NOUNS

The distinguishing quality of Latin, received as its principal legacy from Indo-European, was that it was a highly inflected, synthetic language. Through their form, Latin words declared what role they were playing in a sentence, and the number of forms for any given word was large. The revolution in the history of Latin as it became the Romance languages was precisely the loss of inflections, and a concomitant re-orientation in the nature of the language, from synthetic towards analytic. This segment of our story therefore has two parts: the number of forms that needed to be mastered and deployed was drastically reduced, and, accordingly, the tasks those forms had previously executed needed to be carried out by other means. Those are the themes of this chapter and the next. Of the noun, which is taken up first, the revolution abolished all forms but two. The verb managed to hold on to more of its inflected forms.

Wherever we look among the features of nouns, we find simplification. The number of noun classes was reduced, in the end, from five to three (or fewer), the number of genders from three to two, the number of cases from five to one. Whereas an ancient Roman needed to command about eighty noun forms altogether, the speaker of any of the modern languages makes do with no more than six. This part of our story can be set forth in almost full detail, and yet it is easy to follow.