either lost or protected by an epenthetic vowel, except for some articles and a few monosyllabic prepositions con, per, in. Modern Standard Italian still has very few consonant-final words, although Romanian has resurfaced them through later loss of final and . For example, amās "you love" > ame > Italian ami; amant "they love" > *aman > Ital. amano. On the evidence of "sloppily written" Lombardic language documents, however, the loss of final in northern Italy did not occur until the 7th or 8th century, after the Vulgar Latin period, and the presence of many former final consonants is betrayed by the syntactic gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico) that they trigger. It is also thought that after a long vowel became rather than simply disappearing: nōs > noi "we", se(d)ēs > sei "you are", crās > crai "tomorrow" (southern Italy). In unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified: canēs > > cani "dogs"; amīcās > > amiche "(female) friends", where nominative amīcae should produce **amice rather than amiche (note masculine amīcī > amici not **amichi). Central Western Romance languages eventually regained a large number of final consonants through the general loss of final and , e.g. Catalan llet "milk" < lactem, foc "fire" < focum, peix "fish" < piscem. In French, most of these secondary final consonants (as well as primary ones) were lost before around 1700, but tertiary final consonants later arose through the loss of < -a. Hence masculine frīgidum "cold" > Old French freit > froid , feminine frigidam > Old French freide > froide . Palatalization Palatalization was one of the most important processes affecting consonants in Vulgar Latin. This eventually resulted in a whole series of "" and consonants in most Romance languages, e.g. Italian . The following historical stages occurred: Note how the environments become progressively less "palatal", and the languages affected become progressively fewer. The outcomes of palatalization depended on the historical stage, the consonants involved, and the languages involved. The primary division is between the Western Romance languages, with resulting from palatalization of , and the remaining languages (Italo-Dalmatian and Eastern Romance), with resulting. It is often suggested that was the original result in all languages, with > a later innovation in the Western Romance languages. Evidence of this is the fact that Italian has both and as outcomes of palatalization in different environments, while Western Romance has only . Even more suggestive is