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80-487: Vulgar Latin , also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin , is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Vulgar Latin as a term is both controversial and imprecise. Spoken Latin existed for a long time and in many places. Scholars have differed in opinion as to the extent of the differences, and whether Vulgar Latin was in some sense a different language. This

160-471: A (elision of -l- is a common feature of Portuguese) and Italian il , lo and la . Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ipse , ipsa an intensive adjective ( su, sa ); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after

240-499: A companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Koine Greek , which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force. Another indication of

320-475: A consonant and before another vowel) became [j], which palatalized preceding consonants. /w/ (except after /k/) and intervocalic /b/ merge as the bilabial fricative /β/. The system of phonemic vowel length collapsed by the fifth century AD, leaving quality differences as the distinguishing factor between vowels; the paradigm thus changed from /ī ĭ ē ĕ ā ă ŏ ō ŭ ū/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/. Concurrently, stressed vowels in open syllables lengthened . Towards

400-585: A great extent a separate language, that was more or less distinct from the written form. To Meyer-Lübke, the spoken Vulgar form was the genuine and continuous form, while Classical Latin was a kind of artificial idealised language imposed upon it; thus Romance languages were derived from the "real" Vulgar form, which had to be reconstructed from remaining evidence. Others that followed this approach divided Vulgar from Classical Latin by education or class. Other views of "Vulgar Latin" include defining it as uneducated speech, slang, or in effect, Proto-Romance . The result

480-672: A most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC. The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages. The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion had already started in Pompeian graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum ("dead body"), and hoc locum for hunc locum ("this place"). The morphological confusion shows primarily in

560-455: A particular activity, such as academic jargon. There is very little agreement as to how the spectrum of formality should be divided. In one prominent model, Martin Joos describes five styles in spoken English: The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has defined the international standard ISO 12620 , Management of terminology resources – Data category specifications . This

640-418: A prepositional case, displacing many instances of the ablative . Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case. Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely confused in inscriptions. Even though Gaulish texts from the 7th century rarely confuse both forms, it

720-554: A shift in meaning. Some notable cases are civitas ('citizenry' → 'city', replacing urbs ); focus ('hearth' → 'fire', replacing ignis ); manducare ('chew' → 'eat', replacing edere ); causa ('subject matter' → 'thing', competing with res ); mittere ('send' → 'put', competing with ponere ); necare ('murder' → 'drown', competing with submergere ); pacare ('placate' → 'pay', competing with solvere ), and totus ('whole' → 'all, every', competing with omnis ). Front vowels in hiatus (after

800-529: A sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from the literary Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect. The early 19th-century French linguist François-Just-Marie Raynouard is often regarded as the father of modern Romance philology . Observing that the Romance languages have many features in common that are not found in Latin, at least not in "proper" or Classical Latin, he concluded that

880-486: A specific vocabulary which one might commonly call slang , jargon , argot , or cant , while others argue against the use of the term altogether. Crystal and Davy, for instance, have critiqued the way the term has been used "in an almost indiscriminate manner". These various approaches to the concept of register fall within the scope of disciplines such as sociolinguistics (as noted above), stylistics , pragmatics , and systemic functional grammar . The term register

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960-476: A spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of obviously distinct varieties—numerous registers can be identified, with no clear boundaries between them. Discourse categorization is a complex problem, and even according to the general definition of language variation defined by use rather than user, there are cases where other kinds of language variation, such as regional or age dialect , overlap. Due to this complexity, scholarly consensus has not been reached for

1040-420: A three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles el , la , and lo . The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno , literally "that which is good", from bueno : good. The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions. Some of the causes include: the loss of final m , the merger of ă with ā , and

1120-531: A varied and contrasting topography. The Mediterranean region offers an ever-changing landscape of high mountains, rocky shores, impenetrable scrub, semi-arid steppes, coastal wetlands, sandy beaches and a myriad of islands of various shapes and sizes dotted amidst the clear blue sea. Contrary to the classic sandy beach images portrayed in most tourist brochures, the Mediterranean is surprisingly hilly. Mountains can be seen from almost anywhere. By definition,

