From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
During the Classical period, Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as sermo plebeius or sermo vulgaris, meaning "common speech".
The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the Renaissance,
when Italian thinkers began to theorize that their own language
originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an
entity distinct from the literary Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect.
The early 19th-century French linguist Raynouard is often regarded as the father of modern Romance philology.
Observing that the Romance languages have many features in common that
are not found in Latin, at least not in "proper" or Classical Latin, he
concluded that the former must have all had some common ancestor (which
he believed most closely resembled Old Occitan) that replaced Latin some time before the year 1000. This he dubbed la langue romane or "the Roman language".
The first truly modern treatise on Romance linguistics, however, and the first to apply the comparative method, was Friedrich Christian Diez's seminal Grammar of the Romance Languages.
Sources
Evidence for the features of non-literary Latin comes from the following sources:
- Recurrent grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic mistakes in Latin epigraphy.
- The insertion, whether intentional or not, of colloquial terms or constructions into contemporary texts.
- Explicit mention of certain constructions or pronunciation habits by Roman grammarians.
- The pronunciation of Roman-era lexical borrowings into neighboring languages such as Basque, Albanian, or Welsh.
History
By the end of the first century AD the Romans had conquered the entire Mediterranean Basin and established hundreds of colonies in the conquered provinces. Over time this—along with other factors that encouraged linguistic and cultural assimilation,
such as political unity, frequent travel and commerce, military
service, etc.—made Latin the predominant language throughout the western
Mediterranean.
Latin itself was subject to the same assimilatory tendencies, such that
its varieties had probably become more uniform by the time the Western Empire fell
in 476 than they had been before it. That is not to say that the
language had been static for all those years, but rather that ongoing
changes tended to spread to all regions.
All of these homogenizing factors were disrupted or voided by a long string of calamities. Although Justinian succeeded in reconquering Italy, Africa, and the southern part of Iberia in the period 533–554, the Empire was hit by one of the deadliest plagues in recorded history in 541, one that would recur six more times before 610. Under his successors most of the Italian peninsula was lost to the Lombards by c. 572, most of southern Iberia to the Visigoths by c. 615, and most of the Balkans to the Slavs and Avars by c. 620. All this was possible due to Roman preoccupation with wars against Persia, the last of which lasted nearly three decades and exhausted both empires. Taking advantage of this, the Arabs invaded and occupied Syria and Egypt by 642, greatly weakening the Empire and ending its centuries of domination over the Mediterranean. They went on to take the rest of North Africa by c. 699 and soon invaded the Visigothic Kingdom as well, seizing most of Iberia from it by c. 716.
It is from approximately the seventh century onward that regional
differences proliferate in the language of Latin documents, indicating
the fragmentation of Latin into the incipient Romance languages. Until then Latin appears to have been remarkably homogenous, as far as can be judged from its written records,
although careful statistical analysis reveals regional differences in
the treatment of the Latin vowel /ĭ/ and in the progression of betacism by about the fifth century.
Vocabulary
Lexical turnover
Over the centuries, spoken Latin lost various lexical items and replaced them with native coinages; with borrowings from neighbouring languages such as Gaulish, Germanic, or Greek; or with other native words that had undergone semantic shift. The literary language generally retained the older words, however.
A textbook example is the general replacement of the suppletive Classical verb ferre, meaning 'carry', with the regular portare. Similarly, the Classical loqui, meaning 'speak', was replaced by a variety of alternatives such as the native fabulari and narrare or the Greek borrowing parabolare.
Classical Latin particles fared especially poorly, with all of the following vanishing from popular speech: an, at, autem, donec, enim, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quoad, quoque, sed, sive, utrum, and vel.
Semantic drift
Many surviving words experienced a shift in meaning. Some notable cases are civitas ('citizenry' → 'city', replacing urbs); focus ('hearth' → 'fire', replacing ignis); manducare ('chew' → 'eat', replacing edere); causa ('subject matter' → 'thing', competing with res); mittere ('send' → 'put', competing with ponere); necare ('murder' → 'drown', competing with submergere); pacare ('placate' → 'pay', competing with solvere), and totus ('whole' → 'all, every', competing with omnis).
Phonological development
Consonantism
Loss of nasals
- Word-final /m/ was lost in polysyllabic words. In monosyllables it tended to survive as /n/.
- /n/ was usually lost before fricatives, resulting in compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (e.g. sponsa ‘fiancée’ > spōsa).
Palatalization
Front vowels in hiatus (after a consonant and before another vowel) became [j], which palatalized preceding consonants.
Fricativization
/w/ (except after /k/) and intervocalic /b/ merge as the bilabial fricative /β/.
Simplification of consonant clusters
- The cluster /nkt/ reduced to [ŋt].
- /kw/ delabialized to /k/ before back vowels.
- /ks/ before or after a consonant, or at the end of a word, reduced to /s/.
Vocalism
Monophthongization
- /ae̯/ and /oe̯/ monophthongized to [ɛː] and [eː] respectively by around the second century AD.
Loss of vowel quantity
The system of phonemic vowel length collapsed by the fifth century AD, leaving quality differences as the distinguishing factor
between vowels; the paradigm thus changed from /ī ĭ ē ĕ ā ă ŏ ō ŭ ū/ to
/i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/. Concurrently, stressed vowels in open syllables lengthened.
Loss of near-close front vowel
Towards the end of the Roman Empire /ɪ/ merged with /e/ in most regions, although not in Africa or a few peripheral areas in Italy.
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), 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.
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.
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.
|
singular |
plural
|
| masculine |
neuter |
feminine |
masculine |
neuter |
feminine
|
| nominative
|
altus |
altum |
alta |
altī |
alta |
altae
|
| accusative
|
altum |
altam |
altōs |
alta |
altās
|
| dative
|
altō |
altae |
altīs
|
| ablative
|
altō |
altā |
altīs
|
| genitive
|
altī |
altae |
altōrum |
altārum
|
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].
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).
Typical Italian endings
|
Nouns
|
Adjectives and determiners
|
|
singular |
plural |
singular |
plural
|
| masculine
|
giardino |
giardini |
buono |
buoni
|
| feminine
|
donna |
donne |
buona |
buone
|
| neuter
| uovo | uova | buono | buone
|
|---|
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.
- 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.
Loss of oblique cases
The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions. 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). Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced.
Evolution of a 1st declension noun:
caepa/cēpa ("onion") (feminine singular)
|
Classical
(c. 1st century)
|
Vulgar
(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
(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. 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, certain
fossilized expressions and some proper names. For example, French jeudi ("Thursday") < Old French juesdi < Vulgar Latin "jovis diēs"; Spanish es menester ("it is necessary") < "est ministeri"; and Italian terremoto ("earthquake") < "terrae motu" as well as names like Paoli, Pieri.
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".
The accusative case developed as a prepositional case, displacing many instances of the ablative. Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case.
Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms
seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely
confused in inscriptions.
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. 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, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and Middle
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.
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.
Reconstructed pronominal system of Vulgar Latin
|
1st person |
2nd person |
3rd person
|
|
singular |
plural |
singular |
plural
|
| 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
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
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/.
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
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 employed, such as in poetry, enabled by
inflectional
marking of the grammatical function of words. 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").
