occurring between the former Roman citizens who were fluent in the "proper" Latin speech (which was already substantially different from Classical Latin), and many of the Gothic rulers who, though largely Latinised, tended to speak Latin poorly, speaking what could be considered a pidgin of Latin and their Germanic mother tongue, though this changed over time. Notable among those who spoke Latin well is Theodoric the Great, imperial regent of Italy (493–526) who is reputed to have been illiterate based on his use of a stamp to sign documents. Since he lived as a hostage of Emperor Leo I at the Great Palace of Constantinople from 461 to 471 (from age 7 to 17) and was well-educated by Constantinople's best teachers,[17] it is difficult to believe he did not know Greek and Latin.

The 'vulgar' or conversational Latin language that continued to evolve after the establishment of the successor kingdoms of the Roman State incorporated Germanic vocabulary, but with minimal influences from Germanic grammar (Germanic languages did not displace Latin except in northern Belgium, England, the Rhineland Moselle region and north of the Alps). For a few centuries this language remained relatively common across most of Western Europe (as a result, Italian, Spanish, French, etc. are far more similar to each other than to Classical Latin), though regional dialects were already developing. As early as 722, in a face to face meeting between Pope Gregory II, born and raised in Rome, and Saint Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon, Boniface complained that he found Pope Gregory's Latin speech difficult to understand, a clear sign of the transformation of Vulgar Latin in two regions of western Europe.[18]

Although they had become more dissimilar over time, Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin were still viewed as the same language.

The verb system [...] seems to have remained virtually intact throughout the fifth century [...] the transformation of the language, from structures we call Latin into structures we call Romance, lasted from the third or fourth century until the eighth, "So its history came to an end – or to put it another way, the language becomes a 'dead' language – when it stops functioning in this way and is no longer anybody's natural mother tongue," In Gaul from the mid-eighth century many people were not able to understand even the most straightforward religious texts read to them in Latin. In Italy the first signs that people were aware of the difference between the everyday language they spoke and the written form is in the mid-tenth century. The period of most rapid change occurred from the second half of the seventh century. Until then the spoken and written form (though with many vulgar features) were regarded as one language.[19]

Similarly, while increasingly divergent, Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages were seen as the same tongue.[20] At the Third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language – either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars – since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg (842), a treaty between Charlemagne's grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German, was proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinct from Latin. József Herman states:

It seems certain that in the sixth century, and quite likely into the early parts of the seventh century, people in the main Romanized areas could still largely understand the biblical and liturgical texts and the commentaries (of greater or lesser simplicity) that formed part of the rites and of religious practice, and that even later, throughout the seventh century, saints' lives written in Latin could be read aloud to the congregations with an expectation that they would be understood. We can also deduce however, that in Gaul, from the central part of the eighth century onward, many people, including several of the clerics, were not able to understand even the most straightforward religious texts.[21]

By the end of the first millennium, local speech had diverged to the point that distinct languages are recognizable; names were emerging for these; and some of the more geographically distant ones may have become mutually unintelligible. With the evolved Latin vernaculars viewed as different languages with local norms, specific orthographies were duly developed for some. Since all modern Romance varieties are continuations of this evolution, Vulgar Latin is not extinct but survives in variously evolved forms as today's Romance languages and dialects. In Romance-speaking Europe, recognition of the common origin of Romance varieties was replaced by labels recognizing and implicitly accentuating local differences in linguistic features. Some Romance languages evolved more than others. In terms of phonological structures, for example, a clear hierarchy from conservative to innovative is found in a comparison of modern Italian, Spanish and French (e.g. Latin amica > Italian amica, Spanish amiga, French amie; Latin caput > Italian capo, Spanish cabo, French chef).

The Oaths of Strasbourg offer indications of the state of Gallo-Romance toward the middle of the 9th century. While the language cannot be said with any degree of certainty to be Old French in the sense of the linear precursor to today's standard French, the abundance of Gallo-Romance features provides a glimpse of some particulars of Vulgar Latin's evolution on French soil.

Extract of the Romance portion of the Oaths of Strasbourg (842)
TextReconstructed Pronunciation[22]Translation
Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in ayudha et in cadhuna cosa si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet. Et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karlo in damno sit.pro dɛ́ə amór e pro krístjan pɔ́blə e nɔ́strə komún salvamɛ́nt dést dí en avánt en kánt dɛ́əs savér e poðér mə dónat sí salvarái̯ ɛ́ə tsést məon fráðrə karlə eð en ajúða eð en kaðúna kɔ́za sí kóm ɔ́m pər dréi̯t son fráðrə salvár déft en ɔ́ keð íl mí altresí fátsət eð a loðér núl plai̯t nónka prendrái̯ kí məon vɔ́l tsést məon fráðrə kárlə en dámnə sétFor the love of God and for Christendom and our common salvation, from this day onwards, as God will give me the wisdom and power, I shall protect this brother of mine Charles, with aid or anything else, as one ought to protect one's brother, so that he may do the same for me, and I shall never knowingly make any covenant with Lothair that would harm this brother of mine Charles.

Vocabulary
Main article: Vulgar Latin vocabulary
Further information: Reichenau Glosses

Vulgar Latin largely kept much of its classical vocabulary, albeit with some changes in spelling and case usage.