1200-451: Is "the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the purposive activity of the speaker or writer; includes subject-matter as one of the elements." Mode is "the function of the text in the event, including both the channel taken by language – spoken or written, extempore or prepared – and its genre, rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive, ' phatic communion ', etc." The tenor refers to "the type of role interaction,

1280-868: Is a borrowing from French); the same for lignum ("wood stick"), plural ligna , that originated the Catalan feminine singular noun (la) llenya , Portuguese (a) lenha , Spanish (la) leña and Italian (la) legna . Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient neuter plural which is treated grammatically as feminine: e.g., BRACCHIUM  : BRACCHIA "arm(s)" → Italian (il) braccio  : (le) braccia , Romanian braț(ul)  : brațe(le) . Cf. also Merovingian Latin ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant . Alternations in Italian heteroclitic nouns such as l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") / le uova fresche ("the fresh eggs") are usually analysed as masculine in

1360-557: Is a registry for registering linguistic terms used in various fields of translation, computational linguistics and natural language processing and defining mappings both between different terms and the same terms used in different systems. The registers identified are: The term diatype is sometimes used to describe language variation which is determined by its social purpose. In this formulation, language variation can be divided into two categories: dialect , for variation according to user , and diatype for variation according to use (e.g.

1440-520: Is a useless and dangerously misleading term ... To abandon it once and for all can only benefit scholarship. Lloyd called to replace the use of "Vulgar Latin" with a series of more precise definitions, such as the spoken Latin of a particular time and place. Research in the twentieth century has in any case shifted the view to consider the differences between written and spoken Latin in more moderate terms. Just as in modern languages, speech patterns are different from written forms, and vary with education,

1520-457: Is believed that both cases began to merge in Africa by the end of the empire, and a bit later in parts of Italy and Iberia. Nowadays, Romanian maintains a two-case system, while Old French and Old Occitan had a two-case subject-oblique system. This Old French system was based largely on whether or not the Latin case ending contained an "s" or not, with the "s" being retained but all vowels in

1600-859: Is considered regular as it is more common than in Italian. Thus, a relict neuter gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian. In Portuguese, traces of the neuter plural can be found in collective formations and words meant to inform a bigger size or sturdiness. Thus, one can use ovo (s) ("egg(s)") and ova (s) ("roe", "collection(s) of eggs"), bordo (s) ("section(s) of an edge") and borda (s ) ("edge(s)"), saco (s) ("bag(s)") and saca (s ) ("sack(s)"), manto (s) ("cloak(s)") and manta (s) ("blanket(s)"). Other times, it resulted in words whose gender may be changed more or less arbitrarily, like fruto / fruta ("fruit"), caldo / calda ("broth"), etc. These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin,

1680-495: Is home to a number of plant communities, which vary with rainfall, elevation, latitude, and soil. The Mediterranean basin is home to considerable biodiversity , including 22,500 endemic vascular plant species . Conservation International designates the region as a biodiversity hotspot , because of its rich biodiversity and its threatened status. The Mediterranean basin has an area of 2,085,292 km , of which only 98,009 km remains undisturbed. Endangered mammals of

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1760-405: Is necessary") < "est ministeri "; and Italian terremoto ("earthquake") < " terrae motu " as well as names like Paoli , Pieri . The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus , in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction "ad" + accusative. For example, "ad carnuficem dabo". The accusative case developed as

1840-400: Is on the way language is used in particular situations, such as legalese or motherese , the language of a biology research lab, of a news report, or of the bedroom. M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan interpret register as "the linguistic features which are typically associated with a configuration of situational features—with particular values of the field, mode and tenor." Field for them

1920-419: Is that the term "Vulgar Latin" is regarded by some modern philologists as an essentially meaningless, but unfortunately very persistent term: the continued use of "Vulgar Latin" is not only no aid to thought, but is, on the contrary, a positive barrier to a clear understanding of Latin and Romance.... I wish it were possible to hope the term might fall out of use. Many scholars have stated that "Vulgar Latin"

