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俗ラテン語 or Sermo Vulgaris ("common speech") was a nonstandard form of Latin (as opposed to Classical Latin, the standard and literary version of the language) spoken in the Mediterranean region during and after the classical period of the Roman Empire. It is from 俗ラテン語 that the Romance languages developed; the best known are the national languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. Works written in Latin during classical times and the earlier Middle Ages used Classical Latin rather than 俗ラテン語, with very few exceptions (most notably sections of Gaius Petronius' Satyricon). Because of its nonstandard nature, 俗ラテン語 had no official orthography. 俗ラテン語 is sometimes also called colloquial Latin, or Common Romance (particularly in the late stage). In Renaissance Latin, 俗ラテン語 was called vulgare Latinum or Latinum vulgare.

By its nature 俗ラテン語 varied greatly by region and by time period, though several major divisions can be seen. 俗ラテン語 dialects began to significantly diverge from Classical Latin in the third century during the classical period of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, throughout the sixth century the most widely spoken dialects were still similar to and mostly mutually intelligible with Classical Latin. "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; we could say Latin "died" [ceased to be anybody's natural mother tongue and had to be learned] in the first part of the eighth century; 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."

The language called Proto-Romance developed during the governance of Germanic rulers. Similarly, in the Eastern Roman Empire Latin faded as the Court language in the course of the 5th century. The 俗ラテン語 spoken in the Balkans north of Greece and southern Bulgaria became heavily influenced by Greek and Slavic and also became radically different from Classical Latin and from the proto-Romance of Western Europe. 俗ラテン語 diverged into distinct languages beginning in the 9th century.

Origin of the term
The term "common speech" (sermo vulgaris), which later became "俗ラテン語", was used by inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Subsequently it became a technical term from Latin and Romance-language philology referring to the unwritten varieties of a Latinised language spoken mainly by Italo-Celtic populations governed by the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.

Traces of their language appear in some inscriptions, such as graffiti or advertisements. The educated population mainly responsible for Classical Latin may also have spoken 俗ラテン語 in certain contexts depending on their socioeconomic background. The term was first used improperly in that sense 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, which had already been studied by Dante Alighieri and published in De vulgari eloquentia, Raynouard noticed that the Romance languages derived in part from lexical, morphological, and syntactic features that were Latin, but were not preferred in Classical Latin. He hypothesized an intermediate phase and identified it with the Romana lingua, a term that in countries speaking Romance languages meant "nothing more or less than the vulgar speech as opposed to literary or grammatical Latin."

Diez, the principal founder of Romance-language philology, impressed by the comparative methods of Jakob Grimm in Deutsche Grammatik, which came out in 1819 and was the first to use such methods in philology, decided to apply them to the Romance languages and discovered Raynouard's work, Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours, published in 1821. Describing himself as a pupil of Raynouard, he went on to expand the concept to all Romance languages, not just the speech of the troubadours, on a systematic basis, thereby becoming the originator of a new field of scholarly inquiry.

Diez, in his signal work on the topic, Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, "文法 of the Romance Languages," first published in 1836–1843 and multiple times thereafter, after enumerating six Romance languages that he compared: Italian and Wallachian (i.e., Romanian) (east); Spanish and Portuguese (southwest); and Provençal and French (northwest), asserts that they had their origin in Latin, but nicht aus dem classischen Latein, "not from classical Latin," rather aus der römischen Volkssprache oder Volksmundart, "from the Roman popular language or popular dialect". These terms, as he points out later in the work, are a translation into German of Dante's vulgare latinum and Latinum vulgare, and the Italian of Boccaccio, latino volgare. These names in turn are at the end of a tradition extending to the Roman republic.

The concepts and vocabulary from which vulgare latinum descend were known in the classical period and are to be found amply represented in the unabridged Latin dictionary, starting in the late Roman republic. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a prolific writer, whose works have survived in large quantity, and who serves as a standard of Latin, and his contemporaries in addition to recognizing the lingua Latina also knew varieties of "speech" under the name . Latin could be sermo Latinus, but in addition was a variety known as sermo vulgaris, sermo vulgi, sermo plebeius and sermo quotidianus. These modifiers inform post-classical readers that a conversational Latin existed, which was used by the masses (') in daily speaking (') and was perceived as lower-class ().