Shifting usage of words

In many dialects of Vulgar Latin, new words were either created or gained greater popularity as the language developed. For example, equus ("horse") (Classical Latin), was replaced by caballu.[23] Many words started to change or broaden their meaning. The Classical Latin word fabulare ("to make stories") became a broad term for "to speak" in Vulgar Latin, encompassing narrare, loqui and other similar verbs (all roughly translating to "to tell, to speak" in Classical Latin).

As Vulgar Latin lost its cases, the new caseless words often took their accusative forms after shifting spelling and pronunciation.

Phonological development
See also: Latin spelling and pronunciation
Main article: Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance

Contemporary evidence

The Appendix Probi, written in the third or fourth century AD, is a collection of spelling corrections written in the format "[correct spelling], not [incorrect spelling]". The spelling mistakes hint at ongoing changes in the spoken language, such as:[24]

  1. Syncope in unstressed internal syllables:
  2. Development of [j] from front vowels in hiatus:
  3. Loss of /n/ before /s/:

Many of the 'incorrect' forms survive today in Romance: the form mesa 'table' explains Spanish mesa and Romanian masă; speclum 'looking-glass' explains Italian specchio and Portuguese espelho; oclus explains Aromanian oclju and Neapolitan uocchio; etc.

Consonant development
See also: Romance languages § Consonants

The most significant consonant changes affecting Vulgar Latin were palatalization (except in Sardinia); lenition, including simplification of geminate consonants (in areas north and west of the La Spezia–Rimini Line, e.g. Spanish digo vs. Italian dico 'I say', Spanish boca vs. Italian bocca 'mouth'); and loss of final consonants.

Loss of final consonants

The loss of final consonants was underway by the 1st century AD in some areas. A graffiti at Pompeii reads "quisque ama valia", which in Classical Latin would read "quisquis amat valeat" ("may whoever loves be strong/do well").[25] (The change from "valeat" to "valia" is also an early indicator of the development of /j/ (yod), which played such an important part in the development of palatalization.) On the other hand, this loss of final /t/ was not general. Old Spanish and Old French preserved a reflex of final /t/ up through 1100 AD or so, and modern French still maintains final /t/ in some liaison environments, and Sardinian retains final /t/ in almost all circumstances.

Lenition of stops

Areas north and west of the La Spezia–Rimini Line lenited intervocalic /p, t, k/ to /b, d, ɡ/. This phenomenon is occasionally attested during the imperial period, but it became frequent by the 7th century. For example, in Merovingian documents, "rotatico" > rodatico ("wheel tax").[26]

Simplification of geminates

Reduction of bisyllabic clusters of identical consonants to a single syllable-initial consonant also typifies Romance north and west of La Spezia-Rimini. The results in Italian and Spanish provide clear illustrations: "siccus" > Italian secco, Spanish seco; "cippus" > Italian ceppo, Spanish cepo; "mittere" > Italian mettere, Spanish meter.

Loss of word-final m

The loss of the final m was a process which seems to have begun by the time of the earliest monuments of the Latin language. The epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who died around 150 BC, reads "taurasia cisauna samnio cepit", which in Classical Latin would be "taurāsiam, cisaunam, samnium cēpit" ("He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium"). This however can be explained in a different way, that the inscription simply fails to note the nasality of the final vowels (just as consul was customarily abbreviated as "cos").

Neutralization of /b/ and /w/

Confusions between b and v show that the Classical semivowel /w/, and intervocalic /b/ partially merged to become a bilabial fricative /β/ (Classical semivowel /w/ became /β/ in Vulgar Latin, while [β] became an allophone of /b/ in intervocalic position). Already by the 1st century AD, a document by one Eunus writes "iobe" for "iovem" and "dibi" for "divi".[27] In most of the Romance varieties, this sound would further develop into /v/, with the notable exception of the betacist varieties of Hispano-Romance and some Sardinian lects: b and v represent the same phoneme /b/ (with allophone [β]) in Modern Spanish, as well as in Galician, northern Portuguese, several varieties of Occitan and the northern dialects of Catalan.

Consonant cluster simplification

In general, many clusters were simplified in Vulgar Latin. For example, /ns/ reduced to /s/, reflecting the fact that syllable-final /n/ was no longer phonetically consonantal. In some inscriptions, "mensis" > mesis ("month"), or "consul" > cosul ("consul").[26] Descendants of "mensis" include Portuguese mês, Spanish and Catalan mes, Old French meis (Modern French mois), Italian mese.[26] In some areas (including much of Italy), the clusters [mn], [kt] ⟨ct⟩, [ks] ⟨x⟩ were assimilated to the second element: [nn], [tt], [ss].[26] Thus, some inscriptions have "omnibus" > onibus ("all [dative plural]"), "indictione" > inditione ("indiction"), "vixit" > bissit ("lived").[26] Also, three-consonant clusters usually lost the middle element. For example, "emptores" > imtores ("buyers").[26]

Not all areas show the same development of these clusters, however. In the East, Italian has [kt] > [tt], as in "octo" > otto ("eight") or "nocte" > notte ("night"); while Romanian has [kt] > [pt] (opt, noapte).[26] By contrast, in the West, the [k] weakened to [j]. In French and Portuguese, this came to form a diphthong with the previous vowel (huit, oito; nuit, noite), while in Spanish, the [i] brought about palatalization of [t], which produced [tʃ] (*oito > ocho, *noite > noche).[28]

Also, many clusters including [j] were simplified. Several of these groups seem to have never been fully stable (e.g. facunt for "faciunt"). This dropping has resulted in the word "parietem" ("wall") developing as Italian parete, Romanian părete>perete, Portuguese parede, Spanish pared, or French paroi (Old French pareid).[28]

