consonant), and pronounced short everywhere else. This situation is still maintained in modern Italian: cade "he falls" vs. cadde "he fell". The Proto-Romance loss of phonemic length originally produced a system with nine different quality distinctions in monophthongs, where only original had merged. Soon, however, many of these vowels coalesced: The simplest outcome was in Sardinian, where the former long and short vowels in Latin simply coalesced, e.g. > , > : This produced a simple five-vowel system . In most areas, however (technically, the Italo-Western languages), the near-close vowels lowered and merged into the high-mid vowels . As a result, Latin pira "pear" and vēra "true", came to rhyme (e.g. Italian and Spanish pera, vera, and Old French poire, voire). Similarly, Latin nucem (from nux "nut") and vōcem (from vōx "voice") become Italian noce, voce, Portuguese noz, voz, and French noix, voix. This produced a seven-vowel system , still maintained in conservative languages such as Italian and Portuguese, and lightly transformed in Spanish (where ). In the Eastern Romance languages (particularly, Romanian), the front vowels evolved as in the majority of languages, but the back vowels evolved as in Sardinian. This produced an unbalanced six-vowel system: . In modern Romanian, this system has been significantly transformed, with and with new vowels evolving, leading to a balanced seven-vowel system with central as well as front and back vowels: . Sicilian is sometimes described as having its own distinct vowel system. In fact, Sicilian passed through the same developments as the main bulk of Italo-Western languages. Subsequently, however, high-mid vowels (but not low-mid vowels) were raised in all syllables, stressed and unstressed; i.e. . The result is a five-vowel . Further variants are found in southern Italy and Corsica, which also boasts a completely distinct system (see above). The Proto-Romance allophonic vowel-length system was rephonemicized in the Gallo-Romance languages as a result of the loss of many final vowels. Some northern Italian languages (e.g. Friulian) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels. French phonemicized a third vowel length system around AD 1300 as a result of the sound change /VsC/ > /VhC/ > (where V is any vowel and C any consonant). This vowel length began to be lost in Early Modern French, but the long vowels are still usually marked with a circumflex (and continue to be