2000-673: Is the replacement of the highly irregular ( suppletive ) verb ferre , meaning 'to carry', with the entirely regular portare . Similarly, the verb loqui , meaning 'to speak', was replaced by a variety of alternatives such as the native fabulari and narrare or the Greek borrowing parabolare . Classical Latin particles fared poorly, with all of the following vanishing in the course of its development to Romance: an , at , autem , donec , enim , etiam , haud , igitur , ita , nam , postquam , quidem , quin , quoad , quoque , sed , sive , utrum , vel . Many words experienced

2080-592: The Atlas Mountains . In the eastern Mediterranean the Sahara extends to the southern shore of the Mediterranean, with the exception of the northern fringe of the peninsula of Cyrenaica in Libya , which has a dry Mediterranean climate. Europe lies to the north of the Mediterranean. The European portion of the Mediterranean basin loosely corresponds to Southern Europe . The three large Southern European peninsulas,

2160-922: The Black Sea coast of northeastern Anatolia , the southern coast of Crimea between Sevastopol and Feodosiya in Ukraine and the Black Sea coast between Anapa and Tuapse in Russia forms the Mediterranean floristic region , which belongs to the Tethyan Subkingdom of the Boreal Kingdom and is enclosed between the Circumboreal , Irano-Turanian , Saharo-Arabian and Macaronesian floristic regions . The Mediterranean region

2240-894: The Iberian Peninsula , Italian Peninsula , and the Balkan Peninsula , extend into and comprise much of the Mediterranean-climate zone. A system of folded mountains, including the Pyrenees dividing Spain from France , the Alps dividing Italy from Central Europe , the Dinaric Alps along the eastern Adriatic , and the Balkan and Rila - Rhodope mountains of the Balkan Peninsula divide

2320-638: The Sahara , which became a grassland , with lakes, rivers, and wetlands. After a period of climatic instability, the Sahara settled into a desert state by the 4th millennium BCE . One of the earliest modern studies of the Mediterranean was Fernand Braudel 's La Méditerranéee et le monde méditerranéen à l époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II), published in 1949. S.D. Goitein 's multivolume study of

2400-615: The Wisconsin glaciation ( Würm in Southern European contexts), reached its maximum extent approximately 21,000 years ago, and ended approximately 12,000 years ago. A warm period, known as the Holocene climatic optimum , followed the ice age. Food crops, including wheat , chickpeas , and olives , along with sheep and goats , were domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean in the 9th millennium BCE , which allowed for

2480-479: The establishment of agricultural settlements . Near Eastern crops spread to southeastern Europe in the 7th millennium BCE . Poppy and oats were domesticated in Europe from the 6th to the 3rd millennium BCE. Agricultural settlements spread around the Mediterranean basin. Megaliths were constructed in Europe from 4500 – 1500 BCE. A strengthening of the summer monsoon 9000–7000 years ago increased rainfall across

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2560-516: The Latin nominative/accusative nomen , rather than the oblique stem form * nomin- (which nevertheless produced Spanish nombre ). Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in -A or -IA ; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as gaudium ("joy"), plural gaudia ; the plural form lies at the root of the French feminine singular (la) joie , as well as of Catalan and Occitan (la) joia (Italian la gioia

2640-577: The Mediterranean basin extends from Macaronesia in the west, to the Levant in the east, although some places may or may not be included depending on the view, as is the case with Macaronesia: some definitions only include Madeira and the Canary Islands while others include the whole Macaronesia (with the Azores and Cape Verde ). In Western Asia, it covers the western and southern portions of

2720-701: The Mediterranean basin include the Mediterranean monk seal , the Barbary macaque , and the Iberian lynx . The WWF identifies 22 Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub ecoregions in the Mediterranean basin, most of which featuring sclerophyll plant species: Neanderthals inhabited western Asia and the non-glaciated portions of Europe starting about 230,000 years ago. Modern humans moved into western Asia from Africa less than 100,000 years ago. Modern humans, known as Cro-Magnons , moved into Europe approximately 50–40,000 years ago. The most recent glacial period,

