Romance languages linguistics

Romance linguistics is the study of linguistics of Romance languages.

Basic features

Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages:
* Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns. The amount of ''synthesis'' is significantly more than English, but less than Classical Latin and much less than the oldest Indo-European languages (e.g. Ancient Greek, Sanskrit). Inflection is often fusional, with a single affix representing multiple features (as contrasted with agglutinative languages such as Turkish or Japanese). For example, Portuguese ''amei'' "I loved" is composed of ''am-'' "love" and the fusional suffix ''-ei'' "first-person singular preterite indicative".
* Romance languages have a primarily subject–verb–object word order, with varying degrees of flexibility from one language to another. Constructions are predominantly of the head-first ( right-branching) type. Adjectives, genitives and relative clauses all tend to follow their head noun, although (except in Romanian) determiners usually precede.
* In general, nouns, adjectives and determiners inflect only according to grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) and grammatical number (singular or plural). Grammatical case is marked only on pronouns, as in English; case marking, as in English, is of the nominative–accusative type (rather than e.g. the ergative–absolutive marking of Basque or the split ergativity of Hindi). A significant exception, however, is Romanian, with three-case marking (nominative/accusative vs. genitive/dative and vocative) on nominal elements.
* Verbs are inflected according to a complex morphology that may mark person, number (singular or plural), tense, mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), and sometimes aspect or gender. Grammatical voice (active, passive, middle/reflexive) and some grammatical aspects (in particular, the perfect aspect) are expressed using periphrastic constructions, as in the Italian present perfect (''passato prossimo'') ''io ho amato''/''io sono stato amato'' "I have loved/I have been loved".
* Most Romance languages are null subject languages (but modern French is not, as a result of the phonetic decay of verb endings).
* All Romance languages have two articles (definite and indefinite), and many have in addition a partitive article (expressing the concept of "some"). In some languages (notably, French), the use of an article with a noun is nearly obligatory; it serves to express grammatical number (no longer marked on most nouns) and to cope with the extreme homophony of French vocabulary as a result of extensive sound reductions.
* The phonemic inventory of most Romance languages is of moderate size with few unusual phonemes. Phonemic vowel length is uncommon. Some languages have developed nasal vowels or front rounded vowels.
* Word accent is of the stress (dynamic) type, rather than making use of pitch accent, pitch (as in Ancient Greek and some modern Slavic languages). Stress most often occurs on one of the last three syllables, with predictability varying by language.

Changes from Classical Latin

Loss of the case system

The most significant changes between Classical Latin and Proto-Romance (and hence all the modern Romance languages) relate to the reduction or loss of the Latin case system, and the corresponding syntactic changes that were triggered.

The case system was drastically reduced from the six-case system of Classical Latin. Although five cases can be reconstructed for Vulgar Latin nouns (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and ablative), for Proto-Romance this had been reduced to three: nominative, accusative-ablative, and genitive-dative. This system is preserved best in pronouns. In the West, the genitive-dative disappeared with the genitive replaced by ''de'' + ablative and the dative by ''ad'' + accusative. This left only two cases: nominative and oblique. (However, a morphologically unmarked genitive, the so-called juxtaposition genitive, syntactically still discernible, survives in Old French and Old Occitan, also leaving traces in Old Italian and some modern Italian dialects.) Some of the older Gallo-Romance languages (in particular, Old French, Old Occitan, Old Sursilvan and Old Friulian, and in traces Old Catalan and Old Venetian) preserved this two-case system well into the literary period, and in Ibero-Romance languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in Italian (see under Case), a couple of examples are found which preserve the old nominative. In the East, a genitive-dative made entirely of dative forms was retained but the nominative and accusative-ablative eventually merged.

Concomitant with the loss of cases, freedom of word order was greatly reduced. Classical Latin had a generally verb-final (SOV) but overall quite free word order, with a significant amount of word scrambling and mixing of left-branching and right-branching constructions. The Romance languages eliminated word scrambling and nearly all left-branching constructions, with most languages developing a rigid SVO, right-branching syntax. (Old French, however, had a freer word order due to the two-case system still present, as well as a predominantly verb-second word order developed under the influence of the Germanic languages.) Some freedom, however, is allowed in the placement of adjectives relative to their head noun. In addition, some languages (e.g. Spanish, Romanian) have an "accusative preposition" (Romanian ''pe'', Spanish "personal ''a''") along with clitic doubling, which allows for some freedom in ordering the arguments of a verb.

The Romance languages developed grammatical articles where Latin had none. Articles are often introduced around the time a robust case system falls apart in order to disambiguate the remaining case markers (which are usually too ambiguous by themselves) and to serve as parsing clues that signal the presence of a noun (a function that used to be served by the case endings themselves).

This was the pattern followed by the Romance languages: In the Romance languages that still preserved a functioning nominal case system (e.g., Romanian and Old French), only the combination of article and case ending serves to uniquely identify number and case (compare the similar situation in modern German). All Romance languages have a definite article (originally developed from ''ipse'' "self" but replaced in nearly all languages by ''ille'' "that (over there)") and an indefinite article (developed from ''ūnus'' "one"). Many also have a partitive article (''dē'' "of" + definite article).

Latin had a large number of syntactic constructions expressed through infinitives, participles, and similar nominal constructs. Examples are the ablative absolute, the accusative-plus-infinitive construction used for reported speech, gerundive constructions, and the common use of reduced relative clauses expressed through participles. All of these are replaced in the Romance languages by subordinate clauses expressed with finite verbs, making the Romance languages much more "verbal" and less "nominal" than Latin. Under the influence of the Balkan sprachbund, Romanian has progressed the furthest, largely eliminating the infinitive. (It is being revived, however, due to the increasing influence of other Romance languages.)

Other changes

* Loss of phonemic vowel length, and change into a free-stressed language. Classical Latin had an automatically determined stress on the second or third syllable from the end, conditioned by vowel length; once vowel length was neutralized, stress was no longer predictable so long as it remained where it was (which it mostly did).
* Development of a series of palatal consonants as a result of palatalization.
* Loss of most traces of the neuter gender.
* Development of a series of analytic perfect tenses, comparable to English "I have done, I had done, I will have done".
* Loss of the Latin synthetic passive voice, replaced by an analytic construction comparable to English "it is/was done".
* Loss of deponent verbs, replaced by active-voice verbs.
* Replacement of the Latin future tense with a new tense formed (usually) by a periphrasis of infinitive + present tense of ''habēre'' "have", which usually contracts into a new synthetic tense. A corresponding conditional tense is formed in the same way but using one of the past-tense forms of ''habēre''.
* Numerous lexical changes. A number of words were borrowed from the Germanic languages and Celtic languages. Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Throughout the medieval period, words were borrowed from Classical Latin in their original form (''learned words'') or in something approaching the original form (''semi-learned words''), often replacing the popular forms of the same words.

