cultural identity as the source of its inferiority and disloyalty to Rome. The affinity between the two regions persisted after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire under shared governance by the Vandal Kingdom and then the Byzantine Exarchate of Africa. Pinelli believes that the Vandal presence had "estranged Sardinia from Europe, linking its own destiny to Africa's territorial expanse" in a bond that was to strengthen further "under Byzantine rule, not only because the Roman Empire included the island in the African Exarchate, but also because it developed from there, albeit indirectly, its ethnic community, causing it to acquire many of the African characteristics". The spoken variety of African Romance was perceived to be similar to Sardinian as reported in the above-cited passage by – supporting hypotheses that there were parallelisms between developments of Latin in Africa and Sardinia. Although this testimony comes from a secondhand source, the Catalan merchant Riaria, these observations are reliable since Sardinia was under Catalan rule by the Crown of Aragon, so the merchant could have had the opportunity to trade in both regions. Augustine of Hippo writes that "African ears have no quick perception of the shortness or length of [Latin] vowels". This also describes the evolution of vowels in the Sardinian language. Sardinian has only five vowels, and no diphthongs; unlike the other surviving Romance languages, the five long vowel pairs of Classical Latin, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū (phonetically [aː, eː, iː, oː, uː]), merged with their corresponding short vowel counterparts ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ [a, ɛ, ɪ, ɔ, ʊ] into five single vowels with no length distinction: /a, ɛ, i, ɔ, u/. In the Italo-Western Romance varieties, short ǐ, ŭ [ɪ, ʊ] merged with long ē, ō [e(ː), o(ː)] instead of with long ī, ū [i(ː), u(ː)] as in Sardinian, which typically resulted in a seven vowel system, for example /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/ in Italian. Adams theorises that similarities in some vocabulary, such as pala ("shoulderblade") and acina ("grape") across Sardinian and African Romance, or spanu in Sardinian and spanus ("light red") in African Romance, may be evidence that some vocabulary was shared between Sardinia and Africa. A further theory suggests that the Sardinian word for "Friday", cenàpura or chenàpura (literally "pure dinner", in reference to parasceve, or Friday preparation for the Sabbath), may have been brought to Sardinia by North African Jews. The term