oblique form ( home < hominem). In a few cases in which the only distinction between forms was the nominative -s ending, the -s was preserved. An example is fils "son" (< Latin nominative fīlius). The fact that the -s in the word is still pronounced today is irregular, but has to do with the later developments, namely the Middle French and Early Modern French system of pausal pronunciations. As in Spanish and Italian, the neuter gender was eliminated, and most old neuter nouns became masculine. Some Latin neuter plurals (which ended in -a) were reanalysed as feminine singulars: gaudium was more widely used in the plural form gaudia, which was taken for a singular in Vulgar Latin and ultimately led to la joie, "joy" (feminine singular). Nouns were declined in the following declensions: Class I is derived from the Latin first declension. Class Ia mostly comes from Latin feminine nouns in the third declension. Class II is derived from the Latin second declension. Class IIa generally stems from second-declension nouns ending in -er and from third-declension masculine nouns; in both cases, the Latin nominative singular did not end in -s, which is preserved in Old French. The classes show various analogical developments: Class I nominative plural -es from the accusative instead of -∅ (-e after a consonant cluster) in Class I nominative plural ( -ae, although there is evidence to suggest this analogy had already occurred in VL), li pere instead of *li peres ( illi patres) in Class IIa nominative plural, modelled on Class II, etc. Class III nouns show a separate stem in the nominative singular that does not occur in any of the other forms: IIIa nouns are agent nouns which ended in -ātor, -ātōrem in Latin and preserve the stress shift. IIIb nouns also had a stress shift, from -ō to -ōnem (although several IIIb nouns actually continue Frankish weak nouns with a similar inflection: Frankish *barō ~ *baran becomes ber ~ baron). IIIc nouns are an Old French creation and have no clear Latin antecedent. IIId nouns represent various other third-declension Latin nouns with stress shift or a change of consonant (soror, sorōrem; īnfāns, īnfāntem; presbyter, presbyterem; seiior, seiiōrem; comes, comitem). Regular feminine forms of masculine nouns are formed by adding an -e to the masculine stem (unless the masculine stem already ends in -e). For example, bergier (shepherd) becomes bergiere ( berger and