The cluster [kw] ⟨qu⟩ was simplified to [k] in most instances before /i/ and /e/. In 435, one can find the hypercorrective spelling quisquentis for "quiescentis" ("of the person who rests here"). Modern languages have followed this trend, for example Latin "qui" ("who") has become Italian chi and French qui (both /ki/); while "quem" ("whom") became quien (/kjen/) in Spanish and quem (/kẽj/) in Portuguese.[28] However, [kw] has survived in front of [a] in most areas, although not in French; hence Latin "quattuor" yields Spanish cuatro (/kwatro/), Portuguese quatro (/kwatru/), and Italian quattro (/kwattro/), but French quatre (/katʀ/), where the qu- spelling is purely etymological.[28]

In Spanish, most words with consonant clusters in syllable-final position are loanwords from Classical Latin, examples are: transporte [tɾansˈpor.te], transmitir [tɾanz.miˈtir], instalar [ins.taˈlar], constante [konsˈtante], obstante [oβsˈtante], obstruir [oβsˈtɾwir], perspectiva [pers.pekˈti.βa], istmo [ˈist.mo]. A syllable-final position cannot be more than one consonant (one of n, r, l, s or z) in most (or all) dialects in colloquial speech, reflecting Vulgar Latin background. Realizations like [trasˈpor.te], [tɾaz.miˈtir], [is.taˈlar], [kosˈtante], [osˈtante], [osˈtɾwir], and [ˈiz.mo] are very common, and in many cases, they are considered acceptable even in formal speech.

Vowel development
See also: Romance languages § Vowels

In general, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin, which relied on phonemic vowel length, was newly modelled into one in which vowel length distinctions lost phonemic importance, and qualitative distinctions of height became more prominent.

System in Classical Latin

Classical Latin had 10 different vowel phonemes, grouped into five pairs of short-long, ⟨ă – ā, ĕ – ē, ĭ – ī, ŏ – ō, ŭ – ū⟩. It also had four diphthongs, ⟨ae, oe, au, eu⟩, and the rare diphthongs ⟨ui, ei⟩. Finally, there were also long and short ⟨y⟩, representing /y/, /yː/ in Greek borrowings, which, however, probably came to be pronounced /i/, /iː/ even before Romance vowel changes started.

At least since the 1st century AD, short vowels (except a) differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts, the short vowels being lower.[29][30] Thus the vowel inventory is usually reconstructed as /a – aː/, /ɛ – eː/, /ɪ – iː/, /ɔ – oː/, /ʊ – uː/.

General vowel changes in most Vulgar Latin
Spelling1st cent.2nd cent.3rd cent.4th cent.
ă /a//a/
ā /aː/
ĕ /ɛ/
ē /eː//e//e/
ĭ /ɪ/
ī /iː//i/
ŏ /ɔ/
ō /oː//o//o/
ŭ /ʊ/
ū /uː//u/

Monophthongization

Many diphthongs had begun their monophthongization very early. It is presumed that by Republican times, "ae" had become /ɛː/ in unstressed syllables, a phenomenon that would spread to stressed positions around the 1st century AD.[31] From the 2nd century AD, there are instances of spellings with ⟨ĕ⟩ instead of ⟨ae⟩.[32] ⟨oe⟩ was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin (in Old Latin, oinos regularly became "unus" ("one")) and became /eː/ during early Imperial times. Thus, one can find penam for "poenam".[31]

However, ⟨au⟩ lasted much longer. While it was monophthongized to /o/ in areas of north and central Italy (including Rome), it was retained in most Vulgar Latin, and it survives in modern Romanian (for example, aur < "aurum"). There is evidence in French and Spanish that the monophthongization of au occurred independently in those languages.[31]

Loss of distinctive length and near-close mergers

Length confusions seem to have begun in unstressed vowels, but they were soon generalized.[33] In the 3rd century AD, Sacerdos mentions people's tendency to shorten vowels at the end of a word, while some poets (like Commodian) show inconsistencies between long and short vowels in versification.[33] However, the loss of contrastive length caused only the merger of "ă" and "ā" while the rest of pairs remained distinct in quality: /a/, /ɛ – e/, /ɪ – i/, /ɔ – o/, /ʊ – u/.[34]

Also, the near-close vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ became more open in most varieties and merged with /e/ and /o/ respectively.[34] As a result, the reflexes of Latin pira "pear" and vēra "true" rhyme in most Romance languages: Italian and Spanish pera, vera. Similarly, Latin nucem "walnut" and vōcem "voice" become Italian noce, voce, Portuguese noz, voz.

There was likely some regional variation in pronunciation, as the Romanian languages and Sardinian evolved differently.[35] In Sardinian, all corresponding short and long vowels simply merged with each other, creating a 5-vowel system: /a, e, i, o, u/. In Romanian, the front vowels ĕ, ĭ, ē, ī evolved like the Western languages, but the back vowels ŏ, ŭ, ō, ū evolved as in Sardinian. A few Southern Italian languages, such as southern Corsican, northernmost Calabrian and southern Lucanian, behave like Sardinian with its penta-vowel system or, in case of Vegliote (even if only partially) and western Lucanian,[36] like Romanian.

