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. Ætheria's account of her journey
to the Holy Land, and of course this impression of monotony is heightened