These vocabulary items manifest no opposition to the written language. There was an opposition to higher-class, or family Latin (good family) in sermo familiaris and very rarely literature might be termed sermo nobilis. The supposed "sermo classicus" is a scholarly fiction unattested in the dictionary. All kinds of sermo were spoken only, not written. If one wanted to refer to what in post-classical times was called classical Latin one resorted to the concept of ' ("latinity") or ' (adverb).

If one spoke in the lingua or sermo Latinus one merely spoke Latin, but if one spoke ' or ' ("more Latinish") one spoke good Latin, and formal Latin had , the quality of good Latin, about it. After the fall of the empire and the transformation of spoken Latin into the early Romance languages the only representative of the Latin language was written Latin, which became known as classicus, "classy" Latin. The original opposition was between formal or implied good Latin and informal or 俗ラテン語. The spoken/written dichotomy is entirely philological.

歴史


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 rapidly began to change this. The former western provinces became increasingly isolated from the Eastern Roman Empire, leading to a rapid divergence in the Latin spoken on either side. 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 the new 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.

The vulgar 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 (hence the fact that 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 俗ラテン語 in two regions of western Europe.

Soon Classical Latin and 俗ラテン語 came to be viewed as distinct languages. At the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language – either in the rustica lingua romanica (俗ラテン語), 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 onwards, many people, including several of the clerics, were not able to understand even the most straightforward religious texts."

By the end of the first millennium, dialects had diverged so far that some of the more geographically distant ones had become mutually unintelligible and distinct. With the evolved Latin vernaculars viewed as different languages with local norms, specific orthographies would in time be developed for some. Since all modern Romance varieties are continuations of this evolution, 俗ラテン語 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 comparing 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 古フランス語 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 俗ラテン語's evolution on French soil.

語彙
俗ラテン語 featured a large vocabulary of words that were productive in Romance.

音韻論
There was no single pronunciation of 俗ラテン語, and the pronunciation of 俗ラテン語 in the various Latin-speaking areas is indistinguishable from the earlier history of the phonology of the Romance languages. See the article on Romance languages for more information.

Evidence of changes
Evidence of phonological changes can be seen in the late 3rd-century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe:
 * a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels in medial syllables ("calida non calda");
 * the merger of unstressed pre-vocalic and short, probably as yod  ("vinea non vinia");
 * the levelling of the distinction between and  ("coluber non colober") and  and  ("dimidius non demedius");
 * regularization of irregular forms ("glis non glirus");
 * regularization and emphasis of gendered forms ("pauper mulier non paupera mulier");
 * levelling of the distinction between and  between vowels ("bravium non brabium");
 * assimilation of plosive consonant clusters ("amycdala non amiddula");
 * the substitution of diminutives for unmarked words ("auris non oricla, neptis non nepticla");
 * the loss of syllable-final nasals before /s/ ("mensa non mesa") or their inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorrection ("formosus non formunsus");
 * the loss of, both initially ("hostiae non ostiae") and within the word ("adhuc non aduc");
 * simplification of ("coqui non coci").

Many of the forms castigated in the Appendix Probi proved to be the forms accepted in Romance; e.g., oricla (evolved from the Classical Latin marked diminutive auricula) is the source of French oreille, Catalan orella, Spanish oreja, Italian orecchia, Romanian ureche, Portuguese orelha, Sardinian origra 'ear', not the prescribed auris. Development of yod from the post-nasal unstressed /e/ of vinea enabled the palatalization of /n/ that would produce French vigne, Italian vigna, Spanish viña, Portuguese vinha, Catalan vinya, Occitan vinha, Friulan vigne, etc., 'vineyard'.

Consonant development
The most significant consonant changes affecting 俗ラテン語 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.

最後の子音の消失
The loss of final consonants was already under way by the 1st century AD in some areas. A graffito at Pompeii reads, which in Classical Latin would read ("may whoever loves be strong/do well"). (The change from to  is also an early indicator of the development of  (yod), which played such an important part in the development of palatalization.) On the other hand, this loss of final  was not general. Old Spanish and 古フランス語 preserved a reflex of final up through 1100 AD or so, and modern French still maintains final  in some liaison environments.

