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.
- Origin of the term
During the Classical period, Roman authors referred to the...
- Sources
Evidence for the features of non-literary Latin comes from...
- History
By the end of the first century AD the Romans had conquered...
- Vocabulary
Over the centuries, spoken Latin lost various lexical items...
- Phonological development
Front vowels in hiatus became, which palatalized preceding...
- Origin of the term
Latin is an old language that was spoken by the Romans. Vulgar Latin is not spoken anymore, but its many dialects eventually became what are now Romance languages (such as Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian).
- Antiquity; developed into Romance languages 6th to 9th centuries
- Roman Republic, Roman Empire
- Indo-European, ItalicLatino-FaliscanLatinVulgar Latin
- Latin
British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire, Latin became the principal language of the elite, especially in the more Romanised south and east of the island.
- –
- Indo-European, ItalicRomanceBritish Latin
Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken at that time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence and author Petronius.
Vulgar Latin is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed. This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on October 12, 2004. Current status: Former featured article
May 12, 2002 · Vulgar Latinor Sermo Vulgaris("common speech"), also Colloquial Latin,or Common Romance(particularly in the late stage), was a range of non-standardsociolectsof Latinspoken in the Mediterranean regionduring and after the classical period of the Roman Empire. It is distinct from Classical Latin, the standard and literary version of the language.
Vulgar Latin (linguistics, historical) The Latin language as spoken by the Roman people, as opposed to Classical Latin as written in formal literature. Developed into Proto-Romance and descendant languages in the Early Middle Ages.
- What Was Vulgar Latin?
- History
- Vocabulary
- Phonology
- Grammar
- See Also
- External Links
The name "vulgar" simply means "folk", derived from the Latin word vulgaris, meaning "of people". "Vulgar Latin" has a variety of meanings: 1. Variation within Latin (socially, geographically, and chronologically) that differs from the Classical literary standard in an age when most people were illiterate and the primary method of language transmission between people was oral. This typically excludes the language of the more educated upper classes, which, although it does include variation, comes closest to the literary standard. 2. The spoken Latin of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin represents the literary register of Latin, based on the model of ancient literary Greek. It represented a selection from a hypothetical variety of spoken forms.[citation needed] The Latin brought by Roman soldiers to Gaul, Iberia or Dacia was probably not identical to the Latin of Cicero, and differed from it in vocabulary, and later in syntax and grammar as well.[1] By this definition, Vulgar Latin w...
Because the daily speech of Latin speakers was not transcribed, Vulgar Latin can only be studied indirectly. Knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources: First, the comparative method reconstructs the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and notes where they differ from Classical Latin; second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the Late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin speakers were liable to commit, giving us an idea of how Latin was spoken; third, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in Late Latin texts also reveal, in part, the author's spoken language.[2] Some literary works written in a lower register of Latin also provide a glimpse into the world of early Vulgar Latin. The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve basilectal Latin features, as does the recorded speech of freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter. For many centuries...
Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary. Classical equus, "horse", was consistently replaced, by caballus "nag" (but note Romanian iapă, Sardinian èbba, Spanish yegua, Catalan euga and Portuguese égua all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical equa). A sample of words that are exclusively Classical, and those that were productive in Romance, is to be found in the table to the right. The vocabulary changes affected even the basic grammatical particles of Latin; there are many that vanish without a trace in Romance, such as an, at, autem, donec, enim, ergo, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quod, quoque, sed, utrum and vel.[14] Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such suffixes as -bilis, -arius, -itare and -icaregrew apace. These changes occurred frequently to avoid irregular forms or to regularise genders. On the other hand, since Vulgar Latin and Latin proper were for m...
[edit] Evidence of changes
Evidence of phonological changes can be seen in the late 3rd century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribingcorrect classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe: 1. a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels ("masculus non masclus"); 2. the merger between long /e/ and short /i/ ("vinea non vinia"); 3. the levelling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/ ("coluber non colober") and /e/ and /i/ ("dimidius non demedius"); 4. regularization of irregu...
[edit] Consonants
Significant sound changesaffected the consonants of Vulgar Latin: Apocope 1. Final -t, which occurred frequently in verb conjugations, and final -s, in nouns, were dropped. 2. The scansion in Latin poetry suggests that the letter -m may have been pronounced very softly in classical Latin, being either voiceless or merely a silent letter that marked the nasalisation of the vowel which preceded it. It continued, however, to be consistently written in the literary language. In Vulgar Latin, thes...
[edit] Stressed vowels
One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its vowel system. Classical Latin had five short vowels, ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ, and five long vowels, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, each of which was an individual phoneme (see the table in the right, for their likely pronunciation in IPA), and four diphthongs, ae, oe, au and eu (five according to some authors, including ui). There were also long and short versions of y, representing the rounded vowel [y(ː)] in Greek borrowings, which however...
[edit] The Romance articles
It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in some form in all of the Romance languages, arose; largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed. Definite articles formerly were demonstrative pronouns or adjectives; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, (i...