Phonologization of stress

The placement of stress generally did not change from Classical to Vulgar Latin, and except for reassignment of stress on some verb morphology (e.g. Italian cantavamo 'we were singing', but stress retracted one syllable in Spanish cantábamos) most words continued to be stressed on the same syllable they were before. However, the loss of distinctive length disrupted the correlation between syllable weight and stress placement that existed in Classical Latin. Whereas in Classical Latin the place of the accent was predictable from the structure of the word, it was no longer so in Vulgar Latin. Stress had become a phonological property and could serve to distinguish forms that were otherwise homophones of identical phonological structure, as in Spanish canto 'I sing' vs. cantó 'he or she sang'.

Lengthening of stressed open syllables

After the Classical Latin vowel length distinctions were lost in favor of vowel quality, a new system of allophonic vowel quantity appeared sometime between the 4th and 5th centuries. Around then, stressed vowels in open syllables came to be pronounced long (but still keeping height contrasts), and all the rest became short. For example, long venis /*ˈvɛː.nis/, fori /*fɔː.ri/, cathedra /*ˈkaː.te.dra/; but short vendo /*ˈven.do/, formas /*ˈfor.mas/.[37] (This allophonic length distinction persists to this day in Italian.) However, in some regions of Iberia and Gaul, all stressed vowels came to be pronounced long: for example, porta /*ˈpɔːr.ta/, tempus /*ˈtɛːm.pus/.[37] In many descendants, several of the long vowels underwent some form of diphthongization, most extensively in Old French where five of the seven long vowels were affected by breaking.

Grammar

Romance articles

It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed.

Definite articles evolved from demonstrative pronouns or adjectives (an analogous development is found in many Indo-European languages, including Greek, Celtic and Germanic); compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, illud "that", in the Romance languages, becoming French le and la (Old French li, lo, la), Catalan and Spanish el, la and lo, Occitan lo and la, Portuguese o and a (elision of -l- is a common feature of Portuguese), and Italian il, lo and la. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ipse, ipsa "this" (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, e.g. lupul ("the wolf" – from *lupum illum) and omul ("the man" – *homo illum),[35] possibly a result of being within the Balkan sprachbund.

This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille daemon sodalis peccati ("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 Koine Greek, which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.[25]

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 praedictus, 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 civitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were no longer felt to be strong or specific enough.[25]

In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ecce (originally an interjection: "behold!"), which also spawned Italian ecco through eccum, a contracted form of ecce eum. This is the origin of Old French cil (*ecce ille), cist (*ecce iste) and ici (*ecce hic); Italian questo (*eccum istum), quello (*eccum illum) and (now mainly Tuscan) codesto (*eccum tibi istum), as well as qui (*eccu hic), qua (*eccum hac); Spanish and Occitan aquel and Portuguese aquele (*eccum ille); Spanish acá and Portuguese cá (*eccum hac); Spanish aquí and Portuguese aqui (*eccum hic); Portuguese acolá (*eccum illac) and aquém (*eccum inde); Romanian acest (*ecce iste) and acela (*ecce ille), 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 christian poblo – "for the Christian people"). Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles are suffixed to the noun (or an adjective preceding it), as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages.

The numeral unus, una (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases (again, this is a common semantic development across Europe). This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.

Loss of neuter gender
1st and 2nd adjectival declension paradigm in Classical Latin:
e.g. altus ("tall")
Excludes vocative.
singularplural
masculineneuterfemininemasculineneuterfeminine
nominative altusaltumaltaaltīaltaaltae
accusative altumaltamaltōsaltaaltās
dative altōaltaealtīs
ablative altōaltāaltīs
genitive altīaltaealtōrumaltārum
The genders

The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages.

The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion had already started in Pompeian graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum ("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's work, one can find balneus for balneum ("bath"), fatus for fatum ("fate"), caelus for caelum ("heaven"), amphitheater for amphitheatrum ("amphitheatre"), vinus for vinum ("wine"), and conversely, thesaurum for thesaurus ("treasure"). Most of these forms occur in the speech of one man: Trimalchion, an uneducated Greek (i.e. foreign) freedman.

In modern Romance languages, the nominative s-ending has been largely abandoned, and all substantives of the o-declension have an ending derived from -um: -u, -o, or -Ø. E.g., masculine murum ("wall"), and neuter caelum ("sky") have evolved to: Italian muro, cielo; Portuguese muro, céu; Spanish muro, cielo, Catalan mur, cel; Romanian mur, cieru>cer; French mur, ciel. However, Old French still had -s in the nominative and -Ø in the accusative in both words: murs, ciels [nominative] – mur, ciel [oblique]. [lower-alpha 1]

For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was productive; for others, the nominative/accusative form, (the two were identical in Classical Latin). Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French (le) lait, Catalan (la) llet, Occitan (lo) lach, Spanish (la) leche, Portuguese (o) leite, Italian language (il) latte, Leonese (el) lleche and Romanian lapte(le) ("milk"), all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin nominative/accusative neuter lacte or accusative masculine lactem. In Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, lapte/lăpturi). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French nom, Leonese, Portuguese and Italian nome, Romanian nume ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative nomen, rather than the oblique stem form *nominem (which nevertheless produced Spanish nombre).[35]

Typical Italian endings
Nouns Adjectives and determiners
singularpluralsingularplural
masculine giardinogiardinibuonobuoni
feminine donnadonnebuonabuone
neuter uovouovabuonobuone

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 braț(ul) : brațe(le). Cf. also Merovingian Latin ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant.

Alternations in Italian heteroclitic nouns such as l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") / le uova fresche ("the fresh eggs") are usually analysed as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in -a. However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that 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. The same alternation in gender exists in certain Romanian nouns, but is considered regular as it is more common than in Italian. Thus, a relict neuter gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian.