Lenition of stops
Areas north and west of the La Spezia–Rimini Line lenited intervocalic to. This phenomenon is occasionally attested during the imperial period, but it became frequent by the 7th century. For example, in Merovingian documents, > rodatico ("wheel tax").

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: > Italian secco, Spanish seco;  > Italian ceppo, Spanish cepo;  > Italian mettere, Spanish meter.

語末のmの消失
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, which in Classical Latin would be ("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 (like in the established custom of writing for consul).

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

Consonant cluster simplification
In general, many clusters were simplified in 俗ラテン語. For example, reduced to, reflecting the fact that  was no longer phonetically consonantal. In some inscriptions, > mesis ("month"), or  > cosul ("consul"). Descendants of include Portuguese mês, Spanish and Catalan mes, 古フランス語 meis (Modern French mois), Italian mese. In some areas (including much of Italy), the clusters, $\langlect\rangle$,  $\langlex\rangle$ were assimilated to the second element: , ,. Thus, some inscriptions have > onibus ("all [与格 複数]"),  > inditione ("indiction"),  > bissit ("lived"). Also, three-consonant clusters usually lost the middle element. For example: > imtores ("buyers")

Not all areas show the same development of these clusters, however. In the East, Italian has >, as in  > otto ("eight") or  > notte ("night"); while Romanian has  >  (opt, noapte). By contrast, in the West, the weakened to. 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 (sound change) of, which produced (*oito > ocho, *noite > noche)

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

The cluster $\langlequ\rangle$ was simplified to  in most instances before /i/ and /e/. In 435, one can find the hypercorrective spelling quisquentis for ("of the person who rests here"). Modern languages have followed this trend, for example Latin ("who") has become Italian chi and French qui (both ); while  ("whom") became quien  in Spanish and quem  in Portuguese. However, has survived in front of  in most areas, although not in French; hence Latin  yields Spanish cuatro, Portuguese quatro , and Italian quattro , but French quatre , where the qu- spelling is purely etymological.

In Spanish, most words with consonant clusters in syllable-final position are loanwords from Classical Latin, examples are: transporte, transmitir , instalar , constante , obstante , obstruir , perspectiva , istmo. 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 俗ラテン語 background. Realizations like, , , , , , and are very common, and in many cases, they are considered acceptable even in formal speech.

Vowel development
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, $\langle\rangle$. It also had four diphthongs, $\langle\rangle$, and the rare diphthong $\langle\rangle$. Finally, there were also long and short $\langle\rangle$, representing, in Greek borrowings, which, however, probably came to be pronounced ,  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. Thus the vowel inventory is usually reconstructed as, , , ,.

単母音化
Many diphthongs had begun their monophthongization very early. It is presumed that by Republican times, had become  in unstressed syllables, a phenomenon that would spread to stressed positions around the 1st century AD. From the 2nd century AD, there are instances of spellings with $\langle\rangle$ instead of $\langle\rangle$. $\langleoe\rangle$ was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin (in Old Latin, oinos regularly became ("one")) and became  during early Imperial times. Thus, one can find penam for.

However, $\langle\rangle$ lasted much longer. While it was monophthongized to in areas of north and central Italy (including Rome), it was retained in most 俗ラテン語, and it survives in modern Romanian (for example, aur < ). There is evidence in French and Spanish that the monophthongization of au occurred independently in those languages.

Loss of distinctive length and near-close mergers
Length confusions seem to have begun in unstressed vowels, but they were soon generalized. 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. However, the loss of contrastive length caused only the merger of and  while the rest of pairs remained distinct in quality:, , , ,.

Also, the near-close vowels and  became more open in most varieties and merged with  and  respectively. 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. In Sardinian, all corresponding short and long vowels simply merged with each other, creating a 5-vowel system:. 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, like Romanian.

強勢の音韻化
The placement of stress did not change from Classical to 俗ラテン語, and 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. Where in Classical Latin the place of the accent was predictable from the structure of the word, it was no longer so in 俗ラテン語. Stress had become a phonological property and could serve to distinguish forms that were otherwise homophones.

長音化 of stressed 開音節
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, fori , cathedra ; but short vendo , formas. (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, tempus. In many descendents, several of the long vowels underwent some form of diphthongization, most extensively in 古フランス語 where five of the seven long vowels were affected by breaking.