2800-453: The Mediterranean from the temperate climate regions of Western , Northwestern or Northern Europe , Central Europe , and Eastern Europe . The Mediterranean basin was shaped by the ancient collision of the northward-moving African–Arabian continent with the stable Eurasian continent. As Africa–Arabia moved north, it closed the former Tethys Sea , which formerly separated Eurasia from the ancient super continent of Gondwana , of which Africa

2880-430: The Mediterranean region is further subdivided into seven to nine floristic provinces : Southwestern Mediterranean (or Southern Moroccan and Southwestern Mediterranean), Ibero-Balearian (or Iberian and Balearian), Liguro-Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, East Mediterranean , South Mediterranean and Crimeo-Novorossiysk. The Mediterranean basin is the largest of the world's five Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub regions. It

2960-511: The Mediterranean vegetation are the Aleppo pine , stone pine , Mediterranean cypress , bay laurel , Oriental sweetgum , holm oak , kermes oak , strawberry tree , Greek strawberry tree , mastic , terebinth , common myrtle , oleander , Acanthus mollis and Vitex agnus-castus . Moreover, many plant taxa are shared with one of the four neighboring floristic regions only. According to different versions of Armen Takhtajan 's delineation,

3040-684: The Miocene, which supported laurel forests . The shift to a Mediterranean climate occurred within the last 3.2–2.8 million years, during the Pliocene epoch, as summer rainfall decreased. The subtropical laurel forests retreated, although they persisted on the islands of Macaronesia off the Atlantic coast of Iberia and North Africa, and the present Mediterranean vegetation evolved, dominated by coniferous trees and sclerophyllous trees and shrubs, with small, hard, waxy leaves that prevent moisture loss in

3120-645: The Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles are suffixed to the noun (or an adjective preceding it), as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages . The numeral unus , una (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases (again, this is a common semantic development across Europe). This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with

3200-414: The adoption of the nominative ending -us ( -Ø after -r ) in the o -declension. In Petronius 's work, one can find balneus for balneum ("bath"), fatus for fatum ("fate"), caelus for caelum ("heaven"), amphitheater for amphitheatrum ("amphitheatre"), vinus for vinum ("wine"), and conversely, thesaurum for thesaurus ("treasure"). Most of these forms occur in

3280-574: The articles fully developed. Definite articles evolved from demonstrative pronouns or adjectives (an analogous development is found in many Indo-European languages, including Greek , Celtic and Germanic ); compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille , illa , illud "that", in the Romance languages , becoming French le and la (Old French li , lo , la ), Catalan and Spanish el , la and lo , Occitan lo and la , Portuguese o and

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3360-662: The channel of communication, such as spoken, written or signed. Mediterranean Basin In biogeography , the Mediterranean basin ( / ˌ m ɛ d ɪ t ə ˈ r eɪ n i ən / MED -ih-tə- RAY -nee-ən ), also known as the Mediterranean region or sometimes Mediterranea , is the region of lands around the Mediterranean Sea that have mostly a Mediterranean climate , with mild to cool, rainy winters and warm to hot, dry summers , which supports characteristic Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub vegetation. It

3440-407: The conquered provinces. Over time this—along with other factors that encouraged linguistic and cultural assimilation , such as political unity, frequent travel and commerce, military service, etc.—led to Latin becoming the predominant language throughout the western Mediterranean. Latin itself was subject to the same assimilatory tendencies, such that its varieties had probably become more uniform by

3520-405: The definitions of terms such as register , field , or tenor ; different scholars' definitions of these terms often contradict each other. Additional terms such as diatype, genre , text types , style , acrolect , mesolect , basilect , sociolect , and ethnolect , among many others, may be used to cover the same or similar ground. Some prefer to restrict the domain of the term register to

3600-426: The dry summers. Much of these forests and shrublands have been altered beyond recognition by thousands of years of human habitation. There are now very few relatively intact natural areas in what was once a heavily wooded region. Phytogeographically , the Mediterranean basin together with the nearby Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean woodlands and forests and Mediterranean dry woodlands and steppe of North Africa ,

