Proto-Romance Language
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Proto-Romance is the comparatively reconstructed ancestor of all
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
. It reflects a late variety of spoken Latin prior to regional fragmentation.


Phonology


Vowels


Monophthongs


Diphthong

The only phonemic diphthong was /au̯/.


Allophony

*Vowels were lengthened in stressed open syllables. *Stressed /ɛ, ɔ/ may have yielded the incipient diphthongs ͜ɛ, o͜ɔwhen followed by a syllable containing a close vowel. **Whatever the precise outcome,
Maiden Virginity is the state of a person who has never engaged in sexual intercourse. The term ''virgin'' originally only referred to sexually inexperienced women, but has evolved to encompass a range of definitions, as found in traditional, modern ...
argues that this would have been limited, at the Proto-Romance stage, to open syllables. That is, it would have applied only to instances of /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ that had been subject to stressed-open-syllable lengthening.


Constraints

*Neither a distinct /ɛ/ nor /ɔ/ occurred in unstressed position on account of having merged into /e/ and /o/ respectively.Ferguson 1976: 76; Gouvert 2015: 78–81, 121–122 *Neither a distinct /i/ nor /u/ occurred in the second syllable of words with the structure σσˈσσ(such as ''càntatóre'' 'singer') on account of having merged into /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ respectively.


Consonants

was affricated to and was at least fronted to , if not also affricated to .


Allophony

The following features are reconstructed with varying degrees of certainty: *A prop-vowel was added before word-initial /sC/ clusters not already preceded by a vowel (as in /sˈtare/ sˈtaːɾe. *Palatalized consonants, other than /sʲ rʲ/, tended to
geminate In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...
in intervocalic position, although this varied widely depending on the consonant in question. For /bʲ dʲ ɡʲ/, see below. *The sequence /ɡn/ was likely realized as nat first, with subsequent developments varying by region.' */j/ was likely realized as or possibly with gemination in intervocalic position. * /d/ and /ɡ/ might have been fricatives or approximants in intervocalic position. */s/ might have been
apico-alveolar An apical consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the tip of the tongue (apex) in conjunction with upper articulators from lips to postalveolar, and possibly prepalatal. It contrasts with laminal cons ...
. */ll/ might have been
retroflex A retroflex (Help:IPA/English, /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal (Help:IPA/English, /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated betw ...
.' */f/ might have been
bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tli ...
.


Constraints

*/b/ and /bʲ/ did not occur intervocalically on account of having merged with /β, βʲ/. **The same may also have occurred after /r/ or /l/. */dʲ/ and /ɡʲ/ did not occur intervocalically on account of both having merged with /j/. */kʷ/ and /ɡʷ/ did not occur before
back vowel A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...
s on account of having delabialized to /k, ɡ/.


Nouns

Proto-Romance nouns appear to have had three cases: a
nominative In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...
, an
accusative The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
, and a combined
genitive In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...
-
dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...
. Several Class III nouns had inflexions that differed by syllable count or stress position. Some nouns were pluralized with -''a'' or ''-ora'', having originally been neuter in Classical Latin. Their singular was treated as grammatically masculine, while their plural was treated as feminine. Such nouns, due to their plurals, were often reanalyzed as collective feminine nouns.


Adjectives


Positive


Comparative

Proto-Romance inherited the
comparative In general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as wel ...
suffix ''-ior'' from Latin, but only in a limited number of adjectives.' Otherwise, the typical way to form a comparative seems to have been to add either ''plus'' or ''magis'' (meaning 'more') to a positive adjective.


Superlative

With the exception of a few
fossilized A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved in ...
forms, such as /ˈpɛssɪmʊs/ 'worst', superlatives were formed by adding an intensifying adverb or prefix (/mʊltu, bɛne, per-, tras-/ etc.) to a positive adjective. Comparative forms could also have been made superlative by adding a
demonstrative adjective Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...
.


Possessive

Feminine singular forms shown below. In certain cases there was an opposition between 'strong' (stressed) and 'weak' (unstressed) variants.


Pronouns


Personal

Numerous variant forms appear to have existed. For the third-person genitive-dative inflexions, there appears to have been an opposition between 'strong' (stressed) and 'weak' (unstressed) variants, as also with the possessive adjectives.


Relative

The interrogative pronouns were the same, except that the neuter nominative-accusative form was /ˈkʷɪd/.


Verbs

Proto Romance verbs belonged to three main classes, each characterized by a different
thematic vowel In Indo-European studies, a thematic vowel or theme vowel is the vowel or from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and tho ...
. Their conjugations were built on three stems and involved various combinations of mood, aspect, and tense.Hall 1983: 47–50


Present indicative


Participles

As in Latin, present participles had an active sense and inflected like class III adjectives, while past participles had a passive sense and inflected like class I/II adjectives. Regular forms would have been as follows (in the accusative feminine singular):


See also

*
Appendix Probi The ''Appendix Probi'' ("Probus' Appendix") is the conventional name for a series of five documents believed to have been copied in the seventh or eighth century in Bobbio, Italy. Its name derives from the fact that the documents were found atta ...
*
Reichenau Glossary The Reichenau Glossary is a collection of Latin glosses likely compiled in the 8th century in northern France to assist local clergy in understanding certain words or expressions found in the Vulgate Bible. Background Over the centuries Jerome’ ...
*
Lexical changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance 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. Much of th ...
*
Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance As Latin developed into Proto-Romance it experienced numerous sound changes, a rough summary of which is provided below. General changes * /h/ is lost without a trace in all positions. **If this results in a collision of identical short vowels ...


Notes


References


Bibliography

* * * * *Chambon, Jean-Pierre. 2013. Notes sur un problème de la reconstruction phonétique et phonologique du protoroman: Le groupe */ɡn/. ''Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris''. CVIII, 273–282. * * * * * * * * * * *Lausberg, Heinrich. 1970. ''Lingüística románica'', I: Fonética. Madrid: Gredos. *Lausberg, Heinrich. 1973. ''Lingüística románica'', II: Morfología. Madrid: Gredos. *Leppänen, V., & Alho, T. 2018. On the mergers of Latin close-mid vowels. ''Transactions of the Philological Society'' 116. 460–483. * *Lloyd, Paul M. 1987. ''From Latin to Spanish''. Philadelphia: American Philological Society. * * *Maiden, Martin. 2016. Diphthongization. In Ledgeway, Adam & Maiden, Martin (eds.), ''The Oxford guide to the Romance languages'', 647–57. Oxford University Press. * * * * {{Romance languages, state=expanded Latin language Linguistics Romance languages