Latin vulgar

The vulgar Latin, like that of this political graffiti found in Pompeii, was the language spoken by the popular classes of the Roman Empire, in contrast to the classic literary Latin.

Vulgar Latin or Late Latin (in Latin, Sermo Vulgaris Latinus or Plebeius sermo; in Greek, Λαϊκή Λατινική γλώσσα or Δημώδης λατινική) is a generic term, used to refer to all the vernacular dialects of living Latin, spoken in the provinces of the Roman Empire. The extinction of Latin as a living language was associated with the increasing differentiation of these dialects, which led, towards the century. IX, to the formation of the early Romance languages. Some authors propose to technically distinguish between Vulgar (or Folk) Latin and Late Latin (IV century onwards), although linguistically it is difficult. distinguish between these two meanings.

However, it should be clarified that, from the point of view of modern linguistics, Vulgar Latin as such is an expression based on an ancient and mistaken hypothesis, which supposed the existence of two parallel languages: a "cultured" and a "vulgar" Latin; but, truly, Vulgar Latin was Latin itself, a living and constantly evolving language, while Classical Latin was only maintained in literature and administration as the learned written language, to facilitate communication. among the Roman provinces.

The spoken Latin variant differs markedly from the classical Latin literary style in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until late in the Roman Empire, although many of its features seem to be surprisingly early. Others may even have been around much earlier, at least in the form of Creole Latin. Most definitions of "Vulgar Latin" assume that it is a spoken rather than a written language, because some evidence suggests that Latin it was dialectalized or creolized during this period, and because there is no evidence that anyone transcribed the everyday speech of any of its speakers. The study of Vulgar Latin requires the analysis of indirect evidence, since originally no one intentionally used Vulgar Latin forms when writing.

What is known today of Vulgar Latin comes from three sources. The first is the comparative method that can reconstruct numerous features of the attested Romance languages, and note where they differ from Classical Latin. The second source is various Late Latin prescriptive grammar texts that condemned the linguistic errors that Latin speakers often made, allegations that help describe how the language was used. Finally, the "solecisms" and uses that depart from classical Latin sometimes found in late Latin texts also shed light on the speech of the writer.

Origins

The Singing from my Cid is the literary text earlier, of considerable extension, written in medieval Spanish. Other texts, such as Nodicia de Kesos (very close to the protoiberorromance), although they are not of a literary nature, show a previous development point in medieval romance.

The name "vulgar" derives from the Latin word vulgaris, which meant "common" or "of the people." For those who study Latin, the concept "Vulgar Latin" has several meanings:

• First: designates the Latin spoken of the Roman Empire. The classic Latin was always a somewhat artificial literary language; the Latin carried by the Roman soldiers to Gaul or Dacia was not necessarily the Latin of Cicero. Therefore, under this definition, the vulgar Latin was a spoken language, which began to be written in Latin "tardío", whose style differed from the classic standards of the written texts the first century of our era.
• Second: It also refers to the hypothetical ancestor of romance languages, which cannot be studied directly more than by a few inscriptions. This language introduced a great series of changes in Latin, and could be rebuilt thanks to the evidence supplied by the languages that derived from it, the vernacular Romance languages.
• Third: and with an even more restricted sense, it is sometimes called the vulgar Latin to the hypothetical protorromance of the western Romance languages: the vernaculars that were north and west of the geographical axis La Spezia-Rímini, and on the Iberian peninsula; as well as the romance (very little attested) in the African northwest and in the Balearic Islands. This criterion proposes that the South-Eastern Italian, Romanian and dalmatic developed separately.
• Fourth: the term is sometimes also used to refer to grammatical innovations in late Latin texts, such as Peregrinatio Aetheriae, text of the centuryIV in which the Galactic Monk Aegria relates a journey to Palestine and Mount Sinai; or the works of St.Gregory of Tours. Because the documentation written in vulgar Latin is very rare, these works are of great value to the philologists, mainly because in them sometimes "errors" appear that evidence the spoken use of the period in which the text was written.

