• is lost without a trace in all positions. • If that results in a collision of identical short vowels, they fuse into the corresponding long vowel, as in > . • Final (unstressed) is lost without a trace (except, likely, for lengthening, visible in the outcomes of
-um and
-im, see for details) in polysyllabic words, as in > . • In (stressed) monosyllables it tends to survive as , as in > > Spanish . • Clusters consisting of a
stop followed by a
liquid consonant draw the stress position forward, as in > . • Two apparent counterexamples are and , judging by the
Old French outcomes and ''''. • is lost before
fricatives, leaving the preceding vowel
lengthened (but no longer nasalised), as in > . • is often retained or later restored if it belongs to a prefix (
in- or
con-) or to a word which has forms where a fricative does not follow , as in > French , thanks to related forms such as the infinitive > French ''''. • Sequences of two generally merge to a single long , as in > . • In some outlying rural areas, the diphthongs and reduce to and respectively in Classical times. Influence from such dialects made a
number of Latin words acquire
monophthongized variants early on, as in or . Most words, however, remain unaffected by this. • Later, 'mainstream' Latin experiences a general monophthongization of to , and of to , and remains intact in most cases, as in > . • turns to the fricative , as does original in intervocalic position, as in > . • Intervocalic in contact with a rounded vowel tends to disappear, as in > > . • It is often restored if other forms of the word have a non-rounded vowel following , as in the nominative plural . • In
hiatus, unstressed
front vowels become , and unstressed
back vowels become , as in > . • The same process also affects stressed front and back vowels in hiatus if they are
antepenultimate (in the third-to-last syllable of a word). When is produced, primary stress shifts to the following vowel, but when is produced, primary stress shifts instead to the preceding syllable, as in > . • If is formed after a geminate consonant, it is deleted, as in > > . • is deleted before unstressed back vowels, as in > > . • is occasionally deleted before unstressed non-back vowels as well, as in > > . • Similarly, is delabialized to before back vowels, whether they are stressed or not, as in > . • If those changes result in sequences of or , they merge to and respectively, as in > > . • If forms after , the resulting simplifies and delabializes to , as in > > . •
raises before or , as in > > Italian , (not *
coi, *
foi). • before
vocalizes to , as in > . • is reduced to before or after a consonant, as in > , or at the end of words of more than one syllable. • Intervocalically, it sometimes
metathesizes to , as in > . • Words beginning with receive an initial
supporting vowel , unless they are preceded by a word ending in a vowel, as in > . • The earliest unambiguous attestations occur in inscriptions of the second century AD. In some Romance languages, such as
Spanish, word-initial remains phonologically forbidden to this day. In other languages, such as
Romanian, the supporting vowel seems to have been abandoned early on, resulting in restoration of initial . Although there is barely any direct inscriptional evidence of the supporting vowel in Latin inscriptions in the Balkans, its development and subsequent loss is considered to be indirectly attested by the dropping of word-initial before in cases in which it was not originally a supporting vowel, as in Romanian 'to dust', from . Compare also > * > Italian , ; French ,
. • and before are raised, respectively, to and , as in > > Italian
, . • Compound verbs stressed on a prefix are usually reconstructed according to their prefixless equivalent, with their stress shifted forward from the prefix, as in > *, by analogy with the simplex form . • simply yields (rather than *), perhaps because the verb, while recognisable as a compound, was not easy to identify with the original . • Some words such as 'fasten' are apparently not recognised as compounds at all and so remain unchanged. • Monosyllabic nouns ending in a consonant receive an
epenthetic final , as in > > > French '
. (Compare > French '.) • Phonemic vowel length gradually collapses via the following changes (which only affect vowel length, not quality; this process appears to have been finished by the 5th century, compare ): • Long vowels shorten in unstressed syllables. • Long vowels shorten in stressed closed syllables. • Short vowels lengthen in stressed open syllables. • On account of the above, the vowel inventory changes from to , with pre-existing differences in vowel quality achieving phonemic status and with no distinction between original and . Additionally: • Unstressed and merge into and respectively. • In the second syllable of words with the structure [ˌσσˈσσ], and merge into and respectively. • Word-internal merges into a preceding consonant and
palatalises it, as in > > > Italian . == Sporadic changes ==