3680-549: The end of the Roman Empire /ɪ/ merged with /e/ in most regions, although not in Africa or a few peripheral areas in Italy. It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article , absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show

3760-424: The ending being lost (as with veisin below). But since this meant that it was easy to confuse the singular nominative with the plural oblique, and the plural nominative with the singular oblique, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and Middle French adopted one case (usually the oblique) for all purposes. Register (sociolinguistics) As with other types of language variation , there tends to be

3840-415: The feminine derivations (a) pereira , (la) perera . As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension noun manus ("hand"), another feminine noun with the ending -us , Italian and Spanish derived (la) mano , Romanian mânu> mână , pl. mâini / (reg.) mâni , Catalan (la) mà , and Portuguese (a) mão , which preserve

3920-609: The feminine gender along with the masculine appearance. Except for the Italian and Romanian heteroclitic nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but still have neuter pronouns. French celui-ci / celle-ci / ceci ("this"), Spanish éste / ésta / esto ("this"), Italian: gli / le / ci ("to him" /"to her" / "to it"), Catalan: ho , açò , això , allò ("it" / this / this-that / that over there ); Portuguese: todo / toda / tudo ("all of him" / "all of her" / "all of it"). In Spanish,

4000-511: The following sources: An oft-posed question is why (or when, or how) Latin “fragmented” into several different languages. Current hypotheses contrast the centralizing and homogenizing socio-economic, cultural, and political forces that characterized the Roman Empire with the centrifugal forces that prevailed afterwards. By the end of the first century CE the Romans had seized the entire Mediterranean Basin and established hundreds of colonies in

4080-545: The former must have all had some common ancestor (which he believed most closely resembled Old Occitan ) that replaced Latin some time before the year 1000. This he dubbed la langue romane or "the Romance language". The first truly modern treatise on Romance linguistics and the first to apply the comparative method was Friedrich Christian Diez 's seminal Grammar of the Romance Languages . Researchers such as Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke characterised Vulgar Latin as to

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4160-742: The fragmentation of Latin into the incipient Romance languages. Until then Latin appears to have been remarkably homogeneous, as far as can be judged from its written records, although careful statistical analysis reveals regional differences in the treatment of the vowel /ĭ/, and in the frequency of the merger of (original) intervocalic /b/ and /w/, by about the fifth century CE. Over the centuries, spoken Latin lost certain words in favour of coinages ; in favour of borrowings from neighbouring languages such as Gaulish , Germanic , or Greek ; or in favour of other Latin words that had undergone semantic shift . The “lost” words often continued to enjoy some currency in literary Latin, however. A commonly-cited example

4240-443: The last 630,000 years of the Miocene epoch, which could explain several events of large amounts of salt deposition. Recent studies, however, show that repeated desiccation and re-flooding is unlikely from a geodynamic point of view. The end of the Miocene also marked a change in the Mediterranean basin's climate. Fossil evidence shows that the Mediterranean basin had a relatively humid subtropical climate with summer rainfall during

4320-512: The late Miocene, the Mediterranean was closed at its western end by drifting Africa, which caused the entire sea to evaporate. There followed several (debated) episodes of sea drawdown and re-flooding known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis , which ended when the Atlantic last re-flooded the basin at the end of the Miocene. Recent research has suggested that a desiccation-flooding cycle may have repeated several times during

4400-956: The less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ecce (originally an interjection : "behold!"), which also spawned Italian ecco through eccum , a contracted form of ecce eum . This is the origin of Old French cil (* ecce ille ), cist (* ecce iste ) and ici (* ecce hic ); Italian questo (* eccum istum ), quello (* eccum illum ) and (now mainly Tuscan) codesto (* eccum tibi istum ), as well as qui (* eccu hic ), qua (* eccum hac ); Spanish and Occitan aquel and Portuguese aquele (* eccum ille ); Spanish acá and Portuguese cá (* eccum hac ); Spanish aquí and Portuguese aqui (* eccum hic ); Portuguese acolá (* eccum illac ) and aquém (* eccum inde ); Romanian acest (* ecce iste ) and acela (* ecce ille ), and many other forms. On

