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The vast, vast majority of native Italian words (i.e. words not imported from another language) end in vowels. It's very uncommon for Italian words to stop at a consonant. Yet, when we look at Latin vocabulary, huge number of words end in hard consonants, e.g. diem, emptor, nauseam, rigor, nos, id, meus, and so on and so forth.

We all know Italian is derived from Latin and is closest to Latin among all the romance languages, but what happened to the consonant endings? How did the same population who a few centuries ago used to speak Latin with all its consonant-endings manage to lose not one or two but all of them in the derived language? It's as if such sounds never existed in this population, like the sound ZI doesn't naturally occur in Japanese, or the sound æ (as in English man or stand) doesn't naturally occur in German.

It's stranger in this case because Latin after all originated in Italy, not in a foreign country. It's intimately associated with Italy's history and culture. So what happened?

Charo
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  • Does this answer your question? Are there any rules that italian words needs to end with vowel characters? – Hachi Jul 23 '20 at 11:36
  • No, because that question is about foreign words imported into Italian. I am talking about native Italian words. –  Jul 23 '20 at 11:39
  • Why does almost every Italian word end with a vowel? https://www.quora.com/Why-does-almost-every-Italian-word-end-with-a-vowel – Hachi Jul 23 '20 at 11:48
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    None of those answers my question. Shall we let others have a crack at it and maybe post some original thoughts? –  Jul 23 '20 at 11:59
  • The following may help: “First of all, Italian got rid of most of the Latin word endings. Of course, this has to do with the fact that the Italian dialects lost the Latin case system and the neuter gender, as did most (but not all) Romance languages.” ... But that is not the only way endings changed. Graffiti from Pompeii show that the loss of final consonants (the so-called ‘apocope’) in Vulgar Latin had already started in the first century AD. This affected strongly the verb conjugation: cantat ‘he/she sings’ became canta, cantamus ‘we sing’ became cantiamo, cantatis ‘you (pl.) .../... – Hachi Jul 23 '20 at 12:10
  • “But enough about endings. Many other consonant shifts took place in Italian, and most of them followed a regular pattern, which is often the case with language change. For example, the n in the Latin consonant cluster ns almost always disappeared, so it changed to a simple s in Italian, which is pronounced as /z/ between vowels: mensis ‘month’ became mese; insula ‘island’ became isola; construere ‘to build’ became costruire.”..... https://damyanlissitchkov.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/how-latin-became-italian/ – Hachi Jul 23 '20 at 12:13
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    You should be more precise. I assume that you refer mostly to nouns and verbs. Many articles and prepositions, for instance, end in consonant: in, con, per, il and so on. – DaG Jul 23 '20 at 12:20
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    “It's as if such sounds never existed in this population”: which sounds? The final consonants in your examples (m, r, s, d) are alive and well in Italian. It's their position and role within the world within the words that has shifted, unlike sounds actually absent, such as in the examples you make from Japanese and German. – DaG Jul 23 '20 at 12:28
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    That said, your question, albeit imprecisely formulated, is an interesting one and whole books have been written about the transition from Latin to Romance languages, each of which has strong peculiarities among each other and with respect to Latin. – DaG Jul 23 '20 at 12:30
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    "We all know Italian is derived from Latin and is closest to Latin among all the romance languages": a strong assumption, I'm not sure we all know this :) It's difficult to say a language is the closest to Latin, it depends on what you're considering. For instance some consonant clusters are "lost in gemination" in Italian but kept in other languages. – Old Man of Aran Jul 23 '20 at 13:16
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    I might write an answer later this evening. But note that many final consonants were already transitioning to a more vocalic pronunciation in classical Latin. For example, it's pretty much the standard consensus that final m was pronounced by nasalizing the previous vowel (so "rosam" was pronounced more like "rosã", where ã denotes the sound of the French word en). – Denis Nardin Jul 23 '20 at 13:38
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    @OldManofAran: According to the article "Romance languages" from Encyclopedia Britannica: "if the Romance languages are compared with Latin, it is seen that by most measures Sardinian and Italian are least differentiated and French most (though in vocabulary Romanian has changed most)." – Charo Jul 23 '20 at 13:44
  • To whomever voted to close (and to anybody else who has an opinion about this): which question would this be a duplicate of? – DaG Jul 23 '20 at 15:34
  • Great question, as an Italian I often wondered the same. Most of the examples the OP made are not prepositions or articles, which are pretty much the only types of words that often end with a consonant, so to me the question is quite clear and makes a lot of sense. My Latin is very rusty but most and probably all the examples the OP made do end with a vowel in Italian. I look forward to an answer. – SantiBailors Jul 24 '20 at 15:32
  • @DaG It is written right there in the first comment. SE automatically adds a "does this answer your question" comment whenever one votes to close a question as a duplicate. – Federico Poloni Jul 24 '20 at 18:22
  • @FedericoPoloni: I see, thanks. I supposed so, but I was unsure, since that question seems to be quite irrelevant to this one. – DaG Jul 24 '20 at 19:55

1 Answers1

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How did the same population who a few centuries ago used to speak Latin with all its consonant-endings manage to lose not one or two but all of them in the derived language?

I think there is a misunderstanding here. I bolded the word 'speak' in your sentence, just to highlight a point: we must separate the written Latin and the spoken Latin.

Italian comes from the ‘vulgar’ Latin (where vulgar in this case doesn’t mean rude, but just spoken by the populace) and not from the written Latin that you can see in famous books that we study at school. We are sure about this because there are many many words that we use in common Italian nowadays that comes from the ‘popular’ from and not from the ‘elite’ form. A couple of examples:

  • Cavallo (horse) comes from caballus (the horse used in the fields) and not from equus (a more elegant horse, war horse for example).
  • Mangiare (to eat) comes from manducare (rimpinzarsi -> in English should be something like over-feed / gorge on) and not from edere (a polite eating).

So in the end difference is just “graphic” because in spoken Latin they were used not to pronounce the last consonant, expecially m, n, t.

“Animam” was spoken “anima”, “lumen” was “lume”. Also the famous and simple “et” ("and" in English) was pronounced “e” just like today.

Probably you have always heard that Italian written is very similar to spoken and that's true. But this is not true for Latin too! ;)

Charo
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MaHaZaeL
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    Welcome to Italian.SE! – Charo Jul 27 '20 at 14:43
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    While some sources would benefit this answer, it seems to me that, at best, it squeezes an evolution that took place along more than 1500 years into something that seems to be a static situation. – DaG Jul 27 '20 at 16:39
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    Well, if you extend the question to "why and how latin evolved into modern italian in 1500 years" yes, my answer isn't just squeezed... it's even incomplete!! I didn't say how caballus become cavallo, the process of "B" evolving to "V", etc! But to be honest I feel like the answer directly answers the question, that was regarding about and only the "lost" ending consonant. For me, they aren't really "lost" ;) – MaHaZaeL Jul 28 '20 at 07:22