Phonology

Vowels

Every language has a different set of vowels from every other. Common characteristics are as follows:
* Most languages have at least five monophthongs . The parent language of most of the Italo-Western Romance languages (which includes the vast majority) actually had a seven-vowel system , which is kept in most Italo-Western languages. In some languages, like Spanish and Romanian, the phonemic status and difference between open-mid and close-mid vowels was lost. French has probably the largest inventory of monophthongs, with conservative varieties having 12 oral vowels and 4 nasal vowels . European Portuguese also has a large inventory, with 9 oral monophthongs , 5 nasal monophthongs , and a large number of oral and nasal diphthongs (see below).
* Some languages have a large inventory of falling diphthongs. These may or may not be considered as phonemic units (rather than sequences of vowel+glide or vowel+vowel), depending on their behavior. As an example, French, Spanish and Italian have occasional instances of putative falling diphthongs formed from a vowel plus a non-syllabic or (e.g. Spanish ''veinte'' "twenty", ''deuda'' "debt"; French ''paille'' "straw", ''caoutchouc'' "rubber"; Italian ''sei'' "you are/six", ''neutro'' "neuter"), but these are normally analyzed as sequences of vowel and glide. The diphthongs in Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan and Occitan, however, have various properties suggesting that they are better analyzed as unit phonemes. Portuguese, for example, has the diphthongs , where (and to a lesser extent ) appear only in some dialects. All except appear frequently in verb or noun inflections. (Portuguese also has nasal diphthongs; see below.)
* Among the major Romance languages, Portuguese and French have nasal vowel phonemes, stemming from nasalization before a nasal stop, nasal consonant followed by loss of the consonant (this occurred especially when the nasal consonant was not directly followed by a vowel). Originally, vowels in both languages were nasalized before ''all'' nasal consonants, but have subsequently become denasalized before nasal consonants that still remain (except in Brazilian Portuguese, where the pre-nasal vowels in words such as ''cama'' "bed", ''menos'' "less" remain highly nasalized). In Portuguese, nasal vowels are sometimes analyzed as phonemic sequences of oral vowels plus an underlying nasal consonant, but such an analysis is difficult in French because of the existence of minimal pairs such as ''bon'' "good (masc.)", ''bonne'' "good (fem.)". In both languages, there are fewer nasal than oral vowels. Nasalization triggered vowel lowering in French, producing the 4 nasal vowels (although most speakers in France nowadays pronounce as ). Vowel raising was triggered in Portuguese, however, producing the 5 nasal vowels . Vowel contraction and other changes also resulted in the Portuguese nasal diphthongs (of which occurs in only two words, ''muito'' "much, many, very", and ''mui'' "very"; and is actually a final-syllable allophone of ).
* Most languages have fewer vowels in unstressed syllables than stressed syllables. This again reflects the Italo-Western Romance parent language, which had a seven-vowel system in stressed syllables (as described above) but only (with no low-mid vowels) in unstressed syllables. Some languages have seen further reductions: e.g. Standard Catalan has only in unstressed syllables. In French, on the other hand, any vowel may take prosodic stress.
* Most languages have even fewer vowels in word-final unstressed syllables than elsewhere. For example, Old Italian allowed only , while the early stages of most Western Romance languages allowed only . The Gallo-Romance languages went even farther, deleting all final vowels except . Of these languages, French has carried things to the extreme by deleting all vowels after the accented syllable and uniformly accenting the final syllable (except for a more-or-less non-phonemic final unstressed that occasionally appears). Modern Spanish now allows final unstressed , and modern Italian allows final unstressed , but they tend to occur largely in borrowed or onomatopoeic words, e.g. ''guru'' "guru", ''taxi'' "taxi", Spanish ''tribu'' "tribe" and ''espíritu'' "spirit" (loanwords from Classical Latin), Italian ''babau'' ~ ''baubau'' "bogeyman" (onomatopoeic, cf. English "boo!"). The apparent Spanish exception ''casi'' "almost" originates from Latin ''quasi'' "as if" < ''quam sī'', and was probably influenced by ''si'' "if".
* Phonemic vowel length is uncommon. Vulgar Latin lost the phonemic vowel length of Classical Latin and replaced it with a non-phonemic length system where stressed vowels in open syllables were long, and all other vowels were short. Standard Italian still maintains this system, and it was rephonemicized in the Gallo-Romance languages (including the Rhaeto-Romance languages) as a result of the deletion of many final vowels. Some northern Italian languages (e.g. Friulan) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but in most languages the new long vowels were either diphthongized or shortened again, in the process eliminating phonemic length. French is again the odd man out: Although it followed a normal Gallo-Romance path by diphthongizing five of the seven long vowels and shortening the remaining two, it phonemicized a third vowel length system around 1300 AD in syllables that had been closed with an (still marked with a circumflex accent), and now is phonemicizing a fourth system as a result of lengthening before final voiced fricatives.
* In modern spoken and literary Romanian, Slavic influences are evident in phonetics and morphology. Phonetic Slavicisms include the iotation of the initial ''e'' in words such as ''el'', ''ea'', ''este'' pronounced (compare es, el, ella, estamos, without the Slavic iotation effect).

Consonants

Most Romance languages have similar sets of consonants. The following is a combined table of the consonants of the five major Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian).

Key:
* bold: Appears in all 5 languages.
* ''italic'': Appears in 3–4 languages.
* (parentheses): Appears in 2 languages.
* ((double parentheses)): Appears in only 1 language.

Notable changes:
* Spanish has no phonemic voiced fricatives (however, occur as allophones of after a vowel and after certain consonants). The equivalent of merged with , and all the rest became voiceless. It also lost , which became or in some other dialects.
* The western languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese) all used to have the affricates , , , . By the fourteenth century or so, these all turned into fricatives except for Spanish and dialectal Portuguese . (Spanish ended up becoming , at least in Northern, Central and some parts of Southern Spain; elsewhere, it merged with , as in some other Romance languages, such as French and Portuguese.) Romanian likewise became .
* French, and most varieties of Spanish, have lost (which merged with ). Romanian merged both and into .
* Romanian was influenced by Slavic phonology, most notably in the palatalization of consonants in the plural form (for example ''pomi'' and ''lupi'' ).

Most instances of most of the sounds below that occur (or used to occur, as described above) in all of the languages are cognate. However:
* Although all of the languages have or used to have , almost none of these sounds are cognate between pairs of languages. The only real exception is many between Italian and Romanian, stemming from Latin C- before E or I. Italian also has from Vulgar Latin -CI-, and from -TI- following a consonant (elsewhere ). Romanian also has from -TI- before a stressed syllable. Former French is from Latin C- before A, either word-initial or following a consonant; Spanish is from Latin -CT-, or from PL, CL following a consonant; former Portuguese is from Latin PL, CL, FL, either word-initial or following a consonant.
* Italian and former Romanian (from some instances of Vulgar Latin -DI-) are not cognate with former western (from lenition of ).

Lexical stress

Word stress was rigorously predictable in classical Latin except in a very few exceptional cases, either on the penultimate syllable (second from last) or antepenultimate syllable (third from last), according to the syllable weight of the penultimate syllable. Stress in the Romance Languages mostly remains on the same syllable as in Latin, but various sound changes have made it no longer so predictable. Minimal pairs distinguished only by stress exist in some languages, e.g. Italian ''Papa'' "Pope" vs. ''papà'' "daddy", or Spanish ''límite'' " limit", present subjunctive ''limite'' "hat /(s)helimit(s)" and preterite ''limité'' " limited".

Erosion of unstressed syllables following the stress has caused most Spanish and Portuguese words to have either penultimate or ultimate stress: e.g. Latin ''trēdecim'' "thirteen" > Spanish ''trece'', Portuguese ''treze''; Latin ''amāre'' "to love" > Spanish/Portuguese ''amar''. Most words with antepenultimate stress are learned borrowings from Latin, e.g. Spanish/Portuguese ''fábrica'' "factory" (the corresponding inherited word is Spanish ''fragua'', Portuguese ''frágua'' "forge"). This process has gone even farther in French, with deletion of all post-stressed vowels, leading to consistent, predictable stress on the last syllable: e.g. Latin ''Stephanum'' "Stephen" > Old French ''Estievne'' > French ''Étienne'' ; Latin ''juvenis'' "young" > Old French ''juevne'' > French ''jeune'' . This applies even to borrowings: e.g. Latin ''fabrica'' > French borrowing ''fabrique'' (the inherited word in this case being monosyllabic ''forge'' < Pre-French *''fauriga'').

