Proto-Romance language

Proto-Romance is the result of applying the comparative method to reconstruct the latest common ancestor of the Romance languages. To what extent, if any, such a reconstruction reflects a real état de langue is controversial. The closest real-life counterpart would have been (vernacular) Late Latin.

/au̯/ appears to be the only phonemic diphthong that can be reconstructed.

• Vowels were lengthened in stressed open syllables.
• Stressed /ɛ ɔ/ may have yielded incipient diphthongs like [e͡ɛ o͡ɔ] in metaphonic conditions.
  • Metaphony, if it can be projected back to Proto-Romance, may have initially been limited to open syllables. That is, it would have targeted allophonically lengthened /ɛ ɔ/.

• /ɛ ɔ/ did not occur in unstressed position.
• /i u/ did not occur in the second syllable of words with the structure ˌσσˈσσ.

• There is scholarly disagreement over whether palatalization was phonemic in Proto-Romance.
• Palatalized consonants tended to geminate between vowels. The extent of this varied by consonant.
• /tʲ/ would have been an affricate like [t͡sʲ] or [t͡zʲ].

• /sC/ in word-initial position was assigned a prop-vowel [ɪ], as in /ˈstare/ [ɪsˈtaːɾe].
• /ɡn/ was likely [ɣn] at first, with later developments varying by region.
• /d ɡ/ might have been fricatives or approximants between vowels.
• /ll/ might have been retroflex.
• /f/ might have been bilabial.

• /b/ did not occur in intervocalic position.

The forms below are spelt as they are in the cited sources, either in Latin style or in phonetic notation. The latter may not always agree with the phonology given above.

Nouns are reconstructed as having three cases: a nominative, an accusative, and a genitive-dative:

Some nouns of the –C type had inflections with alternating stress or syllable count:

There were also ‘neuter’ nouns. In the singular they would have been treated as masculine and in the plural as feminine, often with a collective sense.

For the most part, the typical way to form a comparative would have been to add magis or plus (‘more’) to a positive adjective. A few words can be reconstructed as having a comparative ending -ior, which would have been inflected as follows:

Superlatives would have been formed by adding definite articles to comparatives.

The stressed or 'strong' forms:

The unstressed or 'weak' forms:

As follows:

• Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance

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