14. Inasmuch as Provençal, like the other Romance languages, grew out
of the Latin commonly spoken under the Roman Empire, we must take
this latter language as our starting-point. The transformation was so
gradual and continuous that we cannot assign any date at which speech
ceases to be Latin and begins to be Provençal; since, however, the
various Latin dialects--destined to become later the various Romance
languages--began to diverge widely in the 6th and 7th centuries, we
may, for the sake of convenience, say that the Latin period ends at
about this time. Before this, certain changes (which affected all the
Romance tongues) had occurred in the popular language, differentiating
it considerably from the classic Latin of the Augustan writers.
Although the most important of these alterations have to do with
inflections rather than with pronunciation, the sound-changes in Vulgar
Latin are by no means insignificant.
15. It is essential at the outset to distinguish “popular” from
“learned” words. The former, having always been a part of the spoken
vocabulary, have been subject to the operation of all the phonetic
laws that have governed the development of the language. The latter
class, consisting of words borrowed by clerks, at various periods, from
Latin books and from the Latin of the Church, is naturally exempt from
sound-changes that occurred in the vulgar tongue before the time of
their adoption. The form of learned words depends, in the first place,
on the clerical pronunciation of Latin at the date of their borrowing;
then, if they came into general use, their form was subject to the
influence of any phonetic laws that were subsequently in force. The
fate of borrowed terms differs, therefore, according to the time of
their introduction and the degree of popularity which they afterwards
attained.