Other than French (with consistent final stress), the position of the stressed syllable generally falls on one of the last three syllables. Exceptions may be caused by clitics or (in Italian) certain verb endings, e.g. Italian ''telefonano'' "they telephone"; Spanish ''entregándomelo'' "delivering it to me"; Italian ''mettiamocene'' "let's put some of it in there"; Portuguese ''dávamos-vo-lo'' "we were giving it to you". Stress on verbs is almost completely predictable in Spanish and Portuguese, but less so in Italian.

Nominal morphology

Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns can be marked for gender, number and case. Adjectives and pronouns must agree in all features with the noun they are bound to.

Number

The Romance languages inherited from Latin two grammatical numbers, singular and plural; the only trace of a dual number comes from Latin ''ambō'' > Spanish and Portuguese ''ambos'', Old Romanian ''îmbi'' > Romanian ''ambii'', Old French ''ambe'', Italian ''ambo, ambedue, entrambi''.

Gender

Most Romance languages have two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. The gender of animate nouns is generally natural (i.e. nouns referring to men are generally masculine, and vice versa), but for nonanimate nouns it is arbitrary.

Although Latin had a third gender (neuter), there is little trace of this in most languages. The biggest exception is Romanian, where there is a productive class of "neuter" nouns, which include the descendants of many Latin neuter nouns and which behave like masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural, both in the endings used and in the agreement of adjectives and pronouns (e.g. ''un deget'' "one finger" vs. ''două degete'' "two fingers", cf. Latin ''digitus'', pl. ''digiti''). This behavior happens also in Italian with a restricted number of words (e.g. ''un uovo'' "an egg", ''il braccio'' "the arm" masculine in the singular, ''le uova'' "the eggs", ''le braccia'' "the arms" feminine in the plural). Another noteworthy exception is Asturian, which uses a neuter gender to refer to abstract, collective and uncountable entities. It appears in adjectives (''la xente galbaniego'' "lazy people", ''l'agua frío'' "cold water", ''pensar escoso'' "fruitless thinking"), possessives (''el dineru mío'' "my money", ''la sidra vueso'' "your cider"), one neuter article (''Lo guapo ye...'' "The beautiful hingis...", ''Lo que cal agora ye colar'' "The convenient hingright now is to get out"), one neuter pronoum (''elli/ella/ello'' "he/she/it") and some nouns (''un pelu → el pelo'' "one hair → the hair", ''un fierru → el fierro'' "an iron bar → iron aterial. This neuter does not admit plural forms emerging from metaphorical uses, changing to masculin or feminin (''l'agua frío → les agües fríes'' "cold water → cold waters"). Some of these neuter traces also feature in Spanish, such as ''ello'' ("it").

Such nouns arose because of the identity of the Latin neuter singular ''-um'' with the masculine singular, and the identity of the Latin neuter plural ''-a'' with the feminine singular. A similar class exists in Italian, although it is no longer productive (e.g. ''il dito'' "the finger" vs. ''le dita'' "the fingers", ''l'uovo'' "the egg" vs. ''le uova'' "the eggs"). A similar phenomenon may be observed in Albanian (which is heavily Romance-influenced), and the category remains highly productive with a number of new words loaned or coined in the neuter (''(një) hotel'' one hotel(m) vs. ''(tri) hotele'' three hotels (f)). (A few isolated nouns in Latin had different genders in the singular and plural, but this was an unrelated phenomenon; this is similarly the case with a few French nouns, such as ''amour'', ''délice'', ''orgue''.)

Spanish also has vestiges of the neuter in the demonstrative adjectives: ''esto'', ''eso'', ''aquello'', the pronoun ''ello'' (meaning "it") and the article ''lo'' (used to intensify adjectives). Portuguese also has neuter demonstrative adjectives: "isto", "isso", "aquilo" (meaning "this ear me, "this/that ear you, "that ar from the both of us).

Remnants of the neuter, interpretable now as "a sub-class of the non-feminine gender" (Haase 2000:233), are vigorous in Italy in an area running roughly from Ancona to Matera and just north of Rome to Naples. Oppositions with masculine typically have been recategorized, so that neuter signifies the referent in general, while masculine indicates a more specific instance, with the distinction marked by the definite article. In Southeast Umbrian, for example, neuter ''lo pane'' is 'the bread', while masculine ''lu pane'' refers to an individual piece or loaf of bread. Similarly, neuter ''lo vinu'' is wine in general, while masculine ''lu vinu'' is a specific sort of wine, with the consequence that mass ''lo vinu'' has no plural counterpart, but ''lu vinu'' can take a sortal plural form ''li vini'', referring to different types of wine. Phonological forms of articles vary by locale.

Case

Latin had an extensive case system, where all nouns were declined in six cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, genitive, and ablative) and two numbers. Many adjectives were additionally declined in three genders, theoretically leading to a possible 6 × 2 × 3 = 36 endings per adjective. In practice, some category combinations had identical endings to other combinations, but a basic adjective like ''bonus'' "good" still had 14 distinct endings.

In all Romance languages, this system was drastically reduced. In most modern Romance languages, in fact, case is no longer marked at all on nouns, adjectives and determiners, and most forms are derived from the Latin accusative case. Much like English, however, case has survived somewhat better on pronouns.

Most pronouns have distinct nominative, accusative, genitive and possessive forms (cf. English "I, me, mine, my"). Many also have a separate dative form, a ''disjunctive'' form used after prepositions, and (in some languages) a special form used with the preposition ''con'' "with" (a conservative feature inherited from Latin forms such as ''mēcum'', ''tēcum'', ''nōbīscum'').

The system of inflectional classes is also drastically reduced. The basic system is most clearly indicated in Spanish, where there are only three classes, corresponding to the first, second and third declensions in Latin: plural in ''-as'' (feminine), plural in ''-os'' (masculine), plural in ''-es'' (either masculine or feminine). The singular endings exactly track the plural, except the singular ''-e'' is dropped after certain consonants.

The same system underlines many other modern Romance languages, such as Portuguese, French and Catalan. In these languages, however, further sound changes have resulted in various irregularities. In Portuguese, for example, loss of /l/ and /n/ between vowels (with nasalization in the latter case) produces various irregular plurals (''nação – nações'' "nation(s)"; ''hotel – hotéis'' "hotel(s)").

In French and Catalan, loss of /o/ and /e/ in most unstressed final syllables has caused the ''-os'' and ''-es'' classes to merge. In French, merger of remaining /e/ with final /a/ into , and its subsequent loss, has completely obscured the original Romance system, and loss of final /s/ has caused most nouns to have identical pronunciation in singular and plural, although they are still marked differently in spelling (e.g. ''femme – femmes'' "woman – women", both pronounced ).

Noun inflection has survived in Romanian somewhat better than elsewhere. Determiners are still marked for two cases (nominative/accusative and genitive/dative) in both singular and plural, and feminine singular nouns have separate endings for the two cases. In addition, there is a separate vocative case, enriched with native development and Slavic borrowings (see some examples here) and the combination of noun with a following clitic definite article produces a separate set of "definite" inflections for nouns.

