Romance linguistics

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 [thing] is...", Lo que cal agora ye colar "The convenient [thing] right now is to get out"), one neuter pronoun (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 [material]".

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.

(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)".)

[9]: 36–39 A few of these multi-stem nouns derive from Latin forms without stress shift, e.g. li om – le ome "man" (homō – hominem).

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".

The gender of the possessor can 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".

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.)"

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.

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.

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.

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").

(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.)

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.

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").

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⟩ /s/ and ⟨c⟩ /tʃ/ are clearly distinct from each other.

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.

French generally prefers forms derived from bare ecce "behold", as in the pronoun ce "this one/that one" (earlier ço, from ecce-hoc; cf.

In Catalan, however, a former three-way distinction aquest, aqueix, aquell has been reduced differently, with first-person and second-person demonstratives combined.

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.

); 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.).

Verbs were often replaced by frequentative constructions: canere "to sing" > cantāre; iacere "to throw" > iactāre > *iectāre (Italian gettare, Portuguese jeitar, Spanish echar, etc.

Many Classical Latin words became archaic or poetic and were replaced by more colloquial terms: equus "horse" > caballus (orig.

Spanish yegua, Portuguese égua, Sardinian ebba, Romanian iapă); domus "house" > casa (orig.

anflar, Southern Italian asciare, acchiare, Romanian afla 'to find out'); advenīre "to arrive" gave way to plicāre (orig.

The same thing sometimes happened to religious terms, due to the pervasive influence of Christianity: loquī "to speak" succumbed to parabolāre (orig.

Some words derived from phrases, e.g. Portuguese agora, Spanish ahora "now" < hāc hōrā "at this hour"; French avec "with" (prep.)

[27] 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)).

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.)

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.