In Latin there are three genders, and the grammatical gender of a noun is not necessarily identical with its natural gender.  For inanimate objects it is often determined simply by the form of the noun.  Sella, seat, of the first declension, is feminine, because almost all nouns ending in -a are feminine; hortus, garden, is masculine, because nouns in -us of its declension are mostly masculine, and so on.  From such a system as this two results are reasonably sure to follow.  Where the gender of a noun in literary Latin did not conform to these rules, in popular Latin it would be brought into harmony with others of its class.  Thus stigma, one of the few neuter nouns in -a, and consequently assigned to the third declension, was brought in popular speech into line with sella and the long list of similar words in -a, was made feminine, and put in the first declension.  In the case of another class of words, analogy was supplemented by a mechanical influence.  We have noticed already that the tendency of the stressed syllable in a word to absorb effort and attention led to the obscuration of certain final consonants, because the final syllable was never protected by the accent.  Thus hortus in some parts of the Empire became hortu in ordinary pronunciation, and the neuter caelum, heaven, became caelu.  The consequent identity in the ending led to a confusion in the gender, and to the ultimate treatment of the word for “heaven” as a masculine.  These influences and others caused many changes in the gender of nouns in popular speech, and in course of time brought about the elimination of the neuter gender from the neo-Latin languages.

Something has been said already of the vocabulary of the common people.  It was naturally much smaller than that of cultivated people.  Its poverty made their style monotonous when they had occasion to express themselves in writing, as one can see in reading St. AEtheria’s account of her journey to the Holy Land, and of course this impression of monotony is heightened by such a writer’s inability to vary the form of expression.  Even within its small range it differs from the vocabulary of formal Latin in three or four important respects.  It has no occasion, or little occasion, to use certain words which a formal writer employs, or it uses substitutes for them.  So testa was used in part for caput, and bucca for os.  On the other hand, it employs certain words and phrases, for instance vulgar words and expletives, which are not admitted into literature.

In its choice of words it shows a marked preference for certain suffixes and prefixes.  It would furnish an interesting excursion into folk psychology to speculate on the reasons for this preference in one case and another.  Sometimes it is possible to make out the influence at work.  In reading a piece of popular Latin one is very likely to be impressed with the large number of diminutives which are used, sometimes in the strict sense of the primitive word.  The