This handbook offers a synopsis of the regular changes that Latin words underwent in the course of their evolution into modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with their English cognates). Although it is intended for the nonspecialist, students of Romance philology will find it useful as a ready reference and as a source of abundant examples of Latin sound changes. The synopsis is presented in the form of separate alphabetical charts for each major sound change. The rules, stated as simply as possible, do not generally explain the evolution of the changes, but only the end results. For those desiring further information, there are notes after most rules outlining exceptions to or modifications of that rule and often sketching successive stages in the development of the sound. Several minor or sporadic sound changes are also treated in note form. Each chart is supplemented by a list of additional words illustrating the same sound change. From Latin to Roman in Sound Charts has been used successfully as a graduate level text for such courses as History of Spanish, History of French, and Romance Linguistics.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change. The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.

This book presents for the first time an in-depth historical account of vowel prosthesis in the Romance languages. Vowel prosthesis is a change which involves the appearance of a non-etymological vowel at the beginning of a word: a familiar example is the initial e which appears in the development of Latin sperare to Spanish esperar and French espérer to hope. Despite its widespread incidence in the Romance languages, it has remained poorly studied. In his wide-ranging comparative coverage, Professor Sampson identifies three main categories of vowel prosthesis that have occurred and explores in detail their historical trajectory and the relationship between them. The presentation draws freely throughout on the rich philological materials available from Romance and brings to light various unexpected changes in the productive use of prosthesis through time. For example in French and Italian (which is Tuscan-based), one category of prosthesis became well established in the early Middle Ages only to lose productivity and subsequently become moribund. With its extensive use of empirical data and findings from theoretical linguistics, the book offers a thorough and revealing account of a fascinating chapter in the phonological history of Romance.