Romance linguistics is the scientific study of the Romance languages.
Basic features Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns. The amount of synthesis is significantly more than English, but less than Classical Latin and much less than the oldest Indo-European languages (e.g. Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Inflection is often fusional, with a single affix representing multiple features (as contrasted with agglutinative languages such as Turkish and Mongolian). For example, Portuguese "I loved" is composed of am- "love" and the fusional suffix -ei "first-person singular preterite indicative". Romance languages have a primarily subject–verb–object (SVO) word order, with varying degrees of flexibility from one language to another. Constructions are predominantly of the head-first (right-branching) type. Adjectives, genitives and relative clauses all tend to follow their head noun, although (except in Romanian) determiners usually precede. In general, nouns, adjectives and determiners inflect only according to grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) and grammatical number (singular or plural). Grammatical case is marked only on pronouns, as in English; case marking, as in English, is of the nominative–accusative type (rather than e.g. the ergative–absolutive marking of Basque or the split ergativity of Hindi). A significant exception, however, is Romanian, with three-case marking (nominative/accusative vs. genitive/dative and vocative) on nominal elements. Verbs are inflected according to a complex morphology that may mark person, number (singular or plural), tense, mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative) and sometimes aspect or gender. Grammatical voice (active, passive, middle/reflexive) and some grammatical aspects (in particular, the perfect aspect) are expressed using periphrastic constructions, as in the Italian present perfect () / "I have loved/I have been loved". Most Romance languages are null-subject languages (but modern French is not, as a result of the phonetic decay of verb endings). All Romance languages have two articles (definite and indefinite), and many have in addition a partitive article (expressing the concept of "some"). In some languages (notably, French), the use of an article with a noun is nearly obligatory; it serves to express grammatical number (no longer marked phonetically on most nouns) and to cope with the extreme homophony of French vocabulary as a result of extensive sound reductions. The phonemic inventory of most Romance languages is of moderate size with few unusual phonemes. Phonemic vowel length is uncommon. Some languages have developed nasal vowels or front rounded vowels. Word accent is of the stress (dynamic) type, rather than making use of pitch (as in Ancient Greek and some modern Slavic languages). Stress most often occurs on one of the last three syllables, with predictability varying by language.
Changes from Classical Latin
Loss of the case system
The most significant changes between Classical Latin and Proto-Romance (and hence all the modern Romance languages) relate to the reduction or loss of the Latin case system and the syntactic changes that triggered.
The case system was drastically reduced from the six-case system of Classical Latin. Although five cases can be reconstructed for Vulgar Latin nouns (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative), for Proto-Romance this had been reduced to three: nominative, accusative-ablative and genitive-dative. This system is preserved best in pronouns. In the West, the genitive-dative disappeared with the genitive replaced by + ablative and the dative by + accusative.Tatiana Fotitch, ed., An Anthology of Old Spanish (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 9. This left only two cases: nominative and oblique. (However, a morphologically unmarked genitive, the so-called juxtaposition genitive, syntactically still discernible, survives in Old French and Old Occitan, also leaving traces in Old Italian and some modern Italian dialects.) Some of the older Gallo-Romance languages (in particular, Old French, Old Occitan, Old Sursilvan and Old Friulian, and, in traces, Old Catalan and Old Venetian) preserved this two-case system well into the literary period; and in Ibero-Romance languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in Italian (see under Case), a couple of examples are found which preserve the old nominative. In the East, a genitive-dative made entirely of dative formsTi Alkire & Carol Rosen, Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction (NY: Cambridge UP, 2010), 279; p. 349, note 25: due to preference for the dative of possession. was retained but the nominative and accusative-ablative eventually merged.
Concomitant with the loss of case marking, freedom of word order was greatly reduced. Classical Latin had a generally verb-final (SOV) but overall quite free word order, with a significant amount of word scrambling and mixing of left-branching and right-branching constructions. The Romance languages eliminated word scrambling and nearly all left-branching constructions, with most languages developing a rigid SVO, right-branching syntax. (Old French, however, had a freer word order due to the two-case system still present, as well as a predominantly verb-second word order developed under the influence of the Germanic languages.) Some freedom, however, is allowed in the placement of adjectives relative to their head noun. In addition, some languages (e.g., Spanish and Romanian) have an "accusative preposition" (Romanian , Spanish "personal ") along with clitic doubling, which allows for some freedom in ordering the arguments of a verb.
