This book looks at the changes that took place in vowel length during the development of Latin into the various Romance languages and dialects. It draws on extensive data from a wide range of dialects and presents a new account of these changes, which has implications for a number of issues in Romance historical phonology.

This book investigates the changes that affected vowel length during the development of Latin into the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. pila 'ball' vs. pila 'pile', like English bit vs. beat), but no modern Romance language has retained that same contrast. However, many non-standard Romance dialects (as well as French, up to the early 20th century) have developed novel vowel length contrasts, which are investigated in detail here. Unlike previous studies of this phenomenon, this book combines detailed historical evidence spanning three millennia (as attested by extant texts) with extensive data from present-day Romance varieties collected from first-hand fieldwork, which are subjected to both phonological and experimental phonetic analysis. Professor Loporcaro puts forward a detailed account of the loss of contrastive vowel length in late Latin, showing that this happened through the establishment of a process which lengthened all stressed vowels in open syllables, as in modern Italian casa ['ka:sa]. His analysis has implications for many of the most widely-debated issues relating to the origin of novel vowel length contrasts in Romance, which are also shown to have been preserved to different degrees in different areas. The detailed investigation of the rise and fall of vowel length in dozens of lesser-known (non-standard) varieties is crucial in understanding the development of this aspect of Romance historical phonology, and will be of interest not only to researchers and students in comparative Romance linguistics, but also, more generally, to phonologists and those interested in historical linguistics beyond the Latin-Romance language family.

This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. Michele Loporcaro investigates the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard; he draws on data from the Middle Ages to the present from all the Romance languages and dialects, discussing examples from Romanian to Portuguese and crucially also focusing on less widely-studied varieties such as Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian. The investigation first reveals that several varieties display more complex systems than the binary masculine/feminine contrast familiar from modern French or Italian. Moreover, it emerges that traditional accounts, whereby neuter gender was lost in the spoken Latin of the late Empire, cannot be correct: instead, the neuter gender underwent a range of different transformations from Late Latin onwards, which are responsible for the different systems that can be observed today across the Romance languages. The volume provides a detailed description of many of these systems, which in turns reveals a wealth of fascinating data, such as varieties where 'husbands' are feminine and others where 'wives' are masculine; dialects in which nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and one Romance variety (Asturian) in which it appears that grammatical gender has split into two concurrent systems. The volume will appeal to linguists from a range of backgrounds, including Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax, and is also of relevance to those working in sociology, gender studies, and psychology.

Drawing on a wide range of philological and linguistic materials, Rodney Sampson provides for the first time a detailed comparative study tracing the rise and pattern of the evolution of nasal vowels in Romance; a family of language in which vowel nasalization has been richly represented. Developments across all the standard varieties and some non-standard varieties are considered, enabling broad characteristics of vowel nasalization in Romance to be identified.

This is a reissue of the second edition of a book on the pronunciation of Latin in Rome in the Golden Age. It has a section of supplementary notes which deal with subsequent developments in the subject. The author has also added an appendix on the names of the letters of the Latin alphabet.

This handbook offers a synopsis of the regular changes that Latin words underwent in the course of their evolution into modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with their English cognates). Although it is intended for the nonspecialist, students of Romance philology will find it useful as a ready reference and as a source of abundant examples of Latin sound changes. The synopsis is presented in the form of separate alphabetical charts for each major sound change. The rules, stated as simply as possible, do not generally explain the evolution of the changes, but only the end results. For those desiring further information, there are notes after most rules outlining exceptions to or modifications of that rule and often sketching successive stages in the development of the sound. Several minor or sporadic sound changes are also treated in note form. Each chart is supplemented by a list of additional words illustrating the same sound change. From Latin to Roman in Sound Charts has been used successfully as a graduate level text for such courses as History of Spanish, History of French, and Romance Linguistics.

Syllable and Segment in Latin offers new and detailed analyses of five long-standing problems in Latin historical phonology. In so doing, it clarifies the relative roles of synchronic phonological structure and phonetics in guiding sound change. While the phenomena can predominantly be explained by a reductionist view of diachronic phonology, claiming that demands of speech production and perception alone motivate and constrain historical development, the author shows that synchronic structure played the pivotal role of governing significant (but not immediately apparent) categorical and gradient surface variants, and that some phonetically explicable developments were in fact initiated and constrained by structural analogy. Ranjan Sen considers examines clear and dark /l/; inverse compensatory lengthening; syllabification before stop + liquid in vowel reduction; vocalic epenthesis in stop + /l/; and consonantal assimilations. He ascertains the phonological conditions for each phenomenon, reconstructs the motivations for the changes, and develops a methodology for the appropriate use of evidence from non-current languages to evaluate theories of diachronic phonology. He evaluates the likely phonetic and phonological influences by investigating studies across languages, establishing a secure evidence base through detailed philological examination, and reconstructing the phonetics - through both general principles and pertinent experimental studies - and the relevant phonological structure of the language. The book will appeal to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonology, Classical philology, and Indo-European linguistics.