As Classical Latin developed into Proto-Romance it experienced various sound changes. An approximate summary of changes on the phonemic level is provided below. Their precise order is uncertain.
Classical Latin | 1st century Vulgar Latin | 2nd century Vulgar Latin | 3rd century Vulgar Latin | 4rd century Vulgar Latin |
---|---|---|---|---|
iː | i(ː) | |||
i | e(ː) | e(ː) | ||
e̞ː | eː | |||
o̞e̯ | ||||
e̞ | ɛ | ɛ, i̯ɛː | ɛ, i̯ɛː | |
äe̯ | ɛː, i̯ɛː | |||
äː | ä(ː) | |||
ä | ä(ː) | |||
o̞ | ɔ | ɔ(ː) | ɔ, u̯ɔː | |
o̞ː | oː | o(ː) | ||
u | u(ː) | |||
uː | u(ː) | |||
äu̯ | ɔ(ː) |
Note that the vowels with "(ː)" are long in open stressed syllables, short otherwise. In other words, vowels length progressively stops being phonemic and becomes environment-specific. Similarly, ɛ, äe̯ and ɔ respectively become i̯ɛː, i̯ɛː and u̯ɔː in open stressed syllables and ɛ, ɛː and ɔ otherwise (ɛː then becomes ɛ).
Latin phonology is the system of sounds used in various kinds of Latin. This article largely deals with what features can be deduced for Classical Latin as it was spoken by the educated from the late Roman Republic to the early Empire. Evidence comes in the form of comments from Roman grammarians, common spelling mistakes, transcriptions into other languages, and the outcomes of various sounds in Romance.
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.
The phonology of Catalan, a Romance language, has a certain degree of dialectal variation. Although there are two standard varieties, one based on Central Eastern dialect and another one based on South-Western or Valencian dialect, this article deals with features of all or most dialects, as well as regional pronunciation differences.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Estonian, Finnish, Fijian, Japanese, Kannada, Kyrgyz, Latin, Malayalam, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, Tamil and Vietnamese.
The Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin spoken by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. Old Portuguese, also known as Medieval Galician, began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Germanic invasions, also known as barbarian invasions, in the 5th century, and started appearing in written documents around the 9th century. By the 13th century, Galician-Portuguese had its own literature and began to split into two languages. However, the debate of whether Galician and Portuguese are nowadays varieties of the same language, much like American English or British English, is still present. In all aspects—phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax—Portuguese is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin with some influences from other languages, namely the native Gallaecian and Lusitanian languages spoken prior to the Roman domination.
The phonology of Italian describes the sound system—the phonology and phonetics—of Standard Italian and its geographical variants.
In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word, and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
Central Italian refers to the dialects of Italo-Romance spoken in the so-called Area Mediana, which covers a swathe of the central Italian peninsula. Area Mediana is also used in a narrower sense to describe the southern part, in which case the northern one may be referred to as the Area Perimediana, a distinction that will be made throughout this article. The two areas are split along a line running approximately from Rome in the southwest to Ancona in the northeast.
French is a Romance language that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.
The traditional English pronunciation of Latin, and Classical Greek words borrowed through Latin, is the way the Latin language was traditionally pronounced by speakers of English until the early 20th century. Although this pronunciation is no longer taught in Latin classes, it is still broadly used in the fields of biology, law, and medicine.
This article describes the phonology of the Occitan language.
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.
Proto-Sámi is the hypothetical, reconstructed common ancestor of the Sámi languages. It is a descendant of the Proto-Uralic language.
French exhibits perhaps the most extensive phonetic changes of any of the Romance languages. Similar changes are seen in some of the northern Italian regional languages, such as Lombard or Ligurian. Most other Romance languages are significantly more conservative phonetically, with Spanish, Italian, and especially Sardinian showing the most conservatism, and Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan, and Romanian showing moderate conservatism.
As a member of the dialect continuum of Romance languages, Catalan displays linguistic features similar to those of its closest neighbors. The following features represent in some cases unique changes in the evolution of Catalan from Vulgar Latin; other features are common in other Romance-speaking areas.
Sardinian is conventionally divided, mainly on phonological criteria, into three main varieties: Campidanese, Logudorese, and Nuorese. The last of these has a notably conservative phonology, compared not only to the other two varieties, but also to other Romance languages as well.
The Cornish language separated from the southwestern dialect of Common Brittonic at some point between 600 and 1000 AD. The phonological similarity of the Cornish, Welsh, and Breton languages during this period is reflected in their writing systems, and in some cases it is not possible to distinguish these languages orthographically. However, by the time it had ceased to be spoken as a community language around 1800 the Cornish language had undergone significant phonological changes, resulting in a number of unique features which distinguish it from the other neo-Brittonic languages.
Proto-Romance is the comparatively reconstructed ancestor of the Romance languages. It is effectively Late Latin viewed retrospectively through its descendants.
The Lausberg area is a part of southern Italy that covers much of Basilicata and the northern edge of Calabria, where Southern Italian dialects characterized by atypical Italo-Romance vowel developments are spoken. It is named after the German philologist Heinrich Lausberg, who brought the area to the attention of mainstream scholarship in 1939.
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