Some literary works contain registers other than classical Latin. For example, because in the comedies of Plautus and Terence many of their characters were slaves, these works preserve some early traits of basilect Latin, just as the free men do in Petronius's Satiricon.

Vulgar Latin differentiated itself in the different provinces of the Roman Empire, thus giving rise to the modern era of Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, etc. Obviously, it is considered that Vulgar Latin disappeared when the local dialects had enough differentiating characteristics to become different languages, evolving towards the formation of the Romance languages, when their own unique value was recognized.

The 3rd century is usually considered the period in which, apart from declensions, much of the vocabulary was changing (for example, equus → caballus, etc.). However, it is obvious that these mutations were not uniform throughout the Empire, so perhaps the most striking differences were found between the various forms of Vulgar Latin that occurred in the different provinces (also due to the acquisition of new localisms)..

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin coexisted with written Latin for several centuries, because speakers of vernacular Romance languages preferred to write using the prestigious traditional Latin grammar and spelling. But, although that was what they tried, often what they wrote did not respect the rules of classical Latin. However, at the third Council of Tours in 813, it was decided that the clergy should preach in the vernacular so that the audience would understand them. This could be a documented moment in the diachronic evolution of Latin; in 842, less than thirty years after the Council of Tours, the Oaths of Strasbourg, which reproduce an agreement between two of Charlemagne's heirs, were drawn up in two languages; a Germanic that would evolve into German, and another Romance, which by all accounts was no longer Latin, that would evolve into French:

Extract of the Juraments

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvaai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa...

For the love of God and for the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forth, whenever God gives me wisdom and power, I will defend my brother Charles and help him in anything...

This Late Latin seems to reflect these acquisitions, showing the change that was taking place in that area. Then, the texts of Roman law, both those of Justinian and those of the Catholic Church, served to "freeze" formal Latin, finally unified by medieval copyists and, since then, separated from the already independent vulgar romance. The written language continued to exist as medieval Latin. The vernacular romances were recognized as distinct, separate languages and began to develop their own rules and spellings. So "Vulgar Latin" ceased to be a useful parameter for identifying the various Romance languages.

It was at this time that Vulgar Latin became a collective name to designate a group of dialects derived from Latin, with local (not necessarily common) characteristics, which did not constitute a language, at least in the classical sense of the term.. However, it could be described as something incipient, indefinite, that gradually crystallized in the early forms of each Romance language, having taken formal Latin as its most remote ancestor. Vulgar Latin was therefore an intermediate point in evolution, not a source.

Phonology

Vowels

A profound change that affected all Romance languages changed the order of vowels in Classical Latin. Latin had ten vowels: short and long versions of A, E, I, O, U, Ā, Ē, Ī, Ō, Ū, and three (or four) diphthongs, AE, OE, AU and, according to some, UI. With the exception of Sardinian, where the original five timbres remained unchanged, what happened to Vulgar Latin can be summarized with the table on the right. In this way, the system of ten classical Latin vowels, without counting diphthongs and the Y, which took vowel length into account, was remodeled to become a system in which the difference in vowel length disappeared, and the vowel alteration became be exclusively phonemic. Due to this change, the tonic accent became considerably more pronounced in Vulgar Latin than in Classical Latin. This trend made it difficult to differentiate unstressed syllables, and also produced new alterations in stressed syllables.

The diphthongs OE /oi/ and AE /ai/ fell to form /*e/ and /*ε/, respectively. AU, which was maintained at the beginning, ended up giving way, mutating from /au/ to /*o/ (/ou/ in Galician-Portuguese), once the original O had undergone other modifications.

The short vowels Ŏ and Ĕ evolved into the open vowels /*ɔ/ and /*ε/. In many languages these phonemes in stressed position tended to break into diphthongs. The classical word FŎCUS «hearth, hearth, fireplace» (accusative FŎCU(M)), became the Proto-Romance word for fire (replacing ignis «fire»), but its short vowel Ŏ became a diphthong in several languages:

• Old French: fou → French: faith (today is no longer a diptongo but /fø/)
• Italian: fuoco
• Spanish: Fire

In Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan, however, it did not become a diphthong: port. fogo (pronounced [ˈfoɡu]), rum. and cat. foc (pronounced [ˈfɔk]).