The inflectional classes of Latin have also survived more in Romanian than elsewhere, e.g. ''om – oameni'' "man – men" (Latin ''homo'' – ''homines''); ''corp – corpuri'' "body – bodies" (Latin ''corpus'' – ''corpora''). (Many other exceptional forms, however, are due to later sound changes or analogy, e.g. ''casă – case'' "house(s)" vs. ''lună – luni'' "moon(s)"; ''frate – fraţi'' "brother(s)" vs. ''carte – cărţi'' "book(s)" vs. ''vale – văi'' "valley(s)".)

In Italian, the situation is somewhere in between Spanish and Romanian. There are no case endings and relatively few classes, as in Spanish, but noun endings are generally formed with vowels instead of /s/, as in Romanian: ''amico – amici'' "friend(s) (masc.)", ''amica – amiche'' "friend(s) (fem.)"; ''cane – cani'' "dog(s)". The masculine plural ''amici'' is thought to reflect the Latin nominative plural ''-ī'' rather than accusative plural ''-ōs'' (Spanish ''-os''); however, the other plurals are thought to stem from special developments of Latin ''-ās'' and ''-ēs''.

A different type of noun inflection survived into the medieval period in a number of western Romance languages (Old French, Old Occitan, and the older forms of a number of Rhaeto-Romance languages). This inflection distinguished nominative from oblique, grouping the accusative case with the oblique, rather than with the nominative as in Romanian.

The oblique case in these languages generally inherits from the Latin accusative; as a result, masculine nouns have distinct endings in the two cases while most feminine nouns do not.

A number of different inflectional classes are still represented at this stage. For example, the difference in the nominative case between masculine ''li voisins'' "the neighbor" and ''li pere'' "the father", and feminine ''la riens'' "the thing" vs. ''la fame'' "the woman", faithfully reflects the corresponding Latin inflectional differences (''vicīnus'' vs. ''pater'', ''fēmina'' vs. ''rēs'').

A number of synchronically quite irregular differences between nominative and oblique reflect direct inheritances of Latin third-declension nouns with two different stems (one for the nominative singular, one for all other forms), most with of which had a stress shift between nominative and the other forms: ''li ber – le baron'' "baron" (''barō'' – ''barōnem''); ''la suer – la seror'' "sister" (''soror'' – ''sorōrem''); ''li prestre – le prevoire'' "priest" (''presbyter'' – ''presbyterem''); ''li sire – le seigneur'' "lord" (''senior'' – ''seniōrem''); ''li enfes – l'enfant'' "child" (''infāns'' – ''infantem'').

A few of these multi-stem nouns derive from Latin forms without stress shift, e.g. ''li om – le ome'' "man" (''homō'' – ''hominem''). All of these multi-stem nouns refer to people; other nouns with stress shift in Latin (e.g. ''amor'' – ''amōrem'' "love") have not survived. Some of the same nouns with multiple stems in Old French or Old Occitan have come down in Italian in the nominative rather than the accusative (e.g. ''uomo'' "man" < ''homō'', ''moglie'' "wife" < ''mulier''), suggesting that a similar system existed in pre-literary Italian.

The modern situation in Sursilvan (one of the Rhaeto-Romance languages) is unique in that the original nominative/oblique distinction has been reinterpreted as a predicative/attributive distinction:
* ''il hotel ej vɛɲiws natsionalizaws'' "the hotel has been nationalized"
* ''il hotel natsionalizaw'' "the nationalized hotel"

Pronouns, determiners

As described above, case marking on pronouns is much more extensive than for nouns. Determiners (e.g. words such as "a", "the", "this") are also marked for case in Romanian.

Most Romance languages have the following sets of pronouns and determiners:
* Personal pronouns, in three persons and two genders.
* A reflexive pronoun, used when the object is the same as the subject. This approximately corresponds to English "-self", but separate forms exist only in the third person, with no number marking.
* Definite and indefinite articles, and in some languages, a partitive article that expresses the concept of "some".
* A two-way or three-way distinction among demonstratives. Many languages have a three-way distinction of distance (near me, near you, near him) which, though not paralleled in current English, used to be present as "this/that/yon".
* Relative pronouns and interrogatives, with the same forms used for both (similar to English "who" and "which").
* Various indefinite pronouns and determiners (e.g. Spanish ''algún'' "some", ''alguien'' "someone", ''algo'' "something"; ''ningún'' "no", ''nadie'' "no one"; ''todo'' "every"; ''cada'' "each"; ''mucho'' "much/many/a lot", ''poco'' "few/little"; ''otro'' "other/another"; etc.).

Personal pronouns

Unlike in English, a separate neuter personal pronoun ("it") generally does not exist, but the third-person singular and plural both distinguish masculine from feminine. Also, as described above, case is marked on pronouns even though it is not usually on nouns, similar to English. As in English, there are forms for nominative case ( subject pronouns), oblique case (object pronouns), and genitive case (possessive pronouns); in addition, third-person pronouns distinguish accusative and dative. There is also an additional set of possessive determiners, distinct from the genitive case of the personal pronoun; this corresponds to the English difference between "my, your" and "mine, yours".

Development from Latin

The Romance languages do not retain the Latin third-person personal pronouns, but have innovated a separate set of third-person pronouns by borrowing the demonstrative ''ille'' ("that (over there)"), and creating a separate reinforced demonstrative by attaching a variant of ''ecce'' "behold!" (or "here is ...") to the pronoun.

Similarly, in place of the genitive of the Latin pronouns, most Romance languages adopted the reflexive possessive, which then serves indifferently as both reflexive and non-reflexive possessive. Note that the reflexive, and hence the third-person possessive, is unmarked for the gender of the person being referred to. Hence, although gendered possessive forms do exist—e.g. Portuguese ''seu'' (masc.) vs. ''sua'' (fem.)—these refer to the gender of the object possessed, not the possessor.

The gender of the possessor needs to be made clear by a collocation such as French ''la voiture à lui/elle'', Portuguese ''o carro dele/dela'', literally "the car of him/her". (In spoken Brazilian Portuguese, these collocations are the usual way of expressing the third-person possessive, since the former possessive ''seu carro'' now has the meaning "your car".)

The same demonstrative ''ille'' is the source of the definite article in most Romance languages (see below), which explains the similarity in form between personal pronoun and definite article. When the two are different, it is usually because of differing degrees of phonological reduction. Generally, the personal pronoun is unreduced (beyond normal sound change), while the article has undergone various degrees of reduction, beginning with loss of one of the two original syllables, e.g. Spanish ''ella'' "she" < ''illa'' vs. ''la'' "the (fem.)" < ''-la'' < ''illa'', or masculine ''el'', developed from ''il-'' < ''illud''.

Clitic pronouns

Object pronouns in Latin were normal words, but in the Romance languages they have become clitic forms, which must stand adjacent to a verb and merge phonologically with it. Originally, object pronouns could come either before or after the verb; sound change would often produce different forms in these two cases, with numerous additional complications and contracted forms when multiple clitic pronouns cooccurred.

Catalan still largely maintains this system with a highly complex clitic pronoun system. Most languages, however, have simplified this system by undoing some of the clitic mergers and requiring clitics to stand in a particular position relative to the verb (usually after imperatives, before other finite forms, and either before or after non-finite forms depending on the language).

When a pronoun cannot serve as a clitic, a separate disjunctive form is used. These result from dative object pronouns pronounced with stress (which causes them to develop differently from the equivalent unstressed pronouns), or from subject pronouns.