In Portuguese, traces of the neuter plural can be found in collective formations and words meant to inform a bigger size or sturdiness. Thus, one can use ovo/ovos ("egg/eggs") and ova/ovas ("roe", "a collection of eggs"), bordo/bordos ("section(s) of an edge") and borda/bordas ("edge/edges"), saco/sacos ("bag/bags") and saca/sacas ("sack/sacks"), manto/mantos ("cloak/cloaks") and manta/mantas ("blanket/blankets"). Other times, it resulted in words whose gender may be changed more or less arbitrarily, like fruto/fruta ("fruit"), caldo/calda (broth"), etc.

These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, the names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin 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.

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, Romanian mânu>mâna pl (reg.)mâini/mâini, 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 still have neuter pronouns. French celui-ci / celle-ci / ceci ("this"), Spanish éste / ésta / esto ("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 ("all of him" / "all of her" / "all of it").

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 "that which is good", from bueno: good.

  1. In a few isolated masculine nouns, the s has been either preserved or reinstated in the modern languages, for example FILIUS ("son") > French fils, DEUS ("god") > Spanish dios and Portuguese deus, and particularly in proper names: Spanish Carlos, Marcos, in the conservative orthography of French Jacques, Charles, Jules, etc.[38]

Loss of oblique cases

The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions.[39] Some of the causes include: the loss of final m, the merger of ă with ā, and the merger of ŭ with ō (see tables).[39] Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced.[39]

Evolution of a 1st declension noun:
caepa/cēpa ("onion") (feminine singular)
Classical
(c. 1st century)		 Vulgar[39]
(c. 5th cent.)		 Modern
Romanian
nominative caepa, cēpa *cépa ceapă
accusative caepam, cēpam
ablative caepā, cēpā
dative caepae, cēpae *cépe cepe
genitive
Evolution of a 2nd declension noun:
mūrus ("wall") (masculine singular)
Classical
(c. 1st cent.)		 Vulgar[39]
(c. 5th cent.)		 Old French
(c. 11th cent.)
nominative mūrus *múros murs
accusative mūrum *múru mur
ablative mūrō *múro
dative
genitive mūrī *múri

There also seems to be a marked tendency to confuse different forms even when they had not become homophonous (like the generally more distinct plurals), which indicates that nominal declension was shaped not only by phonetic mergers, but also by structural factors.[39] As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin shifted from a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic one.

The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by "de" + noun (which originally meant "about/concerning", weakened to "of") as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining genitive forms are some pronouns, many fossilized combinations like sayings, some proper names, and certain terms related to the church. For example, French jeudi ("Thursday") < Old French juesdi < Vulgar Latin "jovis diēs"; Spanish es menester ("it is necessary") < "est ministeri"; terms like "angelorum", "paganorum"; and Italian terremoto ("earthquake") < "terrae motu" as well as names like Paoli, Pieri.[40]

The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction "ad" + accusative. For example, "ad carnuficem dabo".[40][41]

The accusative case developed as a prepositional case, displacing many instances of the ablative.[40] Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case.[42]

Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely confused in inscriptions.[42] Even though Gaulish texts from the 7th century rarely confuse both forms, it is believed that both cases began to merge in Africa by the end of the empire, and a bit later in parts of Italy and Iberia.[42] Nowadays, Romanian maintains a two-case system, while Old French and Old Occitan had a two-case subject-oblique system.

This Old French system was based largely on whether or not the Latin case ending contained an "s" or not, with the "s" being retained but all vowels in the ending being lost (as with veisin below). But since this meant that it was easy to confuse the singular nominative with the plural oblique, and the plural nominative with the singular oblique, along with the final "s" becoming silent, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and French adopted one case (usually the oblique) for all purposes, leaving the Romanian the only one to survive to the present day.

Evolution of a masculine noun
in Old French: veisin ("neighbor").
(definite article in parentheses).
Classical Latin
(1st cent.)		Old French
(11th cent.)
singular nominative "vīcīnus"(li) veisins
accusative "vīcīnum"(le) veisin
genitive "vīcīnī"
dative "vīcīnō"
ablative
plural nominative "vīcīnī"(li) veisin
accusative "vīcīnōs"(les) veisins
genitive "vīcīnōrum"
dative "vīcīnīs"
ablative

Wider use of prepositions

Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntactic purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish donde, "where", from Latin de + unde, or French dès, "since", from de + ex, while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese desde is de + ex + de. Spanish después and Portuguese depois, "after", represent 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 represent de + foris (Romanian afară – ad + foris), and we find Jerome writing stulti, nonne qui fecit, quod de foris est, etiam id, quod de intus est fecit? (Luke 11.40: "ye fools, did not he, that made which is without, make that which is within also?"). In some cases, compounds were created by combining a large number of particles, such as the Romanian adineauri ("just recently") from ad + de + in + illa + hora.[43]

Classical Latin:

Marcus patrī librum dat. "Marcus is giving [his] father [a/the] book."

Vulgar Latin:

*Marcos da libru a patre. "Marcus 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, then eventually the accusative (oblique).

Classical Latin:

Marcus mihi librum patris dat. "Marcus is giving me [his] father's book.

Vulgar Latin:

*Marcos mi da libru de patre. "Marcus is giving me [the] book of [his] father."

