Latin Language

(B) Of the consonants: after

c. A.D. 50 b between vowels be came a sound like English v (cf. Ital. avere, Fr. avoir from Latin habere, "have") ; and about the same time Latin v (pronounced like English w) passed into the same sound (cf. Ital. voce, Fr. voix from Latin vocem, "word, voice"), but the corresponding change of consonantal i (=English y) into a 5-sound (cf. Ital. giusto, Fr. juste from Latin iustum, "legal, fair") took place some 400 years later ; whereas consonantal i and consonantal u inherited from I.E., were lost at a very early date, the former between any two vowels, the latter between two like vowels of which the first was accented : thus in torreo, "scorch," the ending was origi nally -eio, the gen. sg. divitis (nom. dives) became, with the loss of u and contraction, ditis. Where for any reason i occurs in the developed language between vowels it really stands for -iy- in pronunciation, e.g., in eius pronounced ei-y-us. From the group du (u being consonantal) at the beginning of a word arose b-: thus we have bis, "twice," from *dwis, beside duo, "two." In popular Latin a single breathed consonant (p, t, k) seems regu larly to have been doubled in the middle of a word when preceded by a long vowel, and the vowel shortened at the same time—but not in the literary language. Hence arose a number of "doublets"; e.g., in the popular language cuppa, "cask" (Fr. coupe), beside cepa (Fr. cuve) in the literary language. On the other hand, -ss became -s- in the first century B.C. after a long vowel cr diph thong; cwisum supine of cado, "fall," from cassum, older *cad-tum t+t, d+t, dh-kt regularly becoming -ss- except bef ore r), and -1l- became 1 after a long vowel when i stood in the following syllable : thus the plural of "thousand," is milk. Assimilation of neighbouring unlike consonants, characteristic of all languages, is prevalent in Latin : actus, "driven," from *ag-tos (cf. ag-o) ; ferre, "carry," from *fer-se (cf. es-se). Before d, m, n, 1 and v, -s- was always lost and the preceding vowel lengthened; e.g., primus, "first," for *pris-mos (cf. pris-cus, "ancient").

4. The Latin vocabulary is in the main inherited directly from I.E., but there are numerous borrowed words from other tongues; moreover, the popular speech retained the power freely to form compounds much longer than the written language. Some of these

are half-comic, as the vaniloquidorus, "generous in talk," of Plautus (there the element -doro- is also Greek). Prepositional compounds, however, in which the true force of the preposition was not felt, so that the compound (e.g., in con-, de-, in-) gains merely in emphasis, were common in the spoken tongue through out its history. Many suffixes remained or became productive, and new words were constantly being built up on old patterns from existing stems.

5. As to the numerals, they reflect an I.E. system of reckoning that was mainly decimal. Only the first three of cardinal numerals up to zoo were declined; the decades, however, were originally neuter plurals, and the hundreds and thousands (except centum and mille) are regularly declined. Even where originally nouns the numerals have almost all become adjectival.

6. Noun and Verb Forms. Certain peculiarities have been noted above; observe in addition the almost complete loss of the dual number, the employment of a termination -i in the gen. sg. of the first (-ae from and second declensions (peculiar to Italic and Keltic in the o-stems), and the adoption (as in Greek) of pronominal terminations in the nom. pl. of the same two declen sions, the extension of -ti- abstract nouns by an -on- suffix (e.g., ratio, "thought"), the wider development of the dies-type of de clension, and the loss of the u-declension of adjectives. In verbs we note the disuse of the augment in the past tenses (Greek i-en-K-a, "I put," but Latin fe-c-i, "I did"), and the growth of new forms for the future perfect and pluperfect tenses and for the imperfect subjunctive. Even the syntactical categories of the future-perfect and imperfect subjunctive were new.

7. Further features of special interest from the point of view of syntax are the running together of the true ablative, the instru mental, and (for the most part) the locative of I.E. into a single ablative case, and sharp definition in the use of all the cases ; the development of constructions by which the subjunctive was regu larly used in dependent questions, in clauses of definition, purpose, and result; and the peculiarly Latin idiom of the gerundive.