Most Romance languages are null subject languages. The subject pronouns are used only for emphasis and take the stress, and as a result are not clitics. In French, however (as in Friulian and in some Gallo-Italian languages of northern Italy), verbal agreement marking has degraded to the point that subject pronouns have become mandatory, and have turned into clitics. These forms cannot be stressed, so for emphasis the disjunctive pronouns must be used in combination with the clitic subject forms. Friulian and the Gallo-Italian languages have actually gone further than this and merged the subject pronouns onto the verb as a new type of verb agreement marking, which must be present even when there is a subject noun phrase. (Some non-standard varieties of French treat disjunctive pronouns as arguments and clitic pronouns as agreement markers.)

Familiar–formal distinction

In medieval times, most Romance languages developed a distinction between familiar and polite second-person pronouns (a so-called ''T–V distinction''), similar to the former English distinction between familiar "thou" and polite "you". This distinction was determined by the relationship between the speakers. As in English, this generally developed by appropriating the plural second-person pronoun to serve in addition as a polite singular. French is still at this stage, with familiar singular ''tu'' vs. formal or plural ''vous''. In cases like this, the pronoun requires plural agreement in all cases whenever a single affix marks both person and number (as in verb agreement endings and object and possessive pronouns), but singular agreement elsewhere where appropriate (e.g. ''vous-même'' "yourself" vs. ''vous-mêmes'' "yourselves").

Many languages, however, innovated further in developing an even more polite pronoun, generally composed of some noun phrases (e.g. Portuguese ''vossa mercê'' "your mercy", progressively reduced to ''vossemecê'', ''vosmecê'' and finally ''você'') and taking third-person singular agreement. A plural equivalent was created at the same time or soon after (Portuguese ''vossas mercês'', reduced to ''vocês''), taking third-person plural agreement. Spanish innovated similarly, with ''usted(es)'' from earlier ''vuestra(s) merced(es)''.

In Portuguese and Spanish (as in other languages with similar forms), the "extra-polite" forms in time came to be the normal polite forms, and the former polite (or plural) second-person ''vos'' was displaced to a familiar form, either becoming a familiar plural (as in European Spanish) or a familiar singular (as in many varieties of Latin American Spanish). In the latter case, it either competes with the original familiar singular ''tú'' (as in Guatemala), displaces it entirely (as in Argentina), or is itself displaced (as in Mexico, except in Chiapas). In the Spanish of the Americas, the gap created by the loss of familiar plural ''vos'' was filled by originally polite ''ustedes'', with the result that there is no familiar/polite distinction in the plural, just as in the original ''tú/vos'' system.

A similar path was followed by Italian and Romanian. Romanian uses ''dumneavoastră'' "your lordship", while Italian the former polite phrase ''sua eccellenza'' "your excellency" has simply been supplanted by the corresponding pronoun ''Ella'' or ''Lei'' (literally "she", but capitalized when meaning "you"). As in European Spanish, the original second-person plural ''voi'' serves as familiar plural. (In Italy, during fascist times leading up to World War II, ''voi'' was resurrected as a polite singular, and discarded again afterwards, although it remains in some southern dialects.)

Portuguese innovated again in developing a new extra-polite pronoun ''o senhor'' "the sir", which in turn downgraded ''você''. Hence, modern European Portuguese has a three-way distinction between "familiar" ''tu'', "equalizing" ''você'' and "polite" ''o senhor''. (The original second-person plural ''vós'' was discarded centuries ago in speech, and is used today only in translations of the Bible, where ''tu'' and ''vós'' serve as universal singular and plural pronouns, respectively.)

Brazilian Portuguese, however, has diverged from this system, and most dialects simply use ''você'' (and plural ''vocês'') as a general-purpose second-person pronoun, combined with ''te'' (from ''tu'') as the clitic object pronoun. The form ''o senhor'' (and feminine ''a senhora'') is sometimes used in speech, but only in situations where an English speaker would say "sir" or "ma'am". The result is that second-person verb forms have disappeared, and the whole pronoun system has been radically realigned. However that is the case only in the spoken language of central and northern Brazil, with the northeastern and southern areas of the country still largely preserving the second-person verb form and the "tu" and "você" distinction.

Catalan still retains the plural form ''vós'' for formal distinction (similarly to French) but it is falling out of use, and nowadays is usually seen in extremely formal circumstances or in writing. Instead, (Central) or (Valencian) is normally used orally, which functions just like Spanish and Portuguese ''usted/você''.

Articles

Latin had no articles as such. The closest definite article was the non-specific demonstrative ''is, ea, id'' meaning approximately "this/that/the". The closest indefinite articles were the indefinite determiners ''aliquī, aliqua, aliquod'' "some (non-specific)" and ''certus'' "a certain".

Romance languages have both indefinite and definite articles, but none of the above words form the basis for either of these. Usually the definite article is derived from the Latin demonstrative ''ille'' ("that"), but some languages (e.g. Sardinian, Old Occitan, and Balearic Catalan) have forms from ''ipse'' (emphatic, as in "I myself"). The indefinite article everywhere is derived from the number ''ūnus'' ("one").

Some languages, e.g. French and Italian, have a partitive article that approximately translates as "some". This is used either with mass nouns or with plural nouns—both cases where the indefinite article cannot occur. A partitive article is used (and in French, required) whenever a bare noun refers to specific (but unspecified or unknown) quantity of the noun, but not when a bare noun refers to a class in general. For example, the partitive would be used in both of the following sentences:
:* I want milk.
:* Men arrived today.
But neither of these:
:* Milk is good for you.
:* I hate men.
The sentence "Men arrived today", however, (presumably) means "some specific men arrived today" rather than "men, as a general class, arrived today" (which would mean that there were no men before today). On the other hand, "I hate men" does mean "I hate men, as a general class" rather than "I hate some specific men".

As in many other cases, French has developed the farthest from Latin in its use of articles. In French, nearly all nouns, singular and plural, must be accompanied by an article (either indefinite, definite, or partitive) or demonstrative pronoun.

Due to pervasive sound changes in French, most nouns are pronounced identically in the singular and plural, and there is often heavy homophony between nouns and identically pronounced words of other classes. For example, all of the following are pronounced : ''sain'' "healthy"; ''saint'' "saint, holy"; ''sein'' "breast"; ''ceins'' "(you) tie around, gird"; ''ceint'' "(he) ties around, girds"; ''ceint'' "tied around, girded"; and the equivalent noun and adjective plural forms ''sains, saints, seins, ceints''. The article helps identify the noun forms ''saint'' or ''sein'', and distinguish singular from plural; likewise, the mandatory subject of verbs helps identify the verb ''ceint''. In more conservative Romance languages, neither articles nor subject pronouns are necessary, since all of the above words are pronounced differently. In Italian, for example, the equivalents are ''sano, santo, seno, cingi, cinge, cinto, sani, santi, seni, cinti'', where all vowels and consonants are pronounced as written, and /s/ and /tʃ/ are clearly distinct from each other.