4480-409: The merger of ŭ with ō (see tables). Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced. There also seems to be a marked tendency to confuse different forms even when they had not become homophonous (like the generally more distinct plurals), which indicates that nominal declension was shaped not only by phonetic mergers, but also by structural factors. As a result of

4560-508: The names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin pirus (" pear tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian (il) pero and Romanian păr(ul) ; in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations (le) poirier , (el) peral ; and in Portuguese and Catalan by

4640-700: The nominative and -Ø in the accusative in both words: murs , ciels [nominative] – mur , ciel [oblique]. For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was productive; for others, the nominative/accusative form, (the two were identical in Classical Latin). Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French (le) lait , Catalan (la) llet , Occitan (lo) lach , Spanish (la) leche , Portuguese (o) leite , Italian language (il) latte , Leonese (el) lleche and Romanian lapte (le) ("milk"), all derive from

4720-444: The non-standard but attested Latin nominative/accusative neuter lacte or accusative masculine lactem . In Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, lapte / lăpturi ). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French nom , Leonese, Portuguese and Italian nome , Romanian nume ("name") all preserve

4800-400: The noun, e.g. lupul ("the wolf" – from * lupum illum ) and omul ("the man" – *homo illum ), possibly a result of being within the Balkan sprachbund . This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille daemon sodalis peccati ("The devil is

4880-619: The other hand, even in the Oaths of Strasbourg , dictated in Old French in AD 842, no demonstrative appears even in places where one would clearly be called for in all the later languages ( pro christian poblo – "for the Christian people"). Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of

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4960-672: The peninsula of Anatolia, as far as Iraq , but excluding the temperate-climate mountains of central Turkey. It includes the Mediterranean Levant at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, bounded on the east and south by the Syrian and Negev deserts. The northern portion of the Maghreb region of northwestern Africa has a Mediterranean climate, separated from the Sahara Desert , which extends across North Africa , by

5040-413: The realization of these meanings." Register, in the view of M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan, is one of the two defining concepts of text. "A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of situation, and therefore consistent in register; and it is coherent with respect to itself, and therefore cohesive." One of the most analyzed areas where

5120-430: The same can be said of Latin. For instance, philologist József Herman agrees that the term is problematic, and therefore limits it in his work to mean the innovations and changes that turn up in spoken or written Latin that were relatively uninfluenced by educated forms of Latin. Herman states: it is completely clear from the texts during the time that Latin was a living language, there was never an unbridgeable gap between

5200-408: The set of relevant social relations, permanent and temporary, among the participants involved". These three values – field, mode and tenor – are thus the determining factors for the linguistic features of the text. "The register is the set of meanings, the configuration of semantic patterns, that are typically drawn upon under the specified conditions, along with the words and structures that are used in

5280-409: The singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in -a . However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that uovo is simply a regular neuter noun ( ovum , plural ova ) and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is -o in the singular and -e in the plural. The same alternation in gender exists in certain Romanian nouns, but

5360-408: The specialised language of an academic journal). This definition of diatype is very similar to those of register. The distinction between dialect and diatype is not always clear; in some cases a language variety may be understood as both a dialect and a diatype. Diatype is usually analysed in terms of field , the subject matter or setting; tenor , the participants and their relationships; and mode ,

5440-593: The speech of one man: Trimalchion, an uneducated Greek (i.e. foreign) freedman . In modern Romance languages, the nominative s -ending has been largely abandoned, and all substantives of the o -declension have an ending derived from -um : -u , -o , or -Ø . E.g., masculine murus ("wall"), and neuter caelum ("sky") have evolved to: Italian muro , cielo ; Portuguese muro , céu ; Spanish muro , cielo , Catalan mur , cel ; Romanian mur , cieru> cer ; French mur , ciel . However, Old French still had -s in

5520-558: The time period. During the Classical period , Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as sermo plebeius or sermo vulgaris , meaning "common speech". This could simply refer to unadorned speech without the use of rhetoric, or even plain speaking. The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the Renaissance , when Italian thinkers began to theorize that their own language originated in