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 ,,  "that", in the Romance languages, becoming French ' and ' (古フランス語 li, lo, la), Catalan and Spanish ', ' and ', Portuguese ' and ' (elision of -l- is a common feature of Portuguese), and Italian ', ' and '. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ,  "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 its membership in 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 ', ', 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 ' (originally an interjection: "behold!"), which also spawned Italian ' through , a contracted form of ecce eum. This is the origin of 古フランス語 ' (*ecce ille), ' (*ecce iste) and ' (*ecce hic); Italian ' (*eccum istum), ' (*eccum illum) and (now mainly Tuscan) ' (*eccum tibi istum), as well as ' (*eccu hic), ' (*eccum hac); Spanish ' and Portuguese ' (*eccum ille); Spanish ' and Portuguese ' (*eccum hac); Spanish ' and Portuguese ' (*eccum hic); Portuguese ' (*eccum illac) and ' (*eccum inde); Romanian ' (*ecce iste) and ' (*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 members of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages.

The numeral , 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  in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.

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

The 中性 gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the 男性 both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion starts already 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 主格 ending -us (-Ø after -r) in the o-declension.

In Petronius' work, one can find balneus for ("bath"), fatus for ' ("fate"), caelus for ' ("heaven"), amphitheater for ' ("amphitheatre"), vinus for ' ("wine"), and conversely, thesaurum for  ("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 主格 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., 男性 ' ("wall"), and 中性 ' ("sky") have evolved to: Italian ', '; Portuguese ', '; Spanish ', ', Catalan ', '; Romanian ', cieru>; French ', . However, 古フランス語 still had -s in the 主格 and -Ø in the 対格 in both words: murs, ciels [主格] – mur, ciel [oblique].

For some 中性 nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem became the productive; for others, the 主格/対格 form, which was identical in Classical Latin. Evidence suggests that the 中性 gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French (le) , Catalan (la) , Spanish (la) , Portuguese (o) , Italian language (il) , Leonese (el) lleche and Romanian (le) ("milk"), all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin 主格/対格 中性 ' or 対格 男性 '.

Note also that in Spanish the word became 女性, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became 男性 (in Romanian it remained 中性, /lăpturi). Other 中性 forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French ', Leonese, Portuguese and Italian ', Romanian ' ("name") all preserve the Latin 主格/対格 nomen, rather than the oblique stem form *nominem (which nevertheless produced Spanish ').

Most 中性 nouns had 複数 forms ending in -A or -IA ; some of these were reanalysed as 女性 singulars, such as ' ("joy"), 複数 gaudia; the 複数 form lies at the root of the French 女性 単数 (la) , as well as of Catalan and Occitan (la)  (Italian la  is a borrowing from French); the same for ' ("wood stick"), 複数 ligna, that originated the Catalan 女性 単数 noun (la) , and Spanish (la) . Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient 中性 複数 which is treated grammatically as 女性: e.g., : BRACCHIA "arm(s)" → Italian (il)  : (le) braccia, Romanian  : 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 男性 in the 単数 and 女性 in the 複数, with an irregular 複数 in -a. However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that ' is simply a regular 中性 noun (', 複数 ova) and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is -o in the 単数 and -e in the 複数. 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 中性 gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian.

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

These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, the names of trees were usually 女性, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by 男性 or 中性 nouns. Latin ' ("pear tree"), a 女性 noun with a 男性-looking ending, became 男性 in Italian (il)  and Romanian '; in French and Spanish it was replaced by the 男性 derivations (le) , (el) ; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the 女性 derivations (a) , (la) .

As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension noun manus ("hand"), another 女性 noun with the ending -us, Italian and Spanish derived (la) , Romanian mânu> pl (reg.)mânule/, Catalan (la) , and Portuguese (a) , which preserve the 女性 gender along with the 男性 appearance.

Except for the Italian and Romanian heteroclitic nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of 中性 nouns, but still have 中性 pronouns. French  / /  ("this"), Spanish  /  /  ("this"), Italian:  /  /  ("to him" /"to her" / "to it"), Catalan: ', ', ', ' ("it" / this / this-that / that over there); Portuguese:  /  /  ("all of him" / "all of her" / "all of it").

In Spanish, a three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles ', ', and . The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno, literally "that which is good", from : good.