Latin, at least originally, had a three-way distinction among demonstrative pronouns distinguished by distal value: ''hic'' 'this', ''iste'' 'that (near you)', ''ille'' 'that (over there)', similar to the distinction that used to exist in English as "this" vs. "that" vs. "yon(der)". In urban Latin of Rome, ''iste'' came to have a specifically derogatory meaning, but this innovation apparently did not reach the provinces and is not reflected in the modern Romance languages. A number of these languages still have such a three-way distinction, although ''hic'' has been lost and the other pronouns have shifted somewhat in meaning. For example, Spanish has ''este'' "this" vs. ''ese'' "that (near you)" vs. ''aquel'' (fem. ''aquella'') "that (over yonder)". The Spanish pronouns derive, respectively, from Latin ''iste'' ''ipse'' ''accu''-''ille'', where ''accu-'' is an emphatic prefix derived from ''eccum'' "behold (it!)" (still vigorous in Italy as ''Ecco!'' 'Behold!'), possibly with influence from ''atque'' "and".

Reinforced demonstratives such as ''accu''-''ille'' arose as ''ille'' came to be used as an article as well as a demonstrative. Such forms were often created even when not strictly needed to distinguish otherwise ambiguous forms. Italian, for example, has both ''questo'' "this" (''eccu''-''istum'') and ''quello'' "that" (''eccu''-''illum''), in addition to dialectal ''codesto'' "that (near you)" (*''eccu-tē-istum''). French generally prefers forms derived from bare ''ecce'' "behold", as in the pronoun ''ce'' "this one/that one" (earlier ''ço'', from ''ecce''-''hoc''; cf. Italian ''ciò'' 'that') and the determiner ''ce/cet'' "this/that" (earlier ''cest'', from ''ecce''-''istum'').

Reinforced forms are likewise common in locative adverbs (words such as English ''here'' and ''there''), based on related Latin forms such as ''hic'' "this" vs. ''hīc'' "here", ''hāc'' "this way", and ''ille'' "that" vs. ''illīc'' "there", ''illāc'' "that way". Here again French prefers bare ''ecce'' while Spanish and Italian prefer ''eccum'' (French ''ici'' "here" vs. Spanish ''aquí'', Italian ''qui''). In western languages such as Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, doublets and triplets arose such as Portuguese ''aqui, acá, cá'' "(to) here" (''accu''-''hīc'', ''accu''-''hāc'', ''eccu''-''hāc''). From these, a prefix ''a-'' was extracted, from which forms like ''aí'' "there (near you)" (''a-(i)bi'') and ''ali'' "there (over yonder)" (''a-(i)llīc'') were created; compare Catalan neuter pronouns ''açò'' (''acce''-''hoc'') "this", ''això'' (''a-(i)psum''-''hoc'') "that (near you)", ''allò'' (''a-(i)llum''-''hoc'') "that (yonder)".

Subsequent changes often reduced the number of demonstrative distinctions. Standard Italian, for example, has only a two-way distinction "this" vs. "that", as in English, with second-person and third-person demonstratives combined. In Catalan, however, a former three-way distinction ''aquest, aqueix, aquell'' has been reduced differently, with first-person and second-person demonstratives combined. Hence ''aquest'' means either "this" or "that (near you)"; on the phone, ''aquest'' is used to refer both to speaker and addressee.

Old French had a similar distinction to Italian (''cist/cest'' vs. ''cil/cel''), both of which could function as either adjectives or pronouns. Modern French, however, has no distinction between "this" and "that": ''ce/cet, cette'' < ''cest, ceste'' is only an adjective, and ''celui, celle'' < ''cel lui, celle'' is only a pronoun, and both forms indifferently mean either "this" or "that". (The distinction between "this" and "that" can be made, if necessary, by adding the suffixes ''-ci'' "here" or ''-là'' "there", e.g. ''cette femme-ci'' "this woman" vs. ''cette femme-là'' "that woman", but this is rarely done except when specifically necessary to distinguish two entities from each other.)

Verbal morphology

Verbs have many conjugations, including in most languages:
* A present tense, a preterite, an imperfect, a pluperfect, a future tense and a future perfect in the indicative mood, for statements of fact.
* Present and preterite subjunctive tenses, for hypothetical or uncertain conditions. Several languages (for example, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) have also imperfect and pluperfect subjunctives, although it is not unusual to have just one subjunctive equivalent for preterit and imperfect (e.g. no unique subjunctive equivalent in Italian of the so-called ''passato remoto''). Portuguese and Spanish also have future and future perfect subjunctives, which have no equivalent in Latin.
* An imperative mood, for direct commands.
* Three non-finite forms: infinitive, gerund, and past participle.
* Distinct active and passive voices, as well as an impersonal passive voice.
* Note that, although these ''categories'' are largely inherited from Classical Latin, many of the ''forms'' are either newly constructed or inherited from different categories (e.g. the Romance imperfect subjunctive most commonly is derived from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive, while the Romance pluperfect subjunctive is derived from a new present perfect tense with the auxiliary verb placed in the imperfect subjunctive).

Several tenses and aspects, especially of the indicative mood, have been preserved with little change in most languages, as shown in the following table for the Latin verb ''dīcere'' (to say), and its descendants.

:

The main tense and mood distinctions that were made in classical Latin are generally still present in the modern Romance languages, though many are now expressed through compound rather than simple verbs. The passive voice, which was mostly synthetic in classical Latin, has been completely replaced with compound forms.
* Owing to sound changes which made it homophonous with the preterite, the Latin future indicative tense was dropped, and replaced with a periphrasis of the form infinitive + present tense of ''habēre'' (to have). Eventually, this structure was reanalysed as a new future tense.
* In a similar process, an entirely new conditional form was created.
* While the synthetic passive voice of classical Latin was abandoned in favour of periphrastic constructions, most of the active voice remained in use. However, several tenses have changed meaning, especially subjunctives. For example:
** The Latin pluperfect indicative became a conditional in Sicilian, and an imperfect subjunctive in Spanish.
** The Latin pluperfect subjunctive developed into an imperfect subjunctive in all languages except Romansh, where it became a conditional, and Romanian, where it became a pluperfect indicative.
** The Latin preterite subjunctive, together with the future perfect indicative, became a future subjunctive in Old Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician.
** The Latin imperfect subjunctive became a personal infinitive in Portuguese and Galician.
* Many Romance languages have two verbs "to be". One is derived from Vulgar Latin *''essere'' < Latin ''esse'' "to be" with an admixture of forms derived from ''sedēre'' "to sit", and is used mostly for essential attributes; the other is derived from ''stāre'' "to stand", and mostly used for temporary states. This development is most notable in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. In French, Italian and Romanian, the derivative of ''stāre'' largely preserved an earlier meaning of "to stand/to stay", although in modern Italian, ''stare'' is used in a few constructions where English would use "to be", as in ''sto bene'' "I am well". In Old French, the derivatives of *''essere'' and ''stāre'' were ''estre'' and ''ester'', respectively. In modern French, ''estre'' persists as ''être'' "to be" while ''ester'' has been lost as a separate verb; but the former imperfect of ''ester'' is used as the modern imperfect of ''être'' (e.g. ''il était'' "he was"), replacing the irregular forms derived from Latin (e.g. ''ere(t), iere(t)'' < ''erat''). In Italian, the two verbs share the same past participle, ''stato''. ''sedēre'' persists most notably in the future of *''essere'' (e.g. Spanish/Portuguese/French/etc. ''ser-'', Italian ''sar-''), although in Old French the future is a direct derivation from Latin, e.g. ''(i)ert'' "he will be" < ''erit''. See Romance copula for further information.
For a more detailed illustration of how the verbs have changed with respect to classical Latin, see Romance verbs.
* During the Renaissance, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and a few other Romance languages developed a progressive aspect which did not exist in Latin. In French, progressive constructions remain very limited, the imperfect generally being preferred, as in Latin.
* Many Romance languages now have a verbal construction analogous to the present perfect of English. In some, it has taken the place of the old preterite (at least in the vernacular); in others, the two coexist with somewhat different meanings (cf. English ''I did'' vs. ''I have done''). A few examples:
** preterite only: Galician, Asturian, Sicilian, Leonese, Portuguese, some dialects of Spanish;
** preterite and present perfect: Catalan, Occitan, standard Spanish, Tuscan/standard Italian;
** present perfect predominant, preterite now literary: French, Romanian, several Italian dialects, some dialects of Spanish;
** present perfect only: Romansh

Note that in Catalan, the synthetic preterite is predominantly a literary tense, except in Valencian; but an analytic preterite (formed using an auxiliary ''vadō'', which in other languages signals the future) persists in speech, with the same meaning. In Portuguese, a morphological present perfect does exist but has a different meaning (closer to "I have been doing").