5600-493: The time the Empire fell than they had been before it. That is not to say that the language had been static for all those years, but rather that ongoing changes tended to spread to all regions. The rise of the first Arab caliphate in the seventh century marked the definitive end of Roman dominance over the Mediterranean. It is from approximately that century onward that regional differences proliferate in Latin documents, indicating

5680-628: The untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin shifted from a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic one . The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke , and began to be replaced by "de" + noun (which originally meant "about/concerning", weakened to "of") as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining genitive forms are some pronouns, certain fossilized expressions and some proper names. For example, French jeudi ("Thursday") < Old French juesdi < Vulgar Latin " jovis diēs "; Spanish es menester ("it

5760-485: The use of language is determined by the situation is the formality scale. The term register is often, in language teaching especially, shorthand for formal/informal style, although this is an aging definition. Linguistics textbooks may use the term tenor instead, but increasingly prefer the term style— "we characterise styles as varieties of language viewed from the point of view of formality" —while defining registers more narrowly as specialist language use related to

5840-516: The weakening of the demonstratives can be inferred from the fact that at this time, legal and similar texts begin to swarm with praedictus , supradictus , and so forth (all meaning, essentially, "aforesaid"), which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes, Erat autem... beatissimus Anianus in supradicta civitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were no longer felt to be strong or specific enough. In

5920-413: The written and spoken, nor between the language of the social elites and that of the middle, lower, or disadvantaged groups of the same society. Herman also makes it clear that Vulgar Latin, in this view, is a varied and unstable phenomenon, crossing many centuries of usage where any generalisations are bound to cover up variations and differences. Evidence for the features of non-literary Latin comes from

6000-652: The written, formalised language exerting pressure back on speech. Vulgar Latin is itself often viewed as vague and unhelpful, and it is used in very different ways by different scholars, applying it to mean spoken Latin of differing types, or from different social classes and time periods. Nevertheless, interest in the shifts in the spoken forms remains very important to understand the transition from Latin or Late Latin through to Proto-Romance and Romance languages. To make matters more complicated, evidence for spoken forms can be found only through examination of written Classical Latin , Late Latin , or early Romance , depending on

6080-563: Was a very important part of Mediterranean civilizations. The Mediterranean basin covers portions of three continents: Europe , Africa , and Asia . It is distinct from the drainage basin , which extends much further south and north due to major rivers ending in the Mediterranean Sea, such as the Nile and Rhône . Conversely, the Mediterranean basin includes regions not in the drainage basin ( Portugal , Jordan and Iraq ). It has

6160-401: Was developed as a theory in the nineteenth century by Raynouard . At its extreme, the theory suggested that the written register formed an elite language distinct from common speech, but this is now rejected. The current consensus is that the written and spoken languages formed a continuity much as they do in modern languages, with speech tending to evolve faster than the written language, and

6240-405: Was first proposed by German botanist August Grisebach in the late 19th century. The monotypic Drosophyllaceae , recently segregated from Droseraceae , is the only plant family endemic to the region. Among the endemic plant genera are: The genera Aubrieta , Sesamoides , Cynara , Dracunculus , Arisarum and Biarum are nearly endemic. Among the endemic species prominent in

6320-429: Was first used by the linguist T. B. W. Reid in 1956, and brought into general currency in the 1960s by a group of linguists who wanted to distinguish among variations in language according to the user (defined by variables such as social background, geography, sex and age), and variations according to use , "in the sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and choices between them at different times." The focus

6400-975: Was part. At about the same time, 170 mya in the Jurassic period, a small Neotethys ocean basin formed shortly before the Tethys Sea was closed at the eastern end. The collision pushed up a vast system of mountains, extending from the Pyrenees in Spain to the Zagros Mountains in Iran . This episode of mountain building, known as the Alpine orogeny , occurred mostly during the Oligocene (34 to 23 million years ago ( mya )) and Miocene (23 to 5.3 mya) epochs. The Neotethys became larger during these collisions and associated folding and subduction. About 6 mya during

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