Languages differed in this process. The Ĕ from the Latin expression FĔRRUM, remained in French fer, in Italian and Catalan ferro and in Portuguese ferro [ˈfεʁu], but it was diphthongized in Spanish hierro i> (although in some parts of Spanish America the archaism fierro is still preserved) and in Romanian fier.

Portuguese stabilized its vowels by somewhat maintaining the Latin distinction between long and short vowels in its system of open and close vowels. The Latin long vowels a, e and o tended to become close vowels in Portuguese (spelled â, ê, and ô when stressed), while short vowels became open vowels in Portuguese (á, é, or when tonic). The pronunciation of these vowels is the same as shown in the Vulgar Latin vowel chart to the right. Some vowel instability occurred, particularly with unstressed o, which mutates to /u/, and unstressed e, which mutates to /i/ or /ɨ/.

In Catalan the process was similar. The Latin short o became an open vowel, while the short e branched into a closed e in Western dialects and a neuter vowel in Eastern ones. This neutral vowel evolved little by little towards an open e, although in a large part of the Balearic Islands it is maintained even today. Eastern dialects, likewise, show some vowel instability similar to that of Portuguese: unstressed e and a become a neutral vowel (at some point in the evolution of the language, this change did not affect the e in pretonic position, a pronunciation that today is maintained in part of the Balearic Islands), while, except in a large part of the island of Majorca, the o unstressed becomes [u].

Consonants

Latin palatalization of the sounds /k/, /t/, and often /g/, occurred in almost all variants of Vulgar Latin. The only Romance dialects that did not undergo palatalization were Sardinian, in some of its variants, and Dalmatian. Thus the Latin word cælum "sky", pronounced [kaɪ̯lũ^m], late [kʲɛːlu] beginning with /k/, became French ciel [sjεl], in Portuguese céu ['sεu], beginning with /s/. The preceding semivowels, written in Latin v, as in vinum, pronounced /w/, and i or j, as in iocunda, pronounced /j/, they became pronounced /v/ and /dʲ/, respectively. Between vowels, /b/, /w/ or /v/ often arise as an intermediate sound /β/. From the comparison of the western Romance languages, the following inventory can be postulated for the Vulgar Latin of the western area, according to the AFI:

The allophonic value of each of these sounds could vary from one variety to another, such as between the allophones of /č, ǧ, š, ž, ɲ, ʎ/ would generally have been [ʧ, ʤ, ʃ, ʒ, ɲ] but in some cases also [kʲ, gʲ, sʲ, zʲ, nʲ, lʲ ]. In general, there are the following evolutions:

♪ go, go, go, go ♪ ▪ *ğe, *ği, *ğV-/*žV-.

gelu ▪ [gj]  [ieielo]  esp. IceIt. Gelu

diurnum ▪ [ğornu]  [ orno] (it. Giorno)  [≈] cat. jornfr. jour

*ke, *ki ▪ *če, *či

cæcus ▪ [kj]  [ ieko]  esp. blind blindIt. SwedishCat. cec

lat. vulg. ♪cīcere ♪cicerōne ▪čičére♪čikrone/  mozár. Cicharo "guisante" ~ cat. cigró, Ciuró «garbanzo»

♪ni- ▪ ♪

hispania ▪ [Panja]  esp. Spain

♪ ▪ *vV/ *βV

vīvere ▪ *viv(e)re  esp. livingCat. viure.

*-VbV- ▪ *-VvV-/ *-VβV-

*jV ▪ *žV-/*ğV-

juvenem ▪ *žuven  esp. Young youngCat. ♪.

Note that in the Latin alphabet, the letters U / V, I / J, were only graphic (and later in some areas, typographic) variations that were not they distinguished until the early modern period arrived.

In the Western Romance area, an epentetic vowel was inserted at the beginning of any word beginning with the letter s and another consonant: thus the Latin word spatha became in Portuguese and Spanish it was espada, in Catalan it was espasa, and in French it was épée. On the other hand, the Eastern Romance languages preserved the euphony rules by adding the epenthesis to the preceding article when necessary, so Italian preserved spada (f) as la spada, and changed the masculine il spaghetto to lo spaghetto.

Gender was reshaped in daughter languages by the loss of final consonants. In Classical Latin, the endings -US and -UM distinguished masculine nouns from second declension neuters; once the -S and -M disappeared, the neuters were mixed with the masculine, a process already finished in the Romance languages. In contrast, some neuter plurals, such as gaudia, meaning "joys," were reinterpreted as feminine singulars. The loss of the final -M is a process that seems to have begun at the time of the first monuments of the Latin language. In the epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbato, who died around 150 B.C. C., reads TAVRASIA CISAVNA SAMNIO CEPIT, which in classical Latin would be written Taurāsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cēpit ("He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium.") However, the final -M was consistently written in the literary language, although it was often treated as a silence for reasons of poetic meter.

Evidence of change

In Wikisource is the text of this historical document: Appendix Probi.

Evidence of these and other changes can be seen in the late 3rd century in Appendix Probi (external link), a collection of prescriptive glosses that proposed a classical Latin usage correct, criticizing certain forms of Vulgar Latin. These glosses describe:

• a syncopa process, loss of atonous vowels (MASCVLVS NON MASCLVS);
• the reduction of the previous forms silábicas /e/ e /i/ in /j/ (VINEA NON VINIA);
• the leveling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/COLVBER NON COLOBERand /e/e /i/DIMIDIVS NON DEMEDIVS);
• regularization of irregular forms (GLIS NON GLIRIS);
• regularization and emphasis on gender forms (PAVPER MVLIER NON PAVPERA MVLIER);
• the leveling of the distinction between /b/ and /v/ between vowels (BRAVIVM NON BRABIVM);
• the substitution of diminutives by unmarked words (AVRIS NON ORICLA, NEPTIS NON NEPTICLA)
• loss of syllable when nasalized (MENSA NON MESAor its inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorruption (FORMOSVS NON FORMVNSVS).

Many of the forms punished in the Appendix Probi were shown to be productive forms in Romance; oricla, without being a classical Latin form, is the source of the French oreille, Portuguese orelha, Spanish "oreja".

Vocabulary

Certain classical Latin words disappeared from the vocabulary, or were deformed by phonic phenomena such as the yod and the wau. Many long words lost their protonic or postonic vowels. And the primitive meaning of the words also changed due to the contagion of the habitual semantic context, among other causes. The aforementioned Appendix Probi, dated between the III century and the IV AD. C., offers a list of Vulgar Latin words that its author, a grammarian, intended to correct, although he incurs frequent ultra-corrections. The classical term equus 'horse' was replaced by caballus 'horse of load, horse' (although it should be noted that in Spanish yegua, Portuguese égua, Catalan euga, Old French ive, Sardinian èbba and Romanian iapă all with a feminine meaning, derive from the classical equa). A very incomplete list of words that were exclusively classical and their productive Romance equivalents is found in the box to the right.

Some of the words that disappeared in Romance were again borrowed from the same Latin a posteriori. Vocabulary changes affected even the basic grammatical particles of Latin; there are many that disappeared 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, because for much of their history, Vulgar Latin and Latin were not different languages, but different registers of the same language, some Romance languages preserve Latin words that were lost in others. For example, the Italian ogni 'every' preserves the Latin expression omnes. Other languages use cognates of totum (accusative of totus) for the same meaning; for example tutto in Italian, tudo in Portuguese, todo in Spanish, tot in Catalan and tout in French.

Frequently, Latin words that have been re-borrowed from the most prestigious record of Classical Latin are found alongside evolved versions of the same word. The absence of an expected phonetic change, in contrast to another word of the same etymological provenance that has undergone such a phonetic change, is the key to finding out if a word is a loan from Classical Latin. In Spanish, for example, the Vulgar Latin fungus (accusative fungum), became mushroom, with the change f > h which was usual in Spanish (cf. filius > old fijo > modern son). But fungus shares a semantic space with fungo which, due to the lack of the expected sound change f > h, proves to have been borrowed again from the classical Latin register. In Portuguese, the change to h from f did not occur, but some sounds became nasalized. fungum became fungo /fũgu/; in the north of Portugal you can hear, fungum /fũgũ/.

Sometimes, a Classical Latin word has been kept alongside a Vulgar Latin word. The classical caput 'head' yielded in Vulgar Latin to testa (originally 'pot; shell', a common Western European metaphor, cf. English cup 'cup' vs. German Kopf 'head') in most Western Romance forms, Italian inclusive. But Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French kept the Latin word under the forms capo, capo, and chef, which contain many metaphorical meanings of 'head'. ' such as 'extreme, boss'. The Latin word with its original meaning is preserved in Romanian and in Catalan cap, which means 'head', with the anatomical sense of the term, although in Catalan it also has metaphorical meanings such as 'boss' etc

Verbs with suffixed prepositions have often displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such suffixes as -bilis, -arius, -itare and -icare grew rapidly.. These changes often occurred to avoid irregular forms or to regularize genres.

Grammar

The loss of declination of the nominal system

The phonetic changes that were occurring in Vulgar Latin caused the drop of certain final consonants that made it difficult to preserve the nominal declension typical of Classical Latin. At the beginning there was a decrease in the number of differentiated forms according to case, passing the number of cases from 5 to 3 (nominative, accusative-ablative, genitive-dative). Finally, most Romance languages completely dispensed with Latin declensions. Although in Old French in the XII century it retained an opposition of two cases (recto / oblique) and in some Romance varieties it was they maintained declination traces until the 18th century. At present only the Romanian retains case oppositions.

As a consequence of the little sustainability of the system of nominal cases after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin became an inflectional language with more analytic than synthetic forms, in which the order of the words is, in several cases, a necessary element for sentence syntactic coherence. See the table to see the change caused by the loss of final /m/, the loss of vowel length, and the sound change from AE /ae/ to E /e/ in the first declension.

Similar changes occurred in the other declensions. As a consequence, with the exception of Old French, which retained for some time the distinction between the nominative and oblique cases (called cas-sujet/cas-régime), from Romanian, which today has the same cases as Vulgar Latin, having one form for the genitive-dative and another for the rest, and some varieties of Romanesque Rhetoric retained traces of the case until the century XVIII at least.

The distinction was marked in two ways in the Romance languages. North and west of the La Spezia-Rimini line, which runs through northern Italy, the singular was usually differentiated from the plural by the suffix -s, which already appeared in the old accusative plurals in both masculine as well as feminine of all declensions. South and east of the La Spezia–Rimini line, the distinction was made by changing the final vowel, just as in contemporary Italian and Romanian. This preserves and generalizes differences that were marked in the nominative plurals of the first and second declension.

The Romance Articles

The influence of colloquial language, which gave great importance to the deictic or pointing element, originated a profuse use of demonstratives. The number of demonstratives that accompanied the noun increased very significantly, especially when referring (anaphorically) to an element named before. In this anaphoric use, the demonstrative value of ille (or ipse, in some regions) gradually became blurred to also apply to any noun that referred to well-known beings or objects.; In this way, the definite article (el, la, los, las, lo) arose, non-existent in classical Latin and present in all Romance languages. In turn, the numeral unus, used with the indefinite value of some, certain, extended its uses accompanying the noun that designated entities not mentioned before, whose entry into the discourse implied the introduction of new information; With this new use of unus arose the indefinite article (un, una, unos, unas) that did not exist in classical Latin either.

Definite articles began as demonstrative pronouns or adjectives: compare the Latin demonstrative adjectives ille, illa, (illud), with the French le and la, Spanish el, lo and la, Catalan lo/el and la and the Italians lo/il and la. The Portuguese articles o and a, came from the same source. Finally, Sardinian also in this aspect had a singular development, forming its article from ipsu(m), ipsa “su, sa”. There are also forms derived from ipsu(m), ipsa in medieval Catalan (es, sa), but today they are only maintained in the Balearic Islands and very residually on the Costa Brava. It should be noted that while most Romance languages place the article before the noun, Romanian places it after, for example lupul "the wolf" and omul "the man". » (from lupus ille and homo ille).

Syntax

The classical construction of Latin easily admitted hyperbats and transpositions, so it was very common for two terms linked by semantic or grammatical relationships to be interspersed with others. On the contrary, the vulgar order preferred to place the modified and modifying words together. Thus, for example, Petronius still offers sentences like

alter matellam tenebat argenteam

with the nominal phrase that acts as the object of the truncated verb into two fragments between which the verb itself is inserted. These types of constructions are rarer in Romance languages, although there is no shortage of parallel examples to the previous one:

My house, the Got it. ordered.

Romance languages, on the other hand, tend to have a more fixed basic syntactic order, with transitive verbs tending to follow the Subject Verb Object order, although for reasons of emphasis they may have other syntactic orders:

Maria, Juan killed her.

John killed Mary.

Conjugation

Regarding verbal conjugation, in Vulgar Latin many desinential forms were replaced by periphrases. Thus, all the simple forms of the passive voice were eliminated, so uses such as amabatur or aperiuntur were replaced by the forms amatus erat and se aperiunt. The futures of the type dicam or cantabo were also left aside, while periphrases of the type cantare habeo and dicere habeo, origin of future Romanesque. On the other hand, it will also be in Vulgar Latin where a new tense that did not exist in Classical Latin emerges: the conditional. From periphrastic forms such as cantare habebam this new tense will be formed, which will later pass to all Romance languages (cantaría).

As can be seen, the main hallmarks of the Romance languages are already present in the grammatical features of Vulgar Latin; in the VI century, a strongly vulgarized Latin will die as a language (remaining only as a learned tool for science) and from it will begin to emerge variants that, over time, will become the different Romance languages

The Reichenau Glosses

Another perspective on vocabulary changes in Vulgar Latin in France can be seen in Reichenau's glosses, written in the margins of a copy of the Vulgate Bible, which explains the Vulgate words of the IV unreadable in the VIII century >, when these glosses appear to have been written. These appear to be of French origin, as some terms are specifically French.

These glosses show the following peculiarities.

Lexical replacement

• femur «muslo» 한 coxa (Portuguese coxaCatalan cuixa, French cuisse, Italian cosciaRomanian coapsă, but Spanish Cuja, formerly “musle”)
• arēna «arena» ▼ Sabulō (French) Sable, Italian sabbia, Portuguese saibro)
• Canere ▪ cantāre (portugués/español/catalán sing, French blacker, Italian singRomanian a cânta)

Grammatical changes

The superlative degree and the synthetic comparative degree of Latin (also present in other Indo-European languages, such as English), disappear from the Romance languages, which start to use an analytic form for both degrees. In Romance languages, only comparatives (better, worse, greater, lesser) and cultisms (best, worst) are preserved residually, the synthetic forms being replaced by periphrases such as &# 34;is more X than" or "the most X of":

• optimal ▪ Mergers (French) meilleursCatalan million, Spanish better, Portuguese melhores, Italian migliori)
• saniore ▪ health benefits (French) plus sain, Italian più sanaCatalan més sa, Spanish healthier, Portuguese mais são/saudávelRomanian mai sănătos)

Germanic lexical loanwords

• turbās ▪ fulcās (Old French) foulc, foucOld West folc)
• cementāriīs ▪ matiōnibus (French) maçonOld West matz ‘albañil’
• non perpercit ▪ non sparniavit (French) EpargnerOccitan Esparnhar, Italian sparambiare, risparmiare ‘Save’
• Galea ▪ Helme (French) HeaumeCatalan elmItalian/Portuguese Elmo, Spanish I'm sorry.)

Words whose meanings have changed

• in ore ▪ in bucca (portugués/español/catalán mouth, French Bouche, Italian bocca)
• rostrum ▪ beccus (French/Catalan bec, Italian becco, Portuguese bico, Spanish peak (of bird)
• isset ▪ ambulaset (Italian ambiasseRomanian umblase ‘hubiera/hubiese gone’
• liberos ▪ infants (French) enfants, romanche unfantsCatalan infants ‘children’
• thousand ▪ servient (Old French) serjants ‘soldiers’