additional triphthongs and (equivalent to diphthongs followed by ); these soon merged into and respectively. The diphthong was rare and had merged into by Middle French ( tiule > tuile 'tile'; siure > Late suire > suivre 'follow'). Hiatus In addition to diphthongs, Old French had many instances of hiatus between adjacent vowels because of the loss of an intervening consonant. Manuscripts generally do not distinguish hiatus from true diphthongs, but modern scholarly transcription indicates it with a diaeresis, as in Modern French: audīre > 'hear' ( ouïr) *vidūta > 'seen' ( vue) rēgīnam > , 'queen' ( reine) pāgēnsem > 'country' ( pays) augustum > 'August' ( août) patellam > 'pan' ( poêle) quaternum > 'booklet, quire' ( cahier) aetāticum > , 'age' ( âge) Sample text Presented below is the first laisse of The Song of Roland along with a broad transcription reflecting reconstructed pronunciation circa 1050 C.E. Grammar Nouns Old French maintained a two-case system, with a nominative case and an oblique case, for longer than some other Romance languages as Spanish and Italian did. Case distinctions, at least in the masculine gender, were marked on both the definite article and the noun itself. Thus, the masculine noun li veisins 'the neighbour' was declined as follows: In later Old French, the distinctions had become moribund. As in most other Romance languages, it was the oblique case form that usually survived to become the Modern French form: l'enfant "the child" represents the old oblique (Latin accusative īnfantem); the nominative was li enfes ( īnfāns). There are some cases with significant differences between nominative and oblique forms (derived from Latin nouns with a stress shift between the nominative and other cases) in which either it is the nominative form that survives or both forms survive with different meanings: Both li sire, le sieur ( seiior, seiiōrem) and le seignor (nom. †sendre; senior, seniōrem) survive in the vocabulary of later French (sire, sieur, seigneur) as different ways to refer to a feudal lord. sœur "sister" is the nominative form ( suer < Latin nominative soror); the oblique form seror (< Latin accusative sorōrem) no longer survives. prêtre "priest" is the nominative form ( prestre < presbyter); the oblique form prevoire, later provoire (< presbyterem) survives only in the Paris street name Rue des Prouvaires. indefinite pronoun on "one" continues Old French nominative hom "man" (< homō); homme "man" continues the