This article lists some vocabulary of Vulgar Latin.
Historical overview
Like all languages, Latin possessed numerous synonyms that were associated with different speech registers. Some of these words were in the everyday language from the time of Old Latin, while others were borrowed late into Latin from other languages: Germanic, Gaulish, the Paleo-Balkan languages preceding Eastern Romance etc. Certain words customarily used in Classical Latin were not used in Vulgar Latin, such as equus, "horse". Instead, Vulgar Latin typically featured caballus "nag" (but note Romanian iapă, Sardinian èbba, Spanish yegua, Catalan euga and Portuguese égua all meaning "mare" and deriving from Classical equa).
The differences applied even to the basic grammatical particles; many classical have no reflex in Romance, such as an, at, autem, dōnec, enim, ergō, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quīn, quod, quoque, sed, utrum and vel. Verbs with prefixed prepositions frequently displaced simple forms. The number of words formed by such productive suffixes as -bilis, -ārius, -itāre and -icāre grew apace.
Some Romance languages preserve Latin words that were lost in most others. For example, Italian ogni ("each/every") and Sardinian ondzi continue Latin omnes. Elsewhere the gap is filled by reflexes of Greek κατά or evolved forms of tōtus (originally "entire") for a similar meaning; Occitan/Portuguese/Spanish cada 'each, every', tudo/todo in Portuguese, todo in Spanish, tot in Catalan, tout in French and tot in Romanian. The plural tutti in Italian means "all, every" and can overlap in meaning with ogni (ogni giorno and tutti i giorni both mean "every day"), and the singular tutto still means "entire" as well as "all".
Sometimes a Classical Latin word appears in a Romance language alongside the equivalent Vulgar Latin word: classical caput, "head", and vulgar testa (originally "pot") in Italian, French and Catalan. In Romanian cap means 'head' in the anatomical sense, but țeastă means skull or carapace, while țest means "pot" or "lid". Some southern Italian dialects preserve capo as the normal word for "head". Spanish and Portuguese have cabeza/cabeça, derived from *capetia, a modified form of caput, but in Portuguese testa is the word for "forehead".
Frequently, words borrowed directly from literary Latin at some later date, rather than evolved within Vulgar Latin, are found side by side with the evolved form. The (lack of) expected phonological developments is a clue that one word has been borrowed. For example, Vulgar Latin fungus, "fungus, mushroom", which became Italian fungo, Catalan fong, and Portuguese fungo, became hongo in Spanish, showing the f > h shift that was common in early Spanish (cf. fīlius > Spanish hijo, "son", facere > Spanish hacer, "to do"). But Spanish also had fungo, which by its lack of the expected sound shifts of /f/ and /u/ shows that it was borrowed directly from Latin.
Vulgar Latin contained a large number of words of foreign origin not present in literary texts. Many works on medicine were written and distributed in Greek, and words were often borrowed from these sources. For example, gamba ( 'knee joint' ), originally a veterinary term only, replaced the classical Latin word for leg (crus) in most Romance languages. (cf. Fr. jambe, It. gamba). Cooking terms were also often borrowed from Greek sources, a calque based on a Greek term was ficatum (iecur) (goose's liver fattened with figs, see foie gras for more information), with the participle ficatum becoming the common word for liver in Vulgar Latin (cf. Sp. hígado, Fr. foie, It. fegato, Pt fígado, Romanian ficat). Important religious terms were also drawn from religious texts written in Greek, such as episcopus (bishop), presbyter (priest), martyr etc. Words borrowed from Gaulish include caballus (horse) and carrus (chariot).