Lexical changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance


As Classical Latin developed into Proto-Romance, its lexicon underwent numerous changes.

Regularization

Irregular nouns and verbs tended to be either regularized or replaced with preexisting regular equivalents. Cf. the loss of edere 'to eat' in favour of manducare or its own regularized compound comedere. Similar motives underlie the general replacement of ferre 'carry' with portare or loqui 'speak' with parabolare and fabulari.

Semantic drift

Various words experienced a significant change in meaning, notable examples being causa, civitas, focus, mittere, necare, pacare, and totus.
Certain words may have shed their originally lower-status or humble associations to become default unmarked terms, thus replacing the literary Classical equivalents. Cf. the general loss of equus 'horse' in favour of caballus or that of domus 'house' in favour of casa.

Loss of short forms

Words that were felt to be too short or phonetically insubstantial were liable to be replaced, often with their own derivatives, hence auris 'ear' and agnus 'lamb' were rejected in favour of their diminutives auricula and agnellus. This is most visible in the case of the word for today in French, aujourd'hui, a univerbation of au + jour + d' + hui, where hui is the descendant of Latin hodie and the whole lemma would instead roughly mean on the day of today.
Most Classical particles simply died out and survive nowhere in Romance.

Coinages

There was a trend towards forming compound prepositions of the type ab ante, which at first simply combined the sense of their constituents. In time many would develop a generic sense, often simply that of one of their constituents. Other examples attested in Late Antiquity are de inter, de retro, de foris, de intus, de ab, and de ex.
A number of verb-forming suffixes were popularized, such as -icare, -ulare, and -izare.

Borrowing

Numerous foreign terms were borrowed into the Latin vernacular, a majority of which came from Greek, particularly in the domains of medicine, cooking, and Christian worship. A smaller fraction came from Gaulish or Germanic.

Selected lexical comparisons

Explanatory notes

General sources

Category:Latin language in ancient Rome
Category:Vocabulary
Category:Romance languages