Pronouns

Unlike in the nominal and adjectival inflections, pronouns kept great part of the case distinctions. However, many changes happened. For example, the /ɡ/ of ego was lost by the end of the empire, and eo appears in manuscripts from the 6th century.[44]

Reconstructed pronominal system of Vulgar Latin[44]
1st person2nd person3rd person
singularpluralsingularplural
Nominative *éo*nọs*tu*vọs
Dative *mi*nọ́be(s)*ti, *tẹ́be*vọ́be(s)*si, *sẹ́be
Accusative *mẹ*nọs*tẹ*vọs*sẹ

Adverbs

Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbs from adjectives: cārus, "dear", formed cārē, "dearly"; ācriter, "fiercely", from ācer; crēbrō, "often", from crēber. 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 mēns, and so meant "with a ... mind". So vēlōx ("quick") instead of vēlōciter ("quickly") gave veloci mente (originally "with a quick mind", "quick-mindedly") This explains the widespread rule for forming adverbs in many Romance languages: add the suffix -ment(e) to the feminine form of the adjective. The development illustrates a textbook case of grammaticalization in which an autonomous form, the noun meaning 'mind', while still in free lexical use in e.g. Italian venire in mente 'come to mind', becomes a productive suffix for forming adverbs in Romance such as Italian chiaramente, Spanish claramente 'clearly', with both its source and its meaning opaque in that usage other than as adverb formant.

Verbs
The Cantar de Mio Cid (Song of my Cid) is the earliest Spanish text
Main article: Romance verbs
See also: Romance languages § Verbal morphology

In general, the verbal system in the Romance languages changed less from Classical Latin than did the nominal system.

The four conjugational classes generally survived. The second and third conjugations already had identical imperfect tense forms in Latin, and also shared a common present participle. Because of the merging of short i with long ē in most of Vulgar Latin, these two conjugations grew even closer together. Several of the most frequently-used forms became indistinguishable, while others became distinguished only by stress placement:

Infinitive 1st 2nd 3rd 1st 2nd 3rd Imperative
singular
singular plural
Second conjugation (Classical) -ēre -eō -ēs -et -ēmus -ētis -ent -ē
Second conjugation (Vulgar) *-ẹ́re *-(j)o *-es *-e(t) *-ẹ́mos *-ẹ́tes *-en(t) *-e
Third conjugation (Vulgar) *-ere *-o *-emos *-etes *-on(t)
Third conjugation (Classical) -ere -ō -is -it -imus -itis -unt -e

These two conjugations came to be conflated in many of the Romance languages, often by merging them into a single class while taking endings from each of the original two conjugations. Which endings survived was different for each language, although most tended to favour second conjugation endings over the third conjugation. Spanish, for example, mostly eliminated the third conjugation forms in favour of second conjugation forms.

French and Catalan did the same, but tended to generalise the third conjugation infinitive instead. Catalan in particular almost completely eliminated the second conjugation ending over time, reducing it to a small relic class. In Italian, the two infinitive endings remained separate (but spelled identically), while the conjugations merged in most other respects much as in the other languages. However, the third-conjugation third-person plural present ending survived in favour of the second conjugation version, and was even extended to the fourth conjugation. Romanian also maintained the distinction between the second and third conjugation endings.

In the perfect, many languages generalized the -aui ending most frequently found in the first conjugation. This led to an unusual development; phonetically, the ending was treated as the diphthong /au/ rather than containing a semivowel /awi/, and in other cases the /w/ sound was simply dropped. We know this because it did not participate in the sound shift from /w/ to /β̞/. Thus Latin amaui, amauit ("I loved; he/she loved") in many areas became proto-Romance *amai and *amaut, yielding for example Portuguese amei, amou. This suggests that in the spoken language, these changes in conjugation preceded the loss of /w/.[35]

Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb habere, *amare habeo, literally "to love I have" (cf. English "I have to love", which has shades of a future meaning). This was contracted into a new future suffix in Western Romance forms, which can be seen in the following modern examples of "I will love":

  • French: j'aimerai (je + aimer + ai) ← aimer ["to love"] + ai ["I have"].
  • Portuguese and Galician: 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"].

A periphrastic construction of the form 'to have to' (late Latin habere ad) used as future is characteristic of Sardinian:

  • Ap'a istàre < apo a istàre 'I will stay'
  • Ap'a nàrrere < apo a nàrrer 'I will say'

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 literary Portuguese, which in these tenses allows clitic object pronouns to be incorporated between the root of the verb and its ending: "I will love" (eu) amarei, but "I will love you" amar-te-ei, from amar + te ["you"] + (eu) hei = amar + te + [h]ei = amar-te-ei.

In Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, personal pronouns can still be omitted from verb phrases as in Latin, as the endings are still distinct enough to convey that information: venio > Sp vengo ("I come"). In French, however, all the endings are typically homophonous except the first and second person (and occasionally also third person) plural, so the pronouns are always used (je viens) except in the imperative.

Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, which has now survived 6000 years of known evolution, the synthetic passive voice was utterly lost in Romance, being replaced with periphrastic verb forms—composed of the verb "to be" plus a passive participle—or impersonal reflexive forms—composed of a verb and a passivizing pronoun.

Apart from the grammatical and phonetic developments there were many cases of verbs merging as complex subtleties in Latin were reduced to simplified verbs in Romance. A classic example of this are the verbs expressing the concept "to go". Consider three particular verbs in Classical Latin expressing concepts of "going": ire, vadere, and *ambitare. In Spanish and Portuguese ire and vadere merged into the verb ir, which derives some conjugated forms from ire and some from vadere. andar was maintained as a separate verb derived from ambitare.

Italian instead merged vadere and ambitare into the verb andare. At the extreme French merged three Latin verbs with, for example, the present tense deriving from vadere and another verb ambulare (or something like it) and the future tense deriving from ire. Similarly the Romance distinction between the Romance verbs for "to be", essere and stare, was lost in French as these merged into the verb être. In Italian, the verb essere inherited both Romance meanings of "being essentially" and "being temporarily of the quality of", while stare specialized into a verb denoting location or dwelling, or state of health.

Copula
Main article: Romance copula

The copula (that is, the verb signifying "to be") of Classical Latin was esse. This evolved to *essere in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix -re to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian essere and French être through Proto-Gallo-Romance *essre and Old French estre as well as Spanish and Portuguese ser (Romanian a fi derives from fieri, which means "to become").

In Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb stare, which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand", to denote a more temporary meaning. That is, *essere signified the essence, while stare signified the state. Stare evolved to Spanish and Portuguese estar and Old French ester (both through *estare), while Italian and Romanian retained the original form.

The semantic shift that underlies this evolution is more or less as follows: A speaker of Classical Latin might have said: vir est in foro, meaning "the man is in/at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin could have been *(h)omo stat in foro, "the man stands in/at the marketplace", replacing the est (from esse) with stat (from stare), because "standing" was what was perceived as what the man was actually doing.

The use of stare in this case was still semantically transparent assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from esse to stare became more widespread. In the Iberian peninsula esse ended up only denoting natural qualities that would not change, while stare was applied to transient qualities and location. In Italian, stare is used mainly for location, transitory state of health (sta male 's/he is ill' but è gracile 's/he is puny') and, as in Spanish, for the eminently transient quality implied in a verb's progressive form, such as sto scrivendo to express 'I am writing'.

The historical development of the stare + gerund progressive in those Romance languages that have it seems to have been a passage from a usage such as sto pensando 'I stand/stay (here) thinking', in which the stare form carries the full semantic load of 'stand, stay' to grammaticalization of the construction as expression of progressive aspect (Similar in concept to the English verbal construction of "I am still thinking"). The process of reanalysis that took place over time bleached the semantics of stare so that when used in combination with the gerund the form became solely a grammatical marker of subject and tense (e.g. sto = subject first person singular, present; stavo = subject first person singular, past), no longer a lexical verb with the semantics of 'stand' (not unlike the auxiliary in compound tenses that once meant 'have, possess', but is now semantically empty: j'ai écrit, ho scritto, he escrito, etc.). Whereas sto scappando would once have been semantically strange at best (?'I stay escaping'), once grammaticalization was achieved, collocation with a verb of inherent mobility was no longer contradictory, and sto scappando could and did become the normal way to express 'I am escaping'. (Although it might be objected that in sentences like Spanish la catedral está en la ciudad, "the cathedral is in the city" this is also unlikely to change, but all locations are expressed through estar in Spanish, as this usage originally conveyed the sense of "the cathedral stands in the city").

Word order typology

Classical Latin in most cases adopted an SOV word order in ordinary prose, although other word orders were allowed, such as in poetry, due to its inflectional nature. However, word order in the modern Romance languages generally adopted a standard SVO word order. Fragments of SOV word order still survive in the placement of clitic object pronouns (e.g. Spanish yo te amo "I love you").

See also

History of specific Romance languages

References

Citations
  1. Alkire & Rosen (2010), p. 28
  2. Posner, Rebecca (1996). The Romance Languages. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 98.
  3. Herman 2000, p. 117.
  4. Adams (2007), pp. 626-9
  5. Wright (1982), passim.
  6. Posner, Rebecca; Sala, Marius. "Vulgar Latin". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 20 Jun 2017.
  7. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. American Philological Association. 1870. pp. 8–9.
  8. Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours, 1821.
  9. Meyer 1906, p. 239.
  10. Meyer 1906, pp. 244–5.
  11. Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, first published in 1836–1843 and multiple times thereafter
  12. ...nicht aus dem classischen Latein, rather aus der römischen Volkssprache oder Volksmundart. Diez (1882), p. 1.
  13. Diez (1882), p. 63.
  14. Elcock (1960), p. 20
  15. Grandgent 1907, p. 5.
  16. Elcock (1960), p. 23
  17. Johnson 1988, p. 73.
  18. Mann, Horace, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Vol. I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule, Part 2, 657–795 (1903), pg. 158
  19. Herman 2000, pp. 96–115.
  20. Ed. Roger Wright, 1991, p. 22, "...it is well known that there is absolutely no evidence for any name other than Latin in the Romance area before the ninth century"..."It means that the process of establishing new language names does not belong to Carolingian times, but to the long period of expansion that followed after the disastrous tenth century," Tore Janson, ISBN 0-271-01569-1
  21. Herman 2000, p. 114.
  22. Hall, Robert A. (1953). "The Oaths of Strassburg: Phonemics and Classification". Language. 29 (3): 317–321. doi:10.2307/410027. ISSN 0097-8507.
  23. ianjamesparsley (2017-01-20). "How to learn languages – Vulgar Latin". Ian James Parsley. Retrieved 2019-01-29.
  24. Elcock, pp. 28-34
  25. Harrington et al. (1997).
  26. Herman 2000, p. 47.
  27. Horrocks, Geoffrey and James Clackson (2007). The Blackwell History of the Latin Language. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4051-6209-8.
  28. Herman 2000, p. 48.
  29. Allen (2003) states: "There appears to have been no great difference in quality between long and short a, but in the case of the close and mid vowels (i and u, e and o) the long appear to have been appreciably closer than the short." He then goes on to the historical development, quotations from various authors (from around the 2nd century AD), and evidence from older inscriptions in which "e" stands for normally short i, "i" for long e, etc.
  30. Grandgent 1991, p. 11.
  31. Palmer 1988, p. 157.
  32. Grandgent 1991, p. 118.
  33. Herman 2000, pp. 28–29.
  34. Palmer 1988, p. 156.
  35. Vincent (1990).
  36. Michele Loporcaro, "Phonological Processes", The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages: Structures, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 112–4.
  37. Grandgent 1991, p. 125.
  38. Menéndez Pidal 1968, p. 208; Survivances du cas sujet.
  39. Herman 2000, p. 52.
  40. Grandgent 1991, p. 82.
  41. Captivi, 1019.
  42. Herman 2000, p. 53.
  43. Romanian Explanatory Dictionary (DEXOnline.ro)
  44. Grandgent 1991, p. 238.

