Vulgar Latin vocabulary

This article lists some vocabulary of Vulgar Latin.

Like all languages, Latin possessed numerous synonyms that were associated with different speech registers. Some of these words were in the everyday language from the time of Old Latin, while others were borrowed late into Latin from other languages: Germanic, Gaulish, the Paleo-Balkan languages preceding Eastern Romance etc. Certain words customarily used in Classical Latin were not used in Vulgar Latin, such as equus, "horse". Instead, Vulgar Latin typically featured caballus "nag" (but note Romanian iapă, Sardinian èbba, Spanish yegua, Catalan euga and Portuguese égua all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical equa).

The differences applied even to the basic grammatical particles; many classical have no reflex in Romance, such as an, at, autem, dōnec, enim, ergō, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quīn, quod, quoque, sed, utrum and vel. Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such productive suffixes as -bilis, -ārius, -itāre and -icāre grew apace.

Some Romance languages preserve Latin words that were lost in most others. For example, Italian ogni ("each/every") and Sardinian ondzi continue Latin omnes. Elsewhere the gap is filled by reflexes of Greek κατά or evolved forms of tōtus (originally "entire") for a similar meaning; Occitan/Portuguese/Spanish cada 'each, every', tudo/todo in Portuguese, todo in Spanish, tot in Catalan, tout in French and tot in Romanian. The plural tutti in Italian means "all, every" and can overlap in meaning with ogni (ogni giorno and tutti i giorni both mean "every day"), and the singular tutto still means "entire" as well as "all".

Sometimes a Classical Latin word appears in a Romance language alongside the equivalent Vulgar Latin word: classical caput, "head", and vulgar testa (originally "pot") in Italian, French and Catalan. In Romanian cap means 'head' in the anatomical sense, but țeastă means skull or carapace, while țest means "pot" or "lid". Some southern Italian dialects preserve capo as the normal word for "head". Spanish and Portuguese have cabeza/cabeça, derived from *capetia, a modified form of caput, but in Portuguese testa is the word for "forehead".

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