The following are common features of the Romance languages (inherited from Vulgar Latin) that are different from Classical Latin:
* Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify.
* The normal clause structure is SVO, rather than SOV, and is much less flexible than in Latin.
* Many Latin constructions involving nominalized verbal forms (e.g. the use of accusative plus infinitive in indirect discourse and the use of the ablative absolute) were dropped in favor of constructions with subordinate clause. Exceptions can be found in Italian, for example, Latin ''tempore permittente'' > Italian ''tempo permettendo''; L. ''hoc facto'' > I. ''ciò fatto''.

Lexicon

Loanwords

Romance languages have borrowed heavily, though mostly from other Romance languages. However, some, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and French, have borrowed heavily from other language groups. Vulgar Latin borrowed first from indigenous languages of the Roman empire, and during the Germanic folk movements, from Germanic languages, especially Gothic; for Eastern Romance languages, during Bulgarian Empires, from Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian. Notable examples are *''blancus'' "white", replacing native ''albus'' (but Romansh ''alv'', Dalmatian ''jualb'', Romanian ''alb''); *''guerra'' "war", replacing native ''bellum''; and the words for the cardinal directions, where cognates of English "north", "south", "east" and "west" replaced the native words ''septentriō'', ''merīdiēs'' (also "noon; midday nap"; cf. Romanian ''meriză''), ''oriens'', and ''occidens''. (See History of French – The Franks.) Some Celtic words were incorporated into the core vocabulary, partly for words with no Latin equivalent (''betulla'' "birch", ''camisia'' "shirt", ''cerevisia'' "beer"), but in some cases replacing Latin vocabulary (''gladius'' "sword", replacing ''ensis''; ''cambiāre'' "to exchange", replacing ''mūtāre'' except in Romanian and Portuguese; ''carrus'' "cart", replacing ''currus''; ''pettia'' "piece", largely displacing ''pars'' (later resurrected) and eliminating ''frustum''). Many Greek loans also entered the lexicon, e.g. ''spatha'' "sword" (Greek: ''spáthē'', replacing ''gladius'' which shifted to "iris", cf. French ''épée'', Spanish ''espada'', Italian ''spada ''and Romanian ''spată''); ''cara'' "face" (Greek: κάρα ''kára'', partly replacing ''faciēs''); ''colpe'' "blow" (Greek: κόλαφος ''kólaphos'', replacing ''ictus'', cf. Spanish ''golpe'', French ''coup''); ''cata'' "each" (Greek: ''katá'', replacing ''quisque''); common suffixes *''-ijāre/-izāre'' (Greek: ''-izein'', French ''-oyer/-iser'', Spanish ''-ear/-izar'', Italian ''-eggiare/-izzare'', etc.), ''-ista'' (Greek: ''-istes'').

Lexical innovation

Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Nouns, and sometimes adjectives, were often replaced by diminutives, e.g. ''auris'' "ear" > ''auricula'' (orig. "outer ear") > ''oricla'' (Sardinian ''origra'', Italian ''orecchia/o'', Portuguese ''orelha'', etc.); ''avis'' "bird" > ''avicellus'' (orig. "chick, nestling") > ''aucellu'' (Occitan ''aucèl'', Friulian ''ucel'', Neapolitan ''auciello'', etc.); ''caput'' "head" > ''capitium'' (Portuguese ''cabeça'', Spanish ''cabeza'', French ''chevet'' "headboard"; but reflexes of ''caput'' were retained also, sometimes without change of meaning, as in Italian ''capo'' "head", alongside ''testa''); ''vetus'' "old" > ''vetulus'' > ''veclus'' (Dalmatian ''vieklo'', Italian ''vecchio'', Portuguese ''velho'', etc.). Sometimes augmentative constructions were used instead: ''piscis'' "fish" > Old French ''peis'' > ''peisson'' (orig. "big fish") > French ''poisson''. Verbs were often replaced by frequentative constructions: ''canere'' "to sing" > ''cantāre''; ''iacere'' "to throw" > ''iactāre'' > *''iectāre'' (Italian ''gettare'', Portuguese ''jeitar'', Spanish ''echar'', etc.); ''iuvāre'' > ''adiūtāre'' (Italian ''aiutare'', Spanish ''ayudar'', French ''aider'', etc., meaning "help", alongside e.g. ''iuvāre'' > Italian ''giovare'' "to be of use"); ''vēnārī'' "hunt" (Romanian ''vâna'', Aromanian ''avinari'') > replaced by *''captiāre'' "to hunt", frequentative of ''capere'' "to seize" (Italian ''cacciare'', Portuguese ''caçar'', Romansh ''catschar'', French ''chasser'', etc.).

Many Classical Latin words became archaic or poetic and were replaced by more colloquial terms: ''equus'' "horse" > ''caballus'' (orig. "nag") (but ''equa'' "mare" remains, cf. Spanish ''yegua'', Portuguese ''égua'', Sardinian ''ebba'', Romanian ''iapă''); ''domus'' "house" > ''casa'' (orig. "hut"); ''ignis'' "fire" > ''focus'' (orig. "hearth"); ''strāta'' "street" > ''rūga'' (orig. "furrow") or ''callis'' (orig. "footpath") (but ''strāta'' is continued in Italian ''strada''). In some cases, terms from common occupations became generalized: ''invenīre'' "to find" replaced by ''afflāre'' (orig. "to sniff out", in hunting, cf. Spanish ''hallar'', Portuguese ''achar'', Romansh dial. ''anflar'', Southern Italian ''asciare'', ''acchiare'', Romanian ''afla'' 'to find out'); ''advenīre'' "to arrive" gave way to ''plicāre'' (orig. "to fold (sails; tents)", cf. Spanish ''llegar'', Portuguese ''chegar''; Romanian ''pleca''), elsewhere ''arripāre'' (orig. "to harbor at a riverbank", cf. Italian ''arrivare'', French ''arriver'') (''advenīre'' is continued with the meaning "to achieve, manage to do" as in Middle French ''aveindre'', or "to happen" in Italian ''avvenire'') . The same thing sometimes happened to religious terms, due to the pervasive influence of Christianity: ''loquī'' "to speak" succumbed to ''parabolāre'' (orig. "to tell parables", cf. Occitan ''parlar'', French ''parler'', Italian ''parlare'') or ''fabulārī'' ~ ''fābellāre'' (orig. "to tell stories", cf. Spanish ''hablar'', Dalmatian ''favlur'', Sardinian ''faeddare''), based on Jesus' way of speaking in parables.

