OVER-ALL SHAPE OF THE LEXICON

For the moment, the curtain is rung down on the developing grammar and sounds of Vulgar Latin; when it rises again, the spotlight will be on Proto-Romance. In the meantime, while the action takes place off stage – which is to say, the period when many changes go virtually undocumented – we have the opportunity to examine the vocabulary of the Romance languages, its sources and subsequent alterations.

The great bulk of the vocabulary in our three Romance languages is inherited from Latin or based on Latin. Many of the common, workaday words come from Latin: et “and” > French et, Italian e, Spanish y; de “of; from” > French, Spanish de, Italian di; quando “when” > Italian quando, Spanish cuando, French quand. Other languages also contributed words, to be sure. In the earlier centuries, they entered Latin first, which received and then passed them on: carrum “wagon” from Celtic, or episcopum “bishop” from Greek. Later they seem to have been taken into the Romance languages directly and independently: Germanic *werra “war” > Italian, Spanish guerra, French guerre, and Arabic súkkar “sugar” > French sucre, Italian zucchero, Spanish azucar. Nonetheless, it remains true that Latin bequeathed the vast majority of the words to the Romance languages.

To dramatize this fact, when studying the Romance lexicon with my classes, I have sometimes assigned them a tricky exercise.