Category:Catalan masculine forms with -o

Early in the evolution of Gallo-Romance, unstressed final vowels (other than /a/, which will be ignored for what follows) were nearly always lost in polysyllabic words unless needed to support a preceding consonant cluster. In the latter case, all vowels yielded /ə/ in French and /e/ in Occitan, no matter what they had been in Latin. Notably, Franco-Provençal retained a distinction between original front and back vowels. Consider the following examples:


 * {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

!Proto-Romance !French !Occitan !Fr.-Pr.
 * /ˈmatr e /
 * /ˈkʷattr o /
 * }
 * /ˈkʷattr o /
 * }
 * /ˈkʷattr o /
 * }
 * }
 * }
 * }
 * }

Catalan generally shows the French– and Occitan-type merger (cf., ). Nevertheless, a number of seemingly inherited masculine forms show final -o, generally alongside variants showing -e instead. In some cases one variant or the other has gone extinct. Sometimes no -e variant is attested at all.

Most cases appear to involve /rr/ or a preceding labial sound, especially a stressed o. It is often thought that every instance of -o derives from an earlier -e, whether the latter is attested or not.