Many prepositions were used as verbal particles to make new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian ''estrarre'', Aromanian ''astragu'', ''astradziri'' "to extract" from Latin ''ex-'' "out of" and ''trahere'' "to pull" (Italian ''trarre'' "draw, pull", Aromanian ''tragu'', ''tradziri''), or to augment already existing words, e.g. French ''coudre'', Italian ''cucire'', Portuguese ''coser'' "to sew", from ''cōnsuere'' "to sew up", from ''suere'' "to sew", with total loss of the bare stem. Many prepositions and commonly became compounded, e.g. ''de ex'' > French ''dès'' "as of", ''ab ante'' > Italian ''avanti'' "forward". Some words derived from phrases, e.g. Portuguese ''agora'', Spanish ''ahora'' "now" < ''hāc hōrā'' "at this hour"; French ''avec'' "with" (prep.) < Old French ''avuec'' (adv.) < ''apud hoc'' "with that"; Spanish ''tamaño'', Portuguese ''tamanho'' "size" < ''tam magnum'' "so big"; Italian ''codesto'' "this, that" (near you) < Old Italian ''cotevesto'' < ''eccum tibi istum'' approx. "here's that thing of yours"; Portuguese ''você'' "you" < ''vosmecê'' < ''vossemecê'' < Galician-Portuguese ''vossa mercee'' "your mercy".Likewise Spanish ''usted'' < ''vuestra merced'', Catalan ''vostè'' < ''vostra mercè''.

A number of common Latin words that have disappeared in many or most Romance languages have survived either in the periphery or in remote corners (especially Sardinia and Romania), or as secondary terms, sometimes differing in meaning. For example, Latin ''caseum'' "cheese" in the periphery (Portuguese ''queijo'', Spanish ''queso'', Romansh ''caschiel'', Sardinian ''càsu'', Romanian ''caş''), but in the central areas has been replaced by ''formāticum'', originally "moulded (cheese)" (French ''fromage'', Occitan/Catalan ''formatge'', Italian ''formaggio'', with, however, ''cacio'' also available in much of Italy; similarly ''(com)edere'' "to eat (up)", which survives as Spanish/Portuguese ''comer'' but elsewhere is replaced by ''mandūcāre'', originally "to chew" (French ''manger'', Sardinian ''mandicare'' alongside ''pappare'', Romanian ''mânca(re)''). In some cases, one language happens to preserve a word displaced elsewhere, e.g. Italian ''ogni'' "each, every" < ''omnes'', displaced elsewhere by ''tōtum'', originally "whole" or by a reflex of Greek ''κατά'' (e.g. Italian ''ognuno'', Catalan ''tothom'' "everyone"; Italian ''ogni giorno'', Spanish ''cada día'' "every day"); Friulian ''vaî'' "to cry" < ''flere'' "to weep"; Serbo-Croatian (Dubrovnik) ''otijemna'' "sail pole" < Dalmatian < ''antenna'' "yardarm". Sardinian in particular preserves many words entirely lost elsewhere, e.g. ''eja'' "yes" < ''etiam'' "also/yes/indeed", ''emmo'' "yes" < ''immo'' "rather/yes/no", ''mannu'' "big" < ''magnus'', ''nàrrere'' "to say" < ''narrāre'' "to tell", and ''domo'' "house" < ( abl.) ''domō'' "at home". Sardinian preserves some words that were already archaic in Classical Latin, e.g. ''àchina'' "grape" < ''acinam'', while Sicily and Calabria typically have forms with initial /r/: ''ràcina''.

Latinisms

During the Middle Ages, scores of words were borrowed directly from Classical Latin (so-called Latinisms), either in their original form (''learned loans'') or in a somewhat nativized form (''semi-learned loans''). These resulted in many doublets—pairs of inherited and learned words—such as those in the table below:

Sometimes triplets arise: Latin ''articulus'' "joint" > Portuguese ''artículo'' "joint, knuckle" (learned), ''artigo'' "article" (semi-learned), ''artelho'' "ankle" (inherited; archaic and dialectal). In many cases, the learned word simply displaced the original popular word: e.g. Spanish ''crudo'' "crude, raw" (Old Spanish ''cruo''); French ''légume'' "vegetable" (Old French'' leüm''); Portuguese ''flor'' "flower" (Galician-Portuguese ''chor''). The learned loan always sounds (and, in writing, looks) more like the original than the inherited word does, because regular sound change has been bypassed; likewise, the learned word usually has a meaning closer to that of the original. In French, the stress of the modern form of the learned loan may be on the "wrong" syllable vis-à-vis Latin, whereas the stress of the inherited word always corresponds to the Latin stress: e.g. Latin '' vipera'' (stress on /i/) vs. French '' vipère'', learned loan, and ''guivre/ vouivre'', inherited.

Borrowing from Classical Latin has produced a large number of suffix doublets. Examples from Spanish (learned form first): ''-ción'' vs. ''-zon''; ''-cia'' vs. ''-za''; ''-ificar'' vs. ''-iguar''; ''-izar'' vs. ''-ear''; ''-mento'' vs. ''-miento''; ''-tud'' (< nominative ''-tūdō'') vs. ''-dumbre'' (< accusative ''-tūdine''); ''-ículo'' vs. ''-ejo''; etc. Similar examples can be found in all the other Romance languages.

This borrowing also introduced large numbers of classical prefixes in their original form (''dis-'', ''ex-'', ''post-'', ''trans''-) and reinforced many others (''re-'', popular Spanish/Portuguese ''des-'' < ''dis-'', popular French ''dé-'' < ''dis-'', popular Italian ''s-'' < ''ex-''). Many Greek prefixes and suffixes ( hellenisms) also found their way into the lexicon: ''tele-'', ''poli-/poly-'', ''meta-'', ''pseudo-'', ''-scope/scopo'', ''-logie/logia/logía'', etc.

Notes

References

''Overviews:''
* Frederick Browning Agard. ''A Course in Romance Linguistics''. Vol. 1: ''A Synchronic View'', Vol. 2: ''A Diachronic View''. Georgetown University Press, 1984.
* . Reprint 2003.
*
* Gerhard Ernst et al., eds. ''Romanische Sprachgeschichte: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen''. 3 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003 (vol. 1), 2006 (vol. 2).
*
* Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith & Adam Ledgeway, eds., ''The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages''. Vol. 1: ''Structures'', Vol. 2: ''Contexts''. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011 (vol. 1) & 2013 (vol. 2).
* Martin Maiden & Adam Ledgeway, eds. ''The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
*
*

''Phonology:''
*
* Cravens, Thomas D. ''Comparative Historical Dialectology: Italo-Romance Clues to Ibero-Romance Sound Chang''e. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002.
* Sónia Frota & Pilar Prieto, eds. ''Intonation in Romance''. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.
* Christoph Gabriel & Conxita Lleó, eds. ''Intonational Phrasing in Romance and Germanic: Cross-Linguistic and Bilingual studies''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011.
* Philippe Martin. ''The Structure of Spoken Language: Intonation in Romance''. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.
* Rodney Sampson. ''Vowel Prosthesis in Romance''. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.

''Lexicon:''
*

''French:''
*
*
*

''Portuguese:''
*
*

''Spanish:''
*
*
*
*

''Italian:''
*
*
*{{cite book, title=A Linguistic History of Italian , last1=Maiden , first1=Martin , year=1995 , location=London , publisher=Longman

''Rhaeto-Romance:''
* John Haiman & Paola Benincà, eds., ''The Rhaeto-Romance Languages''. London: Routledge, 1992.

Romance languages