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General
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  • Väänänen, Veikko (1981). Introduction au latin vulgaire (3rd ed.). Paris: Klincksieck. ISBN 2-252-02360-0.
  • Vincent, Nigel (1990). "Latin". In Harris, M.; Vincent, N. (eds.). The Romance Languages. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-520829-3.
  • von Wartburg, Walther; Chambon, Jean-Pierre (1922–1967). Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (in German and French). Bonn: F. Klopp.
  • Wright, Roger (1982). Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France. Liverpool: Francis Cairns.

Transitions to Romance languages
To Romance in general
  • Banniard, Michel (1997). Du latin aux langues romanes. Paris: Nathan.
  • Bonfante, Giuliano (1999). The origin of the Romance languages: Stages in the development of Latin. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
  • Ledgeway, Adam (2012). From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Ledgeway, Adam; Maiden, Martin, eds. (2016). The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Part 1: The Making of the Romance Languages. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
  • Maiden, Martin; Smith, John Charles; Ledgeway, Adam, eds. (2013). The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. Volume II: Contexts. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (esp. parts 1 & 2, Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages; The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages)
  • Wright, Roger (1982). Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France. Liverpool: Francis Cairns.
  • Wright, Roger, ed. (1991). Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle ages. London/New York: Routledge.
To French
  • Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (1995). A History of the French Language through Texts. London/New York: Routledge.
  • Kibler, William W. (1984). An Introduction to Old French. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
  • Lodge, R. Anthony (1993). French: From Dialect to Standard. London/New York: Routledge.
  • Pope, Mildred K. (1934). From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman Phonology and Morphology. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Price, Glanville (1998). The French language: present and past (Revised ed.). London, England: Grant and Cutler.
To Italian
  • Maiden, Martin (1996). A Linguistic History of Italian. New York: Longman.
  • Vincent, Nigel (2006). "Languages in contact in Medieval Italy". In Lepschy, Anna Laura (ed.). Rethinking Languages in Contact: The Case of Italian. Oxford and New York: LEGENDA (Routledge). pp. 12–27.
To Spanish
  • Lloyd, Paul M. (1987). From Latin to Spanish. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
  • Penny, Ralph (2002). A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
  • Pharies, David A. (2007). A Brief History of the Spanish Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Pountain, Christopher J. (2000). A History of the Spanish Language Through Texts. London, England: Routledge.
To Portuguese
  • Castro, Ivo (2004). Introdução à História do Português. Lisbon: Edições Colibri.
  • Emiliano, António (2003). Latim e Romance na segunda metade do século XI. Lisbon: Fundação Gulbenkian.
  • Williams, Edwin B. (1968). From Latin to Portuguese: Historical Phonology and Morphology of the Portuguese Language. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
To Occitan
  • Paden, William D. (1998). An Introduction to Old Occitan. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
To Sardinian
  • Blasco Ferrer, Eduardo (1984). Storia linguistica della Sardegna. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Further reading
  • Adams, James Noel. 1976. The Text and Language of a Vulgar Latin Chronicle (Anonymus Valesianus II). London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies.
  • --. 1977. The Vulgar Latin of the letters of Claudius Terentianus. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
  • --. 2013. Social Variation and the Latin Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Burghini, Julia, and Javier Uría. 2015. "Some neglected evidence on Vulgar Latin 'glide suppression': Consentius, 27.17.20 N." Glotta; Zeitschrift Für Griechische Und Lateinische Sprache 91: 15–26. JSTOR 24368205.
  • Herman, József, and Roger Wright. 2000. Vulgar Latin. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
  • Jensen, Frede. 1972. From Vulgar Latin to Old Provençal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  • Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 2006. "Vulgar Latin: Comparative Castration (and Comparative Theories of Syntax). Style 40, nos. 1–2: 56–61. JSTOR 10.5325/style.40.1-2.56.
  • Rohlfs, Gerhard. 1970. From Vulgar Latin to Old French: An Introduction to the Study of the Old French Language. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
  • Weiss, Michael. 2009. Outline of the historical and comparative grammar of Latin. Ann Arbor, MI: Beechstave.
  • Zovic, V (2015). "Vulgar Latin in Inscriptions from the Roman Province of Dalmatia". Vjesnik Za Arheologiju I Povijest Dalmatinsku. 108: 157–222.
Library resources about
Vulgar Latin
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