[edit] Gender: loss of the neuter
The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages. In Latin, gender is partly a matter of inflection, i.e. there are different declensional paradigms associated with the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, and partly a matter of agreement, i.e. nouns of a certain gender require forms of the same gender in adjectives and pronouns associated with them. The loss of final consonants led to a remodelling of the gender system. In Cl...
[edit] The loss of the noun case system
The sound changes that were occurring in Vulgar Latin made the noun case system of Classical Latin harder to sustain, and ultimately spelled doom for the system of Latin declensions. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, vulgar Latin moved from being a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic language where word order is a necessary element of syntax. Consider what the loss of final /m/, the loss of phonemic vowel length, and the sound shi...
Oaths of StrasbourgRomance copulaRomance languagesVeronese RiddleFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Vulgar Latin vocabulary) As Classical Latin developed into Proto-Romance it gained and lost lexical items for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the new vocabulary came from contact with neighbouring languages, and other times it was coined from native elements.
- What Was Vulgar Latin?
- Phonology
- Vocabulary
- Grammar
The name "vulgar" simply means "common"; it is derived from the Latin word vulgaris, meaning "common", or "of the people". "Vulgar Latin" to Latinists has a variety of meanings. 1. It means variation within Latin (socially, geographically, and chronologically) that differs from the perceived Classical literary standard. As such, it typically excludes the language of the more educated, upper-classes which, although it does include variation, comes closest to the perceived standard. 2. It means the spoken Latin of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin represents the literary register of Latin. It represented a selection from a variety of available spoken forms. The Latin brought by Roman soldiers to Gaul, Iberia or Dacia was not identical to the Latin of Cicero, and differed from it in vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. By this definition, Vulgar Latin was a spoken language and "late" Latin was used for writing, its general style being slightly different from earlier "classic" standards. 1....
Vowels
One profound change that affected every Romance language reordered the vowel system of classical Latin. Latin had ten distinct vowels: long and short versions of A, E, I, O, V, and three diphthongs, AE, OE and AV (four according to some, including VI). There were also long and short versions of the Greek borrowing, Y. At some time during the classical Latin period, all the vowels except [a] began to differ by quality as well as by length. The long vowels became more close, while the short vow...
Consonants
Palatalization of Latin /k/, /t/, and often /g/ was almost universal in vulgar Latin; the only Romance languages it did not affect were Dalmatian and some varieties of Sardinian. Thus Latin caelum ('sky', 'heaven'), pronounced /kaelu(m)/ beginning with /k/, became Italian cielo, /tʃɛlo/, French ciel, /sjɛl/, Catalan cel, /sɛl/, Spanish cielo, /θjelo/ or /sjelo/ (depending on dialect) and Portuguese céu, /'sɛu/, beginning with sibilant consonants. The former semivowels written in Latin as V as...
Evidence of changes
Evidence of these and other changes can be seen in the late third century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe: 1. a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels (MASCVLVS NON MASCLVS); 2. the reduction of formerly syllabic /e/ and /i/ to /j/ (VINEA NON VINIA); 3. the levelling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/ (COLVBER NON COLOBER) and /e/ and /i/ (DIMIDIVS NON DEMEDIVS); 4. regularization...
Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary. Classical equus, "horse", was consistently replaced by caballus (but note Romanian iapă, Sardinian èbba, Spanish yegua, Catalan egua and Portuguese égua all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical equa). Classical aequor, "sea", yielded to mareuniversally. A very partial listing of words that are exclusively Classical, and those that were productive in Romance, is to be found in the table to the right. Some of these words, dropped in Romance, were borrowed back as learned words from Latin itself. The vocabulary changes affected even the basic grammatical particles of Latin; there are many that vanish without a trace in Romance, such as an, at, autem, donec, enim, ergo, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quod, quoque, sed, utrum, and vel. On the other hand, since Vulgar Latin and Latin proper were for much of their history different registers of the same language, rather than different languag...
The Romance articles
It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in some form in all of the Romance languages, arose; largely because the highly colloquial speech it arose in seldom was written until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed. Definite articles formerly were demonstrative pronouns or adjectives; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, (illud), in t...
Gender: loss of the neuter
The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in the Romance languages (though see below). In Latin gender is partly a matter of agreement, i.e. certain nouns take certain forms of the adjectives and pronouns, and partly a matter of inflection, i.e. there are different paradigms associated with the masculine/feminine on the one hand and the neuter on the other. The classical Latin neuter was normally absorbed by the masculine both syntactically and morp...
The loss of the noun case system
The sound changes that were occurring in Vulgar Latin made the noun case system of Classical Latin harder to sustain, and ultimately spelled doom for the system of Latin declensions. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, vulgar Latin moved from being a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic language where word order is a necessary element of syntax. Consider what the loss of final /m/, the loss of phonemic vowel length, and the sound shi...
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Vulgar Latin
Non-standard Latin variety spoken by the people of Ancient Rome
Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is non-literary Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onwards. Depending on the time period, its literary counterpart was either Classical Latin or Late Latin. en.wikipedia.org
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