History 史 · 02
Vulgar Latin
Portuguese descends not from the Latin of the classics but from spoken, everyday Latin. It was that living speech, carried to Hispania by Roman colonisation, that evolved into Galician-Portuguese.
enPortuguese is not descended from the Latin of Cicero and Virgil, but from Vulgar Latin — the spoken, everyday Latin of the soldiers, settlers, traders and peasants who, from the 3rd century BC onward, carried their language across the whole Mediterranean basin. It is from that living speech, and not from the literary language fixed in the schools, that all the Romance languages were born, Portuguese among them.
What “Vulgar Latin” was
The adjective vulgar (from Latin vulgus, “the common people”) carries no disparaging sense here: it names the sermo vulgaris or sermo cotidianus, the ordinary register of the language, as opposed to the polished, literary sermo urbanus. The two were never separate languages, but two registers of a single continuum: as the written norm froze, copying the classical models, speech went on its natural way and drifted ever further from it.
We know Vulgar Latin mostly at second hand. We have no recordings, but clues abound: rough inscriptions, the graffiti of Pompeii, letters on papyrus, recipe books, and above all the prescriptive texts that scold “errors” — and that, in doing so, preserve a precious record of real speech. The most famous is the Appendix Probi (a late-antique compilation), a list of corrections of the form “say X, not Y” which, read in reverse, is a portrait of popular pronunciation.
“SPECULUM non SPECLUM” · “AURIS non ORICLA” · “VETULUS non VECLUS”
In the Appendix Probi, the “wrong” form is precisely the one that won out: SPEC(U)LUM gives Portuguese espelho (“mirror”); OR(I)C(U)LA gives orelha (“ear”).
From Roman conquest to Hispania
The Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula began in 218 BC, during the Second Punic War, and dragged on for two centuries, until the subjugation of the Cantabrians and Astures in 19 BC. The far north-west — the future Gallaecia, cradle of Galician-Portuguese — was among the last territories to be absorbed, which helps explain some of its more conservative features.
The Latin that reached Hispania was not that of a literary elite but that of the armies and the colonists. Over the pre-Roman languages spoken in the territory a new language was thus superimposed, in a slow process of language replacement that took generations and left traces — the so-called substratum — on pronunciation and vocabulary.
How the language changed
Between Classical and Vulgar Latin lie deep transformations that already foreshadow Portuguese. In the vowels, the classical system based on quantity (long and short vowels) collapsed and gave way to one based on quality and the position of the stress. The ten classical vowels were reduced to seven across most of the western Romance area.
| Classical Latin | Vulgar Latin | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Ī [iː] | [i] | *FĪLUM* → *fio* (thread) |
| Ĭ [i] / Ē [eː] | [e] | *PĬLUM* → *pelo* (hair) |
| Ĕ [e] | [ɛ] | *FĔRRUM* → *ferro* (iron) |
| Ŏ [o] | [ɔ] | *PŎRTAM* → *porta* (door) |
| Ŭ [u] / Ō [oː] | [o] | *TŌTUM* → *todo* (all) |
| Ū [uː] | [u] | *LŪNAM* → *lua* (moon) |
The grammar changed just as profoundly. The Classical Latin case system — whose endings marked a noun’s function in the sentence — broke down, and that function passed to word order and to prepositions. There appeared the definite article, absent from Classical Latin, derived from the demonstrative ille (ILLUM gives o, ILLAM gives a), and new periphrastic tenses, such as the future cantare habeo (“I have to sing”), the source of our future cantarei.
New wine from everyday speech
The vocabulary was renewed too. In many cases the classical word was supplanted by a colloquial or expressive synonym, and it is the popular form that survives in the Romance languages.
EQUUS (classical) yielded to CABALLUS (“nag”) → cavalo (horse) · DOMUS yielded to CASA (“hut”) → casa (house) · LOQUI yielded to FABULARI / *FABELLARE* → falar (to speak)
The everyday word — often more concrete or more affective — is the one that endures.
Alongside this internal renewal, the spoken Latin of Hispania also absorbed loanwords — first from Greek, then from the languages of the Germanic peoples who settled in the Peninsula from the 5th century, and later from Arabic.
One Latin, many languages
The fragmentation of the Roman world and the weakening of central power, from the 5th century onward, broke the unity of the spoken language. With no living norm to hold it together, each region pursued its own tendencies, and over the centuries the Vulgar Latin continuum fractured into the various Romance vernaculars: Galician-Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Occitan, French, Italian, Romanian, and others.
When, centuries later, the first documents in Galician-Portuguese set down in writing the speech of the north-western Peninsula, Vulgar Latin no longer existed as a single language: through unbroken evolution it had become something new. Knowing that spoken matrix is therefore indispensable for understanding why Portuguese is the way it is — from its vowels to the order of its words.
Sources
- História da Língua Portuguesa . Sá da Costa (1980)
- The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages . Cambridge University Press (2013)
- Vulgar Latin . Pennsylvania State University Press (2000)