The Romance languages developed grammatical articles where Latin had none. Articles are often introduced around the time a robust case system falls apart in order to disambiguate the remaining case markers (which are usually too ambiguous by themselves) and to serve as parsing clues that signal the presence of a noun (a function that used to be served by the case endings themselves).
This was the pattern followed by the Romance languages: In those that still preserved a functioning nominal case system (e.g., Romanian and Old French), only the combination of article and case ending serves to uniquely identify number and case (compare the similar situation in modern German). All Romance languages have a definite article (originally developed from "self" but replaced in nearly all languages by "that (over there)") and an indefinite article (developed from "one"). Many also have a partitive article (from "of" + definite article).
Latin had a large number of syntactic constructions expressed through infinitives, participles and similar nominal constructs. Examples are the ablative absolute, the accusative-plus-infinitive construction used for reported speech, gerundive constructions and the common use of reduced relative clauses expressed through participles. All of these are replaced in the Romance languages by subordinate clauses expressed with finite verbs, making the Romance languages much more "verbal" and less "nominal" than Latin. Under the influence of the Balkan sprachbund, Romanian has progressed the furthest, largely eliminating the infinitive. (It is being revived, however, due to the increasing influence of other Romance languages.)
Other changes
Loss of phonemic vowel length, and change into a free-stressed language. Classical Latin had an automatically determined stress on the second or third syllable from the end, conditioned by vowel length; once vowel length was neutralized, stress was no longer predictable so long as it remained where it was (which it mostly did). Development of a series of palatal consonants as a result of palatalization. Loss of most traces of the neuter gender. Development of a series of analytic perfect tenses, comparable to English "I have done, I had done, I will have done". Loss of the Latin synthetic passive voice, replaced by an analytic construction comparable to English "it is/was done". Loss of deponent verbs, replaced by active-voice verbs. Replacement of the Latin future tense with a new tense formed (usually) by a periphrasis of infinitive + present tense of "have", which usually contracts into a new synthetic tense. A corresponding conditional mood is formed in the same way, using one of the past-tense forms of . Numerous lexical changes. A number of words were borrowed from the Germanic and Celtic languages. Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Throughout the medieval period, words were borrowed from Classical Latin in their original form (learned words) or in something approaching the original form (semi-learned words), often replacing the popular forms of the same words.
Phonology
Vowels Every language has its own peculiar set of vowels. Common characteristics are as follows: Most languages have at least five monophthongs . The parent language of most of the Italo-Western Romance languages (which includes the vast majority) actually had a seven-vowel system , which is kept in most Italo-Western languages. In some languages, like Spanish and Romanian, the phonemic status and difference between open-mid and close-mid vowels was lost. French has probably the largest inventory of monophthongs, with conservative varieties having 12 oral vowels can occur only in unstressed syllables, and it tends to be rounded ; it is replaced by when stressed. and four nasal vowels . European Portuguese also has a large inventory, with nine oral monophthongs , five nasal monophthongs , and a large number of oral and nasal diphthongs (see below). Some languages have a large inventory of falling diphthongs. These may or may not be considered phonemic units (rather than sequences of vowel+glide or vowel+vowel), depending on their behavior. As an example, French, Spanish and Italian have occasional instances of putative falling diphthongs formed from a vowel plus a non-syllabic or (e.g. Spanish "twenty", "debt"; French "straw", "rubber"; Italian "you are" and "six", "neuter"), but these are normally analyzed as sequences of vowel and glide. The diphthongs in Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Occitan, however, have various properties suggesting that they are better analyzed as unit phonemes. Portuguese, for example, has the diphthongs , where (and to a lesser extent ) appear only in some dialects. All except appear frequently in verb or noun inflections. (Portuguese also has nasal diphthongs; see below.)