Vulgar Latin vocabulary

Vulgar Latin vocabulary is the vocabulary of Vulgar Latin, i.e. the everyday level of the Classical and Late Antique Latin language.

Historical overview

Like all languages, Latin possessed numerous synonyms that were associated with different speech registers. Some of these words occur in the everyday language since Plautus, while others were borrowed late into Latin from other languages (Germanic, Gaulish, words from one or more Paleo-Balkan languages in the Vulgar Latin that led to Eastern Romance etc.).

Certain words from Classical Latin were dropped from the vocabulary. Classical "equus", "horse", was consistently replaced by "caballus" "nag" (but note Romanian "iapă", Sardinian "èbba", Spanish "yegua", Catalan "euga" and Portuguese "egua" all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical "equa").

The vocabulary changes affected even the basic grammatical particles of Latin; there are many that vanish without a trace in Romance, such as "an, at, autem, dōnec, enim, ergō, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quīn, quod, quoque, sed, utrum" and "vel".Harrington et al. (1997).]

Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such suffixes as "-bilis", "-ārius", "-itāre" and "-icāre" grew apace. These changes occurred frequently to avoid irregular forms or to regularise genders.

On the other hand, since Vulgar Latin and Latin proper were for much of their history different registers of the same language, rather than different languages, some Romance languages preserve Latin words that were lost in most others. For example, Italian "ogni" ("each/every") preserves Latin "omnes". Other languages use cognates of "tōtus" for the same meaning; for example "tutto" in Italian, "tudo"/"todo" in Portuguese, "todo" in Spanish, "tot" in Catalan, "tout" in French and "tot" in Romanian.

Sometimes, a classical Latin word was kept alongside a Vulgar Latin word. In Vulgar Latin, classical "caput", "head", yielded to "testa" (originally "pot") in some forms of western Romance, including French and Italian. But Italian, French and Catalan kept the Latin word under the form "capo", "chef", and "cap" which retained many metaphorical meanings of "head", including "boss". The Latin words with the original meanings are preserved in Romanian "cap", meaning 'head' in the anatomical sense, together with "ṭeastă", meaning skull or carapace. [From the online Romanian Explanatory Dictionary [http://dexonline.ro/search.php?lexemId=56807 ] ] Southern Italian dialects likewise preserve "capo" as the normal word for "head". Spanish and Portuguese have "cabeza"/"cabeça", derived from *"capetia", a modified form of "caput", while in Portuguese "testa" was retained as the word for "forehead".

Frequently, words borrowed directly from literary Latin at some later date, rather than evolved within Vulgar Latin, are found side by side with the evolved form. The (lack of) expected phonetic developments is a clue that one word has been borrowed. For example, Vulgar Latin "fungus", "fungus, mushroom", which became Italian "fungo", Catalan "fong", and Portuguese "fungo", became "hongo" in Spanish, showing the "f" > "h" shift that was common in early Spanish (cf. "fīlius" > Spanish "hijo", "son", "facere" > Spanish "hacer", "to do"). But Spanish also had "fungo", which by its lack of the expected sound shift shows that it was borrowed directly from Latin.

Vulgar Latin contained a large number of words of foreign origin not present in literary texts. Many works on medicine were written and distributed in Greek, and words were often borrowed from these sources. For example, "gamba" ( 'knee joint' ), originally a veterinary term only, replaced the classical Latin word for leg ("crus") in most Romance languages. (cf. Fr. jambe, It. gamba). Cooking terms were also often borrowed from Greek sources, a calque based on a Greek term was "ficatum (iecur)" (goose's liver fattened with figs, see foie gras for more information), with the participle "ficatum" becoming the common word for liver in Vulgar Latin (cf. Sp. "higado", Fr. "foie", It. "fegato", Pt "fígado", Romanian "ficat"). Important religious terms were also drawn from religious texts written in Greek, such as "episcopus" (bishop), "presbyter" (priest), "martyr" etc. Words borrowed from Gaulish include "caballus" (horse) and "carrus" (chariot).

Selected list of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin words

Notes