Loss of oblique cases
The 俗ラテン語 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.

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

The 属格 case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by + noun as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining 属格 forms are some pronouns, many fossilized combinations like sayings, some proper names, and certain terms related to the church. For example, French ' ("Thursday") < 古フランス語 juesdi < 俗ラテン語 ; Spanish es  ("it is necessary") < ; terms like, ; and Italian ' ("earthquake") < as well as names like Paoli, Pieri.

The 与格 case lasted longer than the 属格, even though Plautus, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction + 対格. For example,.

The 対格 case developed as a prepositional case, displacing many instances of the 奪格. Towards the end of the imperial period, the 対格 came to be used more and more as a general oblique case.

Despite increasing case mergers, 主格 and 対格 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 古フランス語 and Old Occitan had a two-case subject-oblique system.

This 古フランス語 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 単数 主格 with the 複数 oblique, and the 複数 主格 with the 単数 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.

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 ', "where", from Latin ' + ', or French ', "since", from ' + ', while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese  is de + ex + de. Spanish ' and Portuguese ', "after", represent de + ex + .

Some of these new compounds appear in literary texts during the late empire; French ', Spanish de  and Portuguese de  ("outside") all represent de + ' (Romanian  – 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  ("just recently") from ad + de + in + illa + hora.

As Latin was losing its case system, prepositions started to move in to fill the void. In colloquial Latin, the preposition ad followed by the 対格 was sometimes used as a substitute for the 与格 case.

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

俗ラテン語:
 * *Marco da libru a patre. "Marcus is giving [a/the] book to [his] father."

Just as in the disappearing 与格 case, colloquial Latin sometimes replaced the disappearing 属格 case with the preposition de followed by the 奪格.

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

俗ラテン語:
 * *Marco 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 of ego was lost by the end of the empire, and eo appears in manuscripts from the 6th century.

Adverbs
Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbs from adjectives: ', "dear", formed ', "dearly"; ', "fiercely", from '; ', "often", from '. All of these derivational suffixes were lost in 俗ラテン語, where adverbs were invariably formed by a feminine 奪格 form modifying , which was originally the 奪格 of mēns, and so meant "with a ... mind". So ' ("quick") instead of ' ("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 ', Spanish ' '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 俗ラテン語, these two conjugations grew even closer together. Several of the most frequently-used forms became indistinguishable, while others became distinguished only by stress placement:

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 複数 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 rather than containing a semivowel, and in other cases the  sound was simply dropped. We know this because it did not participate in the sound shift from to. 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.

Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in 俗ラテン語 with auxiliary verbs. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb , *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":
 * j'aimerai (je + aimer + ai) ← aimer ["to love"] + ai ["I have"].
 * Portuguese and amarei (amar + [h]ei) ← amar ["to love"] + hei ["I have"]
 * Spanish and amaré (amar + [h]e) ← amar ["to love"] + he ["I have"].
 * 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) 複数, 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": ', ', 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 . 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", ' and ', was lost in French as these merged into the verb . In Italian, the verb ' inherited both Romance meanings of "being essentially" and "being temporarily of the quality of", while ' 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 . This evolved to *essere in 俗ラテン語 by attaching the common infinitive suffix -re to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian ' and French ' through Proto-Gallo-Romance *essre and 古フランス語 ' as well as Spanish and Portuguese ' (Romanian a  derives from fieri, which means "to become").

In 俗ラテン語 a second copula developed utilizing the verb , 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 ' and 古フランス語 ' (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 俗ラテン語 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. 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 単数, present; stavo = subject first person 単数, 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, however 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. This change may have been attributed from the Germanic peoples' in the late Imperial period, since they spoke in the SVO word order. Fragments of SOV word order still survive through object pronouns (te amo - "I love you").

History of specific Romance languages

 * Sicilian
 * Catalan phonology
 * History of French
 * History of Italian
 * History of Portuguese
 * History of the Spanish language
 * Latin to Romanian sound changes
 * 古フランス語

To Romance in general

 * Ledgeway, Adam (2012). From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 * (esp. parts 1 & 2, Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages; The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages)
 * Ledgeway, Adam (2012). From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 * (esp. parts 1 & 2, Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages; The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages)
 * (esp. parts 1 & 2, Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages; The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages)