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Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Vulgar Latin as a term is both controversial and imprecise. Spoken Latin existed for a long time and in many places. Scholars have differed in opinion as to the extent of the differences, and whether Vulgar Latin was in some sense a different language. This was developed as a theory in the nineteenth century by Raynouard. At its extreme, the theory suggested that the written register formed an elite language distinct from common speech, but this is now rejected.

The current consensus is that the written and spoken languages formed a continuity much as they do in modern languages, with speech tending to evolve faster than the written language, and the written, formalised language exerting pressure back on speech. Vulgar Latin is itself often viewed as vague and unhelpful, and it is used in very different ways by different scholars, applying it to mean spoken Latin of differing types, or from different social classes and time periods. Nevertheless, interest in the shifts in the spoken forms remains very important to understand the transition from Latin or Late Latin through to Proto-Romance and Romance languages. To make matters more complicated, evidence for spoken forms can be found only through examination of written Classical Latin, Late Latin, or early Romance, depending on the time period.

History of the Vulgar Latin controversy
During the Classical period, Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as sermo plebeius or sermo vulgaris, meaning "common speech". This could simply refer to unadorned speech without the use of rhetoric, or even plain speaking. The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the Renaissance, when Italian thinkers began to theorize that their own language originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from the literary Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect.

The early 19th-century French linguist François-Just-Marie Raynouard is often regarded as the father of modern Romance philology. Observing that the Romance languages have many features in common that are not found in Latin, at least not in "proper" or Classical Latin, he concluded that the former must have all had some common ancestor (which he believed most closely resembled Old Occitan) that replaced Latin some time before the year 1000. This he dubbed la langue romane or "the Romance language".

The first truly modern treatise on Romance linguistics and the first to apply the comparative method was Friedrich Christian Diez's seminal Grammar of the Romance Languages. Researchers such as Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke characterised Vulgar Latin as to a great extent a separate language, that was more or less distinct from the written form. To Meyer-Lübke, the spoken Vulgar form was the genuine and continuous form, while Classical Latin was a kind of artificial idealised language imposed upon it; thus Romance languages were derived from the "real" Vulgar form, which had to be reconstructed from remaining evidence. Others that followed this approach divided Vulgar from Classical Latin by education or class. Other views of 'Vulgar Latin' include defining it as uneducated speech, slang, or in effect, Proto-Romance.

The result is that the term 'Vulgar Latin' is regarded by some modern philologists as an essentially meaningless, but unfortunately very persistent term:

"the continued use of 'Vulgar Latin' is not only no aid to thought, but is, on the contrary, a positive barrier to a clear understanding of Latin and Romance. … "I wish it were possible to hope the term might fall out of use. Many scholars have stated that 'Vulgar Latin' is a useless and dangerously misleading term ... To abandon it once and for all can only benefit scholarship."

Lloyd called to replace the use of 'Vulgar Latin' with a series of more precise definitions, such as the spoken Latin of a particular time and place.

Research in the twentieth century has in any case shifted the view to consider the differences between written and spoken Latin in more moderate terms. Just as in modern languages, speech patterns are different from written forms, and vary with education, the same can be said of Latin. For instance, philologist József Herman agrees that the term is problematic, and therefore limits it in his work to mean the innovations and changes that turn up in spoken or written Latin that were relatively uninfluenced by educated forms of Latin. Herman states: "'it is completely clear from the texts during the time that Latin was a living language, there was never an unbridgeable gap between the written and spoken, nor between the language of the social elites and that of the middle, lower, or disadvantaged groups of the same society.'" Herman also makes it clear that Vulgar Latin, in this view, is a varied and unstable phenomenon, crossing many centuries of usage where any generalisations are bound to cover up variations and differences.

Imperial and post-imperial Latin
As noted above, much of the interest in colloquial or 'Vulgar' Latin focuses on the later periods when Latin was spoken, as the antecedent of Romance languages. Latin fragmented; the question is therefore why this happened. Current hypotheses contrast the centralising and homogenizing social, economic, cultural and political forces under the Empire with the divergences that took place afterwards, when these were much reduced.

By the end of the first century AD the Romans had conquered the entire Mediterranean Basin and established hundreds of colonies in the conquered provinces. Over time this—along with other factors that encouraged linguistic and cultural assimilation, such as political unity, frequent travel and commerce, military service, etc.—made Latin the predominant language throughout the western Mediterranean. Latin itself was subject to the same assimilatory tendencies, such that its varieties had probably become more uniform by the time the Western Empire fell in 476 than they had been before it. That is not to say that the language had been static for all those years, but rather that ongoing changes tended to spread to all regions.

All of these homogenizing factors were disrupted or voided by a long string of calamities. Although Justinian succeeded in reconquering Italy, Africa, and the southern part of Iberia in the period 533–554, the Empire was hit by one of the deadliest plagues in recorded history in 541, one that would recur six more times before 610. Under his successors most of the Italian peninsula was lost to the Lombards by c. 572, most of southern Iberia to the Visigoths by c. 615, and most of the Balkans to the Slavs and Avars by c. 620. All this was possible due to Roman preoccupation with wars against Persia, the last of which lasted nearly three decades and exhausted both empires. Taking advantage of this, the Arabs invaded and occupied Syria and Egypt by 642, greatly weakening the Empire and ending its centuries of domination over the Mediterranean. They went on to take the rest of North Africa by c. 699 and soon invaded the Visigothic Kingdom as well, seizing most of Iberia from it by c. 716.

It is from approximately the seventh century onward that regional differences proliferate in the language of Latin documents, indicating the fragmentation of Latin into the incipient Romance languages. Until then Latin appears to have been remarkably homogeneous, as far as can be judged from its written records, although careful statistical analysis reveals regional differences in the treatment of the Latin vowel /ĭ/ and in the progression of betacism by about the fifth century.

Lexical turnover
Over the centuries, spoken Latin lost various lexical items and replaced them with native coinages; with borrowings from neighbouring languages such as Gaulish, Germanic, or Greek; or with other native words that had undergone semantic shift. The literary language generally retained the older words, however.

A textbook example is the general replacement of the suppletive Classical verb ferre, meaning 'carry', with the regular portare. Similarly, the Classical loqui, meaning 'speak', was replaced by a variety of alternatives such as the native fabulari and narrare or the Greek borrowing parabolare.

Classical Latin particles fared especially poorly, with all of the following vanishing from popular speech: an, at, autem, donec, enim, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quoad, quoque, sed, sive, utrum, and vel.

Semantic drift
Many surviving words experienced a shift in meaning. Some notable cases are civitas ('citizenry' → 'city', replacing urbs); focus ('hearth' → 'fire', replacing ignis); manducare ('chew' → 'eat', replacing edere); causa ('subject matter' → 'thing', competing with res); mittere ('send' → 'put', competing with ponere); necare ('murder' → 'drown', competing with submergere); pacare ('placate' → 'pay', competing with solvere), and totus ('whole' → 'all, every', competing with omnis).

Loss of nasals

 * Word-final /m/ was lost in polysyllabic words. In monosyllables it tended to survive as /n/.
 * /n/ was usually lost before fricatives, resulting in compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (e.g. sponsa 'fiancée' > spōsa).

Palatalization
Front vowels in hiatus (after a consonant and before another vowel) became [j], which palatalized preceding consonants.

Fricativization
/w/ (except after /k/) and intervocalic /b/ merge as the bilabial fricative /β/.

Simplification of consonant clusters

 * The cluster /nkt/ reduced to [ŋt].
 * /kw/ delabialized to /k/ before back vowels.
 * /ks/ before or after a consonant, or at the end of a word, reduced to /s/.

Monophthongization

 * /ae̯/ and /oe̯/ monophthongized to [ɛː] and [eː] respectively by around the second century AD.

Loss of vowel quantity
The system of phonemic vowel length collapsed by the fifth century AD, leaving quality differences as the distinguishing factor between vowels; the paradigm thus changed from /ī ĭ ē ĕ ā ă ŏ ō ŭ ū/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/. Concurrently, stressed vowels in open syllables lengthened.

Loss of near-close front vowel
Towards the end of the Roman Empire /ɪ/ merged with /e/ in most regions, although not in Africa or a few peripheral areas in Italy.

Romance articles
It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed.

Definite articles evolved from demonstrative pronouns or adjectives (an analogous development is found in many Indo-European languages, including Greek, Celtic and Germanic); compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective, , "that", in the Romance languages, becoming French  and  (Old French li, lo, la), Catalan and Spanish ,  and , Occitan  and , Portuguese  and  (elision of -l- is a common feature of Portuguese) and Italian ,  and. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from, "this" (su, sa); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after the noun, e.g. lupul ("the wolf" – from *lupum illum) and omul ("the man" – *homo illum), possibly a result of being within the Balkan sprachbund.

This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille daemon sodalis peccati ("The devil is a companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Koine Greek, which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.

Another indication of the weakening of the demonstratives can be inferred from the fact that at this time, legal and similar texts begin to swarm with, , and so forth (all meaning, essentially, "aforesaid"), which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes, Erat autem... beatissimus Anianus in supradicta civitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were no longer felt to be strong or specific enough.

In the less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with (originally an interjection: "behold!"), which also spawned Italian  through, a contracted form of ecce eum. This is the origin of Old French (*ecce ille),  (*ecce iste) and  (*ecce hic); Italian  (*eccum istum),  (*eccum illum) and (now mainly Tuscan)  (*eccum tibi istum), as well as  (*eccu hic),  (*eccum hac); Spanish and Occitan  and Portuguese  (*eccum ille); Spanish  and Portuguese  (*eccum hac); Spanish  and Portuguese  (*eccum hic); Portuguese  (*eccum illac) and  (*eccum inde); Romanian  (*ecce iste) and  (*ecce ille), and many other forms.

On the other hand, even in the Oaths of Strasbourg, no demonstrative appears even in places where one would clearly be called for in all the later languages (pro christian poblo – "for the Christian people"). Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles are suffixed to the noun (or an adjective preceding it), as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages.

The numeral, (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases (again, this is a common semantic development across Europe). This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.

Loss of neuter gender
The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages.

The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion had already started in Pompeian graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum ("dead body"), and hoc locum for hunc locum ("this place"). The morphological confusion shows primarily in the adoption of the nominative ending -us (-Ø after -r) in the o-declension.

In Petronius's work, one can find balneus for ("bath"), fatus for  ("fate"), caelus for  ("heaven"), amphitheater for  ("amphitheatre"), vinus for  ("wine"), and conversely, thesaurum for  ("treasure"). Most of these forms occur in the speech of one man: Trimalchion, an uneducated Greek (i.e. foreign) freedman.

In modern Romance languages, the nominative s-ending has been largely abandoned, and all substantives of the o-declension have an ending derived from -um: -u, -o, or -Ø. E.g., masculine ("wall"), and neuter  ("sky") have evolved to: Italian, ; Portuguese , ; Spanish , , Catalan , ; Romanian , cieru>; French ,. However, Old French still had -s in the nominative and -Ø in the accusative in both words: murs, ciels [nominative] – mur, ciel [oblique].

For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was productive; for others, the nominative/accusative form, (the two were identical in Classical Latin). Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French (le), Catalan (la) , Occitan (lo) , Spanish (la) , Portuguese (o) , Italian language (il) , Leonese (el) lleche and Romanian (le) ("milk"), all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin nominative/accusative neuter or accusative masculine. In Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, /). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French, Leonese, Portuguese and Italian , Romanian ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative nomen, rather than the oblique stem form *nomin- (which nevertheless produced Spanish ).

Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in -A or -IA ; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as ("joy"), plural gaudia; the plural form lies at the root of the French feminine singular (la), as well as of Catalan and Occitan (la)  (Italian la  is a borrowing from French); the same for  ("wood stick"), plural ligna, that originated the Catalan feminine singular noun (la) , Portuguese (a) , Spanish (la)  and Italian (la). Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient neuter plural which is treated grammatically as feminine: e.g., : BRACCHIA "arm(s)" → Italian (il)  : (le) braccia, Romanian  : brațe(le). Cf. also Merovingian Latin ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant.

Alternations in Italian heteroclitic nouns such as l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") / le uova fresche ("the fresh eggs") are usually analysed as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in -a. However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that is simply a regular neuter noun (, plural ova) and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is -o in the singular and -e in the plural. The same alternation in gender exists in certain Romanian nouns, but is considered regular as it is more common than in Italian. Thus, a relict neuter gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian.

In Portuguese, traces of the neuter plural can be found in collective formations and words meant to inform a bigger size or sturdiness. Thus, one can use (s) ("egg(s)") and (s) ("roe", "collection(s) of eggs"), (s) ("section(s) of an edge") and (s) ("edge(s)"), (s) ("bag(s)") and (s) ("sack(s)"), (s) ("cloak(s)") and (s) ("blanket(s)"). Other times, it resulted in words whose gender may be changed more or less arbitrarily, like /  ("fruit"),  /  ("broth"), etc.

These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, the names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin ("pear tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian (il)  and Romanian ; in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations (le), (el) ; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the feminine derivations (a) , (la).

As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension noun manus ("hand"), another feminine noun with the ending -us, Italian and Spanish derived (la), Romanian mânu>, pl. / (reg.) mâni, Catalan (la), and Portuguese (a) , which preserve the feminine gender along with the masculine appearance.

Except for the Italian and Romanian heteroclitic nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but still have neuter pronouns. French /  /  ("this"), Spanish  /  /  ("this"), Italian:  /  /  ("to him" /"to her" / "to it"), Catalan:, , ,  ("it" / this / this-that / that over there); Portuguese:  /  /  ("all of him" / "all of her" / "all of it").

In Spanish, a three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles, , and. The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno, literally "that which is good", from : good.

Loss of oblique cases
The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions. Some of the causes include: the loss of final m, the merger of ă with ā, and the merger of ŭ with ō (see tables). Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced.

There also seems to be a marked tendency to confuse different forms even when they had not become homophonous (like the generally more distinct plurals), which indicates that nominal declension was shaped not only by phonetic mergers, but also by structural factors. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin shifted from a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic one.

The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by "de" + noun (which originally meant "about/concerning", weakened to "of") as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining genitive forms are some pronouns, certain fossilized expressions and some proper names. For example, French ("Thursday") < Old French juesdi < Vulgar Latin ""; Spanish es  ("it is necessary") < "est "; and Italian  ("earthquake") < "" as well as names like Paoli, Pieri.

The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction "ad" + accusative. For example, "ad carnuficem dabo".

The accusative case developed as a prepositional case, displacing many instances of the ablative. Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case.

Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely confused in inscriptions. Even though Gaulish texts from the 7th century rarely confuse both forms, it is believed that both cases began to merge in Africa by the end of the empire, and a bit later in parts of Italy and Iberia. Nowadays, Romanian maintains a two-case system, while Old French and Old Occitan had a two-case subject-oblique system.

This Old French system was based largely on whether or not the Latin case ending contained an "s" or not, with the "s" being retained but all vowels in the ending being lost (as with veisin below). But since this meant that it was easy to confuse the singular nominative with the plural oblique, and the plural nominative with the singular oblique, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and Middle French adopted one case (usually the oblique) for all purposes.

Today, Romanian is generally considered the only Romance language with a surviving case system. However, some dialects of Romansh retain a special predicative form of the masculine singular identical to the plural: il bien vin ("the good wine") vs. il vin ei buns ("the wine is good"). This "predicative case" (as it is sometimes called) is a remnant of the Latin nominative in -us.

Wider use of prepositions
The loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntactic purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish, "where", from Latin +  (which in Romanian literally means "from where"/"where from"), or French , "since", from  + , while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese  is de + ex + de. Spanish and Portuguese, "after", represent de + ex +.

Some of these new compounds appear in literary texts during the late empire; French, Spanish de and Portuguese de  ("outside") all represent de +  (Romanian  – ad + foris), and we find Jerome writing stulti, nonne qui fecit, quod de foris est, etiam id, quod de intus est fecit? (Luke 11.40: "ye fools, did not he, that made which is without, make that which is within also?"). In some cases, compounds were created by combining a large number of particles, such as the Romanian ("just recently") from ad + de + in + illa + hora.

Classical Latin:
 * Marcus patrī librum dat. "Marcus is giving [his] father [a/the] book."

Vulgar Latin:
 * *Marcos da libru a patre. "Marcus is giving [a/the] book to [his] father."

Just as in the disappearing dative case, colloquial Latin sometimes replaced the disappearing genitive case with the preposition de followed by the ablative, then eventually the accusative (oblique).

Classical Latin:
 * Marcus mihi librum patris dat. "Marcus is giving me [his] father's book.

Vulgar Latin:
 * *Marcos mi da libru de patre. "Marcus is giving me [the] book of [his] father."

Pronouns
Unlike in the nominal and adjectival inflections, pronouns kept a great part of the case distinctions. However, many changes happened. For example, the of ego was lost by the end of the empire, and eo appears in manuscripts from the 6th century.

Adverbs
Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbs from adjectives:, "dear", formed , "dearly"; , "fiercely", from ; , "often", from. All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin.

An alternative formation with a feminine ablative form modifying (originally the ablative of mēns, and so meaning "with a ... mind") gave rise to a widespread rule for forming adverbs in many Romance languages: adding the suffix -ment(e) to the feminine form of the adjective. So ("quick") instead of  ("quickly") gave veloci mente (originally "with a quick mind", "quick-mindedly"), and -mente became a productive suffix for forming adverbs in Romance such as Italian, Spanish  'clearly'. The development of an originally autonomous form (the noun mente, meaning 'mind') into a suffix (although remaining in free lexical use in other contexts e.g. Italian venire in mente 'come to mind') is a textbook case of grammaticalization.

Verbs

In general, the verbal system in the Romance languages changed less from Classical Latin than did the nominal system.

The four conjugational classes generally survived. The second and third conjugations already had identical imperfect tense forms in Latin, and also shared a common present participle. Because of the merging of short i with long ē in most of Vulgar Latin, these two conjugations grew even closer together. Several of the most frequently-used forms became indistinguishable, while others became distinguished only by stress placement:

These two conjugations came to be conflated in many of the Romance languages, often by merging them into a single class while taking endings from each of the original two conjugations. Which endings survived was different for each language, although most tended to favour second conjugation endings over the third conjugation. Spanish, for example, mostly eliminated the third conjugation forms in favour of the second conjugation forms.

French and Catalan did the same, but tended to generalise the third conjugation infinitive instead. Catalan in particular almost eliminated the second conjugation ending over time, reducing it to a small relic class. In Italian, the two infinitive endings remained separate (but spelled identically), while the conjugations merged in most other respects much as in the other languages. However, the third-conjugation third-person plural present ending survived in favour of the second conjugation version, and was even extended to the fourth conjugation. Romanian also maintained the distinction between the second and third conjugation endings.

In the perfect, many languages generalized the -aui ending most frequently found in the first conjugation. This led to an unusual development; phonetically, the ending was treated as the diphthong rather than containing a semivowel, and in other cases the  sound was simply dropped. We know this because it did not participate in the sound shift from to. Thus Latin amaui, amauit ("I loved; he/she loved") in many areas became proto-Romance *amai and *amaut, yielding for example Portuguese amei, amou. This suggests that in the spoken language, these changes in conjugation preceded the loss of.

Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb, *amare habeo, literally "to love I have" (cf. English "I have to love", which has shades of a future meaning). This was contracted into a new future suffix in Western Romance forms, which can be seen in the following modern examples of "I will love":
 * j'aimerai (je + aimer + ai) ← aimer ["to love"] + ai ["I have"].
 * Portuguese and amarei (amar + [h]ei) ← amar ["to love"] + hei ["I have"]
 * Spanish and amaré (amar + [h]e) ← amar ["to love"] + he ["I have"].
 * amerò (amar + [h]o) ← amare ["to love"] + ho ["I have"].

The first historical attestation of this new future can be found in a 7th-century Latin lext, the Chronicle of Fredegar

A periphrastic construction of the form 'to have to' (late Latin habere ad) used as future is characteristic of Sardinian:
 * Ap'a istàre < apo a istàre 'I will stay'
 * Ap'a nàrrere < apo a nàrrer 'I will say'

An innovative conditional (distinct from the subjunctive) also developed in the same way (infinitive + conjugated form of habere). The fact that the future and conditional endings were originally independent words is still evident in literary Portuguese, which in these tenses allows clitic object pronouns to be incorporated between the root of the verb and its ending: "I will love" (eu) amarei, but "I will love you" amar-te-ei, from amar + te ["you"] + (eu) hei = amar + te + [h]ei = amar-te-ei.

In Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese, personal pronouns can still be omitted from verb phrases as in Latin, as the endings are still distinct enough to convey that information: venio > Sp vengo ("I come"). In French, however, all the endings are typically homophonous except the first and second person (and occasionally also third person) plural, so the pronouns are always used (je viens) except in the imperative.

Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, which has now survived 6000 years of known evolution, the synthetic passive voice was utterly lost in Romance, being replaced with periphrastic verb forms—composed of the verb "to be" plus a passive participle—or impersonal reflexive forms—composed of a verb and a passivizing pronoun.

Apart from the grammatical and phonetic developments there were many cases of verbs merging as complex subtleties in Latin were reduced to simplified verbs in Romance. A classic example of this are the verbs expressing the concept "to go". Consider three particular verbs in Classical Latin expressing concepts of "going":, , and *ambitare. In Spanish and Portuguese ire and vadere merged into the verb ir, which derives some conjugated forms from ire and some from vadere. andar was maintained as a separate verb derived from ambitare.

Italian instead merged vadere and ambitare into the verb. At the extreme French merged three Latin verbs with, for example, the present tense deriving from vadere and another verb ambulare (or something like it) and the future tense deriving from ire. Similarly the Romance distinction between the Romance verbs for "to be", and, was lost in French as these merged into the verb. In Italian, the verb inherited both Romance meanings of "being essentially" and "being temporarily of the quality of", while  specialized into a verb denoting location or dwelling, or state of health.

Copula
The copula (that is, the verb signifying "to be") of Classical Latin was. This evolved to *essere in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix -re to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian and French  through Proto-Gallo-Romance *essre and Old French  as well as Spanish and Portuguese  (Romanian a  derives from fieri, which means "to become").

In Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb, which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand", to denote a more temporary meaning. That is, *essere signified the essence, while stare signified the state. Stare evolved to Spanish and Portuguese and Old French  (both through *estare), Romanian "a sta" ("to stand"), using the original form for the noun ("stare"="state"/"starea"="the state"), while Italian retained the original form.

The semantic shift that underlies this evolution is more or less as follows: A speaker of Classical Latin might have said: vir est in foro, meaning "the man is in/at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin could have been *(h)omo stat in foro, "the man stands in/at the marketplace", replacing the est (from esse) with stat (from stare), because "standing" was what was perceived as what the man was actually doing.

The use of stare in this case was still semantically transparent assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from esse to stare became more widespread. In the Iberian peninsula esse ended up only denoting natural qualities that would not change, while stare was applied to transient qualities and location. In Italian, stare is used mainly for location, transitory state of health (sta male 's/he is ill' but è gracile 's/he is puny') and, as in Spanish, for the eminently transient quality implied in a verb's progressive form, such as sto scrivendo to express 'I am writing'.

The historical development of the stare + ablative gerund progressive tense in those Romance languages that have it seems to have been a passage from a usage such as sto pensando 'I stand/stay (here) in thinking', in which the stare form carries the full semantic load of 'stand, stay' to grammaticalization of the construction as expression of progressive aspect (Similar in concept to the Early Modern English construction of "I am a-thinking"). The process of reanalysis that took place over time bleached the semantics of stare so that when used in combination with the gerund the form became solely a grammatical marker of subject and tense (e.g. sto = subject first person singular, present; stavo = subject first person singular, past), no longer a lexical verb with the semantics of 'stand' (not unlike the auxiliary in compound tenses that once meant 'have, possess', but is now semantically empty: j'ai écrit, ho scritto, he escrito, etc.). Whereas sto scappando would once have been semantically strange at best (?'I stay escaping'), once grammaticalization was achieved, collocation with a verb of inherent mobility was no longer contradictory, and sto scappando could and did become the normal way to express 'I am escaping'. (Although it might be objected that in sentences like Spanish la catedral está en la ciudad, "the cathedral is in the city" this is also unlikely to change, but all locations are expressed through estar in Spanish, as this usage originally conveyed the sense of "the cathedral stands in the city").

Word order typology
Classical Latin in most cases adopted an SOV word order in ordinary prose, although other word orders were employed, such as in poetry, euphony, focus, or emphasis, enabled by inflectional marking of the grammatical function of words. However, word order in most of the modern Romance languages generally adopted a standard SVO word order. This had to develop as a result of stylistic changes in the language over time as well as the decline of the declension system.

In Late Latin works, such as in Egeria's Itinerary, a VSO word order gained more ground as SOV tended to be more restricted to subordinate clauses or higher registers in the language; this is seen in Old Sardinian. Eventually with the disappearance of the nominative case and the entire declension system, the order became V2 to solve ambiguity issues, eventually resulting in general SVO for most by the Middle Ages.

Relics of SOV word order still survive in the placement of clitic object pronouns (e.g. Spanish yo te amo "I love you").

History of specific Romance languages

 * Sicilian
 * Catalan phonology
 * History of French
 * History of Italian
 * History of Portuguese
 * History of the Spanish language
 * History of the Romanian language
 * Old French

Works consulted

 * General
 * Carlton, Charles Merritt. 1973. A linguistic analysis of a collection of Late Latin documents composed in Ravenna between A.D. 445–700. The Hague: Mouton.
 * Gouvert, Xavier. 2016. Du protoitalique au protoroman: Deux problèmes de reconstruction phonologique. In: Buchi, Éva & Schweickard, Wolfgang (eds.), Dictionnaire étymologique roman 2, 27–51. Berlin: De Gruyter.
 * Leppänen, V., & Alho, T. 2018. On the mergers of Latin close-mid vowels. Transactions of the Philological Society 116. 460–483.
 * Nandris, Grigore. 1951. The development and structure of Rumanian. The Slavonic and East European Review, 30. 7–39.
 * Pei, Mario. 1941. The Italian language. New York: Columbia University Press.
 * Pei, Mario & Gaeng, Paul A. 1976. The story of Latin and the Romance languages. New York: Harker & Row.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.
 * Gouvert, Xavier. 2016. Du protoitalique au protoroman: Deux problèmes de reconstruction phonologique. In: Buchi, Éva & Schweickard, Wolfgang (eds.), Dictionnaire étymologique roman 2, 27–51. Berlin: De Gruyter.
 * Leppänen, V., & Alho, T. 2018. On the mergers of Latin close-mid vowels. Transactions of the Philological Society 116. 460–483.
 * Nandris, Grigore. 1951. The development and structure of Rumanian. The Slavonic and East European Review, 30. 7–39.
 * Pei, Mario. 1941. The Italian language. New York: Columbia University Press.
 * Pei, Mario & Gaeng, Paul A. 1976. The story of Latin and the Romance languages. New York: Harker & Row.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.
 * Leppänen, V., & Alho, T. 2018. On the mergers of Latin close-mid vowels. Transactions of the Philological Society 116. 460–483.
 * Nandris, Grigore. 1951. The development and structure of Rumanian. The Slavonic and East European Review, 30. 7–39.
 * Pei, Mario. 1941. The Italian language. New York: Columbia University Press.
 * Pei, Mario & Gaeng, Paul A. 1976. The story of Latin and the Romance languages. New York: Harker & Row.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.
 * Nandris, Grigore. 1951. The development and structure of Rumanian. The Slavonic and East European Review, 30. 7–39.
 * Pei, Mario. 1941. The Italian language. New York: Columbia University Press.
 * Pei, Mario & Gaeng, Paul A. 1976. The story of Latin and the Romance languages. New York: Harker & Row.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.
 * Pei, Mario & Gaeng, Paul A. 1976. The story of Latin and the Romance languages. New York: Harker & Row.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.
 * Treadgold, Warren. 1997. A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press.

Transitions to Romance languages

 * To Romance in general
 * Ledgeway, Adam (2012). From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 * (esp. parts 1 & 2, Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages; The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages)
 * Ledgeway, Adam (2012). From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 * (esp. parts 1 & 2, Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages; The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages)
 * (esp. parts 1 & 2, Latin and the Making of the Romance Languages; The Transition from Latin to the Romance Languages)

 * To French

 * To Italian

 * To Spanish

 * To Portuguese

 * To Occitan

 * To Sardinian

title: Vulgar Latin


text:
Steinway & Sons

Steinway & Sons, also known as Steinway, is a German-American piano company, founded in 1853 in New York City by German piano builder Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg (later known as Henry E. Steinway). The company's growth led to a move to a larger factory in New York, and later opening an additional factory in Hamburg, Germany. The New York factory, in the borough of Queens, supplies the Americas, and the factory in Hamburg supplies the rest of the world.

Steinway is a prominent piano company, known for its high quality and for inventions within the area of piano development. Steinway has been granted 139 patents in piano making, with the first in 1857. The company's share of the high-end grand piano market consistently exceeds 80 percent. The dominant position has been criticized, with some musicians and writers arguing that it has blocked innovation and led to a homogenization of the sound favored by pianists.

Steinway pianos have received numerous awards. One of the first is a gold medal in 1855 at the American Institute Fair at the New York Crystal Palace. From 1855 to 1862, Steinway pianos received 35 gold medals. More awards and recognitions followed, including three medals at the International Exposition of 1867 in Paris. The European part of the company held a royal warrant of appointment to Queen Elizabeth II. Steinway & Sons was named Company of the Year in 1996 by The Music Trades magazine. The award was given in recognition of Steinway's "overall performance, quality, value-added products, a well-executed promotional program and disciplined distribution which generated the most impressive results in the entire music industry."

In addition to the Steinway piano line, Steinway markets two other, lower-priced brands of piano sold under the brand names Boston and Essex.

Foundation and growth

Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg first made pianos in the 1820s from his house in Seesen, Germany. He made pianos under the Steinweg brand until he emigrated from Germany to America in 1850 with his wife and seven of his nine children. The eldest son, C. F. Theodor Steinweg, remained in Germany, and continued making the Steinweg brand of pianos, partnering with Friedrich Grotrian, a piano dealer, from 1856 to 1865.

In 1853, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg founded Steinway & Sons. His first workshop in America was in a small loft at the back of 85 Varick Street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The first piano made by Steinway & Sons was given the number 483 because Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg had built 482 pianos in Germany. Number 483 was sold to a New York family for $500, and is now on display at the Städtisches Museum Seesen, the town in which Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg began his career as a piano maker. A year later, demand was such that the company moved to larger premises at 82–88 Walker Street. It was not until 1864 that the family anglicized their name from Steinweg to Steinway.

By the 1860s, Steinway had built and moved into a factory at Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Street (the present site of the Seagram Building) where it covered a whole block. With a workforce of 350 men, production increased from 500 to nearly 1,800 pianos per year. The employees were mostly German immigrants and the official language of the company was German. The pianos themselves underwent numerous substantial improvements through innovations made both at the Steinway factory and elsewhere in the industry based on emerging engineering and scientific research, including developments in the understanding of acoustics. Almost half of the company's 139 patented inventions were developed by the first and second generations of the Steinway family. Steinway's pianos won prizes at exhibitions in New York City, London, and Paris. By 1862, Steinway pianos had received more than 35 medals. Part of Steinway's early reputation arose from its successes in trade fairs.

In 1865, the Steinway family sent a letter to C. F. Theodor Steinweg asking that he leave the German Steinweg factory (by then located in Braunschweig (Brunswick)) and travel to New York City to take over the leadership of the family firm due to the deaths of his brothers Henry and Charles from disease. C. F. Theodor Steinweg obeyed, selling his share of the German piano company to his partner Wilhelm Grotrian (son of Friedrich Grotrian) and two other workmen, Adolph Helfferich and H. G. W. Schulz. The German factory changed its name from C. F. Theodor Steinweg to ''Grotrian, Helfferich, Schulz, Th. Steinweg Nachf. (Grotrian, Helfferich, Schulz, successors to Th. Steinweg), later shortened to Grotrian-Steinweg''. In New York City, C. F. Theodor Steinweg anglicized his name to C. F. Theodore Steinway. During the next 15 years of his leadership, he kept a home in Braunschweig and traveled often between Germany and the United States.

Through 1870–80, William Steinway (born Wilhelm Steinweg, a son of Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg) established a company town after purchasing a home and its surrounding property from the widow of Benjamin Pike Jr., that would later bear his name as the Steinway Mansion. This company town would go on to become Steinway Village in what is now the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in New York City. Steinway Village was built as its own town, and included a new factory (still used today) with its own foundry and sawmill, houses for employees, kindergarten, lending library, post office, volunteer fire department, and parks. Steinway Village later became part of Long Island City. Steinway Street, one of the major streets in the Astoria and Long Island City neighborhoods of Queens, is named after the company.

In 1876, Steinway participated in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The competition among piano makers principally involved Steinway, Chickering, and Weber. According to journalist James Barron's account of Steinway's participation in the competition, the company was able to secure success by bribing one of the judges. William Steinway denied to the exposition's organizers that a judge had been paid directly, although Barron states that the judge was bribed through an intermediary, the pianist Frederic Boscovitz. According to freelancer Isabel Wolff, William Steinway admitted in his diary that under his leadership the New York City arm of the company bribed judges at trade fairs to favor Steinway pianos. According to musicologist Donald W. Fostle, it is untrue that Steinway repeatedly bribed judges at trade fairs, and in the one documented case it is unclear if Steinway were enmeshed, along with others, in bribery or were the target of attempted extortion.

To reach European customers who wanted Steinway pianos, and to avoid high European import taxes, William Steinway and C. F. Theodore Steinway established a new piano factory in the free German city of Hamburg in 1880. The first address of Steinway's factory in Hamburg was at Schanzenstraße in the western part of Hamburg, St. Pauli. C. F. Theodore Steinway became the head of the German factory, and William Steinway went back to the factory in New York. The two factories regularly exchanged experience about their patents and techniques despite the large distance between them, and they continue to do so today. C. F. Theodore Steinway was a talented inventor who made many improvements in the construction of the piano. About a third of Steinway's patented inventions are under the name of C. F. Theodore Steinway. The Steinway factory in Hamburg was part laboratory, part factory. Much of the precision cutting and drilling machinery installed in the New York factory was tried in the Hamburg factory first. C. F. Theodore Steinway died in Braunschweig in 1889, having successfully competed against the Grotrian-Steinweg brand – both the Hamburg-based Steinway factory and the Braunschweig-based Grotrian-Steinweg factory became known for making premium German pianos.

Meanwhile, the 1880s saw the company embroiled in a series of labor disputes between the New York City factory's management and workers. Back then, industrialists faced labor strikes frequently. One dispute, in 1880, saw the company lead an industry-wide lockout of piano workers in New York City. In later disputes in the decade, the company hired detectives to spy on its workers, paid police to take management's side in the dispute and to protect company property, and evicted strike leaders from company housing.

In 1883, the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt wrote in a letter to Steinway: "...The new Steinway grand is a glorious masterpiece in power, sonority, singing quality, and perfect harmonic effects, affording delight even to my old piano-weary fingers. Ever continuing success remains a beautiful attribute of the world-renowned firm of Steinway & Sons. ...Owing to my ignorance of the mechanism of piano construction I can but praise the magnificent result in the volume and quality of sound."

In 1890, Steinway received its first royal warrant, granted by Queen Victoria. The following year the patrons of Steinway included the Prince of Wales and other members of royalty and nobility. In subsequent years Steinway was granted royal and imperial warrants from the rulers of Italy, Norway, Persia, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.

Steinway Halls

From 1864 to 1866, William Steinway, who is credited with establishing Steinway's success in marketing, oversaw the construction of Steinway Hall on East 14th Street in Manhattan, New York City. Steinway Hall had cost $200,000 to build. It included the second largest concert hall in New York City as well as showrooms for Steinway pianos. To enter the concert hall concertgoers had to pass through the showrooms, a way to advertise Steinway pianos. Sales increased by more than 400 pianos in 1867. Steinway Hall quickly became one of New York City's most prominent cultural centers, housing the New York Philharmonic for the next 25 years until Carnegie Hall opened in 1891.

In 1925, the Steinway Hall on East 14th Street was closed and a new Steinway Hall on West 57th Street was opened. In 2013, Steinway sold the Steinway Hall on West 57th Street for $46 million and moved out of the building at the end of 2014. In 2016, a new Steinway Hall opened on Sixth Avenue.

A second Steinway Hall was opened in London in 1875. It was located first on Wigmore Street, in 1924 it moved to St. George Street, and later it moved to its current address on Marylebone Lane.

Expansion

In 1857, Steinway began to make a line of art case pianos, designed by artists. In 1903, the 100,000th Steinway grand piano was given as a gift to the White House; it was decorated by the artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing. The 100,000th Steinway grand piano was replaced in 1938 by the 300,000th, which remains in use in the White House. The piano is normally placed in the largest room of the White House, the East Room.

Later, Steinway diversified into the manufacture of player pianos. Several systems such as the Welte-Mignon, Duo-Art, and Ampico were incorporated. During the 1920s, Steinway had been selling up to 6,000 pianos a year. In 1929, Steinway constructed one double-keyboard grand piano. It has 164 keys and 4 pedals. (In 2005, Steinway refurbished this instrument). During World War II, the Steinway factory in New York received orders from the Allied Armies to build wooden gliders to convey troops behind enemy lines. Steinway could make few normal pianos, but built 2,436 special models called the Victory Vertical or G.I. Piano. It was a small piano that four men could lift, painted olive drab, gray, or blue, designed to be carried aboard ships or dropped by parachute from an airplane to bring music to the soldiers.

The factory in Hamburg, Germany, could sell very few pianos during World War II. No more than a hundred pianos per year left the factory. In the later years of the war, the company was ordered to give up all the prepared and dried wood their lumber yard held for war production. In an air raid over Hamburg, several Allied bombs hit the factory and nearly destroyed it. After the war, Steinway restored the Hamburg factory with help from the Marshall Plan.

In the late 1960s, Steinway brought countersuit against Grotrian-Steinweg to stop them from using the name Steinweg on their pianos. Steinway won the case on appeal in 1975, forcing their competitor to use only the name Grotrian in the United States. The case set a precedent and established the concept of Initial Interest Confusion, in which consumers might be initially attracted to a similarly named but lesser-known brand because of the stronger brand's good reputation.

The 500,000th Steinway

In 1988, Steinway made its 500,000th piano. Designed by artist Wendell Castle, it carries inscriptions of the names of the 832 pianists and 90 ensembles on the Steinway Artist roster of 1987, including Van Cliburn, Vladimir Horowitz and Billy Joel.

Six years later the company launched C. F. Theodore Steinway Academy for Concert Technicians, known simply as Steinway Academy, at Steinway's factory in Hamburg, Germany. There, experienced piano tuners and piano technicians from all over the world receive further training in piano tuning and maintenance. By 2000, Steinway had made its 550,000th piano.

In 2003, Steinway celebrated its 150th anniversary at Carnegie Hall with a three-day concert series with performances by Peter Cincotti, Art Garfunkel, Herbie Hancock, Ben Heppner, Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis, Randy Newman, Roger Williams, Nancy Wilson, Yundi Li and Eroica Trio, among others. The first concert featured classical music, the second jazz, and the third pop. As part of the 150th anniversary, fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld created a commemorative Steinway limited edition grand piano.

In 2005, Steinway celebrated the 125th anniversary of the establishment of its factory in Hamburg, Germany. The celebration featured a concert at the Laeiszhalle concert hall in Hamburg with performances by Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy, Lang Lang, and Detlef Kraus. 1,800 people from 33 countries attended the concert. As part of the celebration, a 125th anniversary Steinway limited edition grand piano was designed by Count Albrecht von Goertz.

Until his death on September 18, 2008, at the age of 93, Henry Z. Steinway, the great-grandson of the Steinway founder, still worked for Steinway and put his signature on custom-made limited-edition pianos. At several public occasions, Henry Z. Steinway represented the Steinway family. He started at the company in 1937 after graduating from Harvard University. He was president of the company from 1956 to 1977 and was the last Steinway family member to be president of Steinway.

Changes in ownership
In 1972, after a lengthy strike, a long-running financial struggle, high legal expenses, and a lack of business interest among some of the Steinway family members, the firm was sold to CBS. At that time, CBS owned many enterprises in the entertainment industry, including electric guitar and amplifier maker Fender, drum maker Rogers, electro-mechanical piano maker Rhodes, and the baseball team New York Yankees. CBS had plans to form a musical conglomerate that made and sold music in all forms and through all outlets, including records, radio, television, and musical instruments. This new conglomerate was evidently not as successful as CBS had expected, and Steinway was sold in 1985, along with classical and church organ maker Rodgers and flute and piccolo maker Gemeinhardt, to a group of Boston-area investors led by Robert and John P. Birmingham. In order to acquire Steinway, the investors founded the musical conglomerate Steinway Musical Properties. In 1995, Steinway Musical Properties was acquired by Selmer Industries to form the musical conglomerate Steinway Musical Instruments.

In June 2013, private equity firm Kohlberg & Company offered to buy Steinway parent company Steinway Musical Instruments for $438 million. Two months later hedge fund Paulson & Co. Inc. made a higher offer, $512 million, to take the company private. The Steinway Musical Instruments board recommended that shareholders accept this, and in September 2013 Paulson announced completion of the acquisition.

Recent history
After the 2008 economic downturn, Steinway grand piano sales fell by half, and 30 percent of the union employees were laid off at the New York factory between August 2008 and November 2009. Sales were down 21 percent in 2009 in the United States. But sales began increasing a little in 2010, and they continued to improve the following year.

In 2015, Steinway went back to the player piano industry from around the 1920s by introducing a digital player piano series called Spirio. The technology in the Spirio pianos was created in 2007 by Wayne Stahnke, an Austrian engineer who has previously made digital player piano systems for other piano companies, like Yamaha and Bösendorfer. Wayne Stahnke's technology, originally called Live Performance Model LX, was sold to Steinway in 2014 and re-branded as Spirio. In contrast to player pianos by other brands available at the time, a recording option was not originally available in the Steinway Spirio. In 2018, a recording option was made available in Steinway Spirio pianos, known as the Spirio r. The Spirio technology is referred to as "non-parasitic", meaning that the recording and playback equipment do not interfere with the sound or feel of the piano. The pianist is recorded by over 20 grey-scale optical sensors mounted behind the piano’s keyboard. With over 1000 levels of sensitivity and the ability to record 800 measurements/second, they sense the speed at which the hammers strike the strings. In 2024, the Spirio library contained more than 4,000 recordings.

In 2015, Steinway made its 600,000th piano. The piano features the Fibonacci spiral and Macassar ebony veneer. It took 6,000 hours of work over 4 years to make, and was priced at $2.4 million.

As of early 2021, Paulson & Co. remains the ultimate parent of Steinway & Sons, with head office at 1251 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

Models
Steinway pianos are sold by a worldwide network of around 200 authorized Steinway dealers who operate around 300 showrooms. The primary differentiation between Steinway models is simply their size (which is indicated by their model letter), which is also one of the most important indicators of their relative prices.

Steinway pianos are also sold in the secondary market. The price of a used Steinway can vary tremendously, depending on the model (size), age, condition, and the quality of any restoration work that has been done. Additionally, Steinway offers certified pre-owned pianos, using Steinway-approved parts.

Grands and uprights

Steinway makes the following models of pianos:

The Hamburg factory makes seven models of grand pianos and two upright models. (The numerical portion of each model designation represents the length of the grand pianos and the height of the upright pianos, in centimetres).

The New York factory makes six models of grand pianos and one model of upright piano. (Steinway has previously made upright pianos in different dimensions.)

Grand Pianos

 * Hamburg factory
 * S-155
 * M-170
 * O-180,
 * A-188
 * B-211
 * C-227
 * D-274
 * New York factory
 * S (5'1")
 * M (5'7")
 * O (5'$10 3/4$")
 * A (6'2")
 * B (6'11")
 * D (8'$11 3/4$")

Upright Pianos

 * Hamburg factory
 * V-125
 * K-132
 * New York factory
 * K (52" high).

The Model L (5’ 10 1⁄2" ) was produced and sold as a replacement for the Model O from 1922 to 2006.

Designer cases

Designers and artists such as Karl Lagerfeld, Dakota Jackson, Walter Dorwin Teague, Arthur Blackmore, Joseph Burr Tiffany, Louis Comfort Tiffany,  Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, George Schastey, and the Herter Brothers have created original designs for Steinway pianos. These specially designed pianos fall under the art case piano line or the limited edition piano line.

Steinway began creating art case pianos in 1857 and the making of art case pianos reached its peak in the late 19th century. Today, Steinway only builds art case pianos on rare occasions. The art case pianos are unique. Some of Steinway's most notable art case pianos are the Alma-Tadema grand piano from 1887, the 100,000th Steinway piano from 1903, the 300,000th Steinway piano from 1938, and the Sound of Harmony from 2008. The Alma-Tadema grand piano was designed by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and received great public acclaim when it was exhibited in London. The piano is made of ebony, inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, with carved case, lid, and legs, and painted in the inside lid by artist Edward Poynter. It was bought by financier Henry Gurdon Marquand for his New York City mansion. In 1997, it was sold at Christie's auction house in London for $1.2 million, setting a price record for a piano sold at auction. It is now on display at the art museum Clark Art Institute. The 100,000th Steinway piano was given as a gift to the White House in 1903 and is made of cherry tree with gold leaf. It is decorated with coats of arms of the thirteen original states of America and painted by Thomas Dewing with dancing figures representing the nine Muses. The 100,000th Steinway piano was replaced in 1938 by the 300,000th Steinway piano. The gold gilded mahogany legs of the 300,000th piano are carved as eagles and are molded by sculptor Albert Stewart. The piano remains in use in the White House. The Sound of Harmony is decorated with inlays of 40 different woods, including the lid, which replicates artwork by Chinese painter Shi Qi. It took about four years to build the grand piano and it was priced at €1.2 million. The piano was chosen for use at the Expo 2010 Shanghai China.

Examples of limited edition pianos include The Steinway Limited Edition by Karl Lagerfeld created to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Steinway company in 2003, and the 125th-anniversary grand piano by Count Albrecht von Goertz designed to celebrate the 125th anniversary in 2005 of the founding of the Steinway factory in Hamburg, Germany.

In 1993, Steinway introduced a new line of specially designed cases, the Steinway Crown Jewel Collection. The collection consists of grand and upright pianos in Steinway's regular models, but instead of the traditional black finish the pianos of the Steinway Crown Jewel Collection have veneers of rare woods from around the world. The collection includes Macassar ebony, East Indian rosewood, and kewazinga bubinga.

Brands

In addition to the Steinway & Sons brand, Steinway markets two other brands: Boston for the mid-level market and Essex for the entry-level market. Boston and Essex pianos are made using lower-cost components and labor. Pianos of these two brands, made with Steinway owned designs, are manufactured in Asia by suppliers. Steinway allows only its authorized Steinway dealers to carry new Boston and Essex pianos.

 * Boston: made for the general mid-ranged piano market at lower prices than Steinway's name brand. Boston pianos are manufactured by Kawai Musical Instruments in Hamamatsu, Japan and Karawang, Indonesia. There are five sizes of Boston grand pianos and three sizes of Boston upright pianos available in a variety of finishes. Grand piano models are GP-156 PE, GP-163 PE, GP-178 PE, GP-193 PE, and GP-215 PE. Upright piano models are UP-118 PE, UP-126 PE, and UP-132 PE. Boston pianos incorporate some of the features of Steinway pianos such as a wider tail design (a feature of the Steinway piano models A-188, B-211, C-227, and D-274) resulting in a larger soundboard area than conventionally shaped pianos of comparable sizes, a maple inner rim, and Steinway's patented Octagrip pinblock.
 * Essex: made for the entry-range market and is lower priced than Steinway and Boston pianos. Since 2005, Essex pianos are made at the Pearl River piano factory in Guangzhou, China. Prior to 2005, they were made by Young Chang in Korea. There are two sizes of Essex grand pianos and four sizes of Essex upright pianos available in a wide variety of finishes and furniture designs. Grand piano models are EGP-155 and EGP-173. Upright piano models are EUP-108, EUP-111, EUP-116, and EUP-123. Like the Boston pianos, Essex pianos incorporate some of the features of Steinway pianos as well: a wider tail design, an all-wood action with Steinway geometry with rosette-shaped hammer flanges, and reinforced hammers with metal fasteners.

Piano bank
Steinway maintains a worldwide "piano bank" from which performing pianists, especially Steinway Artists, can select a Steinway piano with the touch and tonal characteristics they prefer for use in a certain concert, recording, or tour. Steinway prepares, tunes, and delivers the piano of the performer's choice to the designated concert hall or recording studio at the performer's expense.

The "piano bank" consists of approximately 250 Steinway pianos valued collectively at $12.5 million in 2019.

German and American factories
Some pianists and technicians have expressed a preference for pianos from Steinway's Hamburg factory over those made in New York, or vice versa. Emanuel Ax, concert pianist and piano teacher at the Juilliard School, has said that "... the differences have more to do with individual instruments than with where they were made." Larry Fine, American piano technician and author of The Piano Book, considers Hamburg Steinways to be of higher quality than those from New York. In 2010, the New York factory made some changes in its manufacturing processes and materials to improve quality, and Fine was invited to tour the factory to see some of the changes. Fine wrote in his Acoustic & Digital Piano Buyer of Spring 2011 that the changes have improved the quality of the New York pianos, but that the Hamburg pianos are still of higher quality.

Steinway has two sales areas: the factory in New York supplies North and South America, and the one in Hamburg supplies the rest of the world. At all main Steinway showrooms across the world, customers can order pianos from either factory. The Hamburg and New York factories exchange parts and craftsmanship, and the parts for both factories come from the same places: Canadian maple is used for the rim, and the soundboards are made from Sitka spruce from Alaska. Both factories use similar crown parameters for their diaphragmatic soundboards. To maintain quality, Steinway has acquired some of its suppliers. Steinway bought the German manufacturer Kluge in Wuppertal, which supplies keyboards, in December 1998, and in November 1999 purchased the company that supplies its cast iron plates, O. S. Kelly Co. in Springfield, Ohio.

A majority of the world's concert halls own at least one Steinway piano, and some (for example Carnegie Hall) have model D-274s from both the Hamburg factory and the New York factory to satisfy a greater range of preferences.

Components

Each Steinway grand piano has more than 12,000 individual parts. A Steinway piano is handcrafted and takes nearly a year to build.

Steinway maintains its own lumber yards at both the Hamburg and New York factories, aging and drying lumber from nine months to five years. Less than 50 percent is finally used in the making of Steinway pianos. More than 70 percent of the walnut stock is discarded. The woods are purchased when they are available rather than when they are needed.

Rim
The rims of Hamburg-made Steinways are made of layers of hard rock maple and mahogany; the New York-made rims use layers of hard rock maple only. The layers are glued and pressed together into one piece in one operation using rim-bending presses that C. F. Theodore Steinway invented in 1880. After the rim-bending process, the rim has to rest from the stress of being bent. It is placed in a conditioning room for a month or more to reduce the moisture content of the wood to approximately six percent.

Plate
Inside the piano, a cast iron plate provides the strength to support the string tension, which ranges from 16 tons to 23 tons depending on the model. The iron plate is installed above the soundboard and is bronzed, lacquered, polished, and decorated with the Steinway logo. Steinway fabricates plates in its own foundry.

Soundboard and bridges
Steinway makes its soundboard from solid spruce, which allows the soundboard to transmit and amplify sound. The soundboard in Steinway pianos are double-crowned with Steinway's diaphragmatic design. The diaphragmatic soundboard, which was granted a patent in 1936, tapers in thickness from the center to the edges, which permits more freedom of movement resulting in a richer and more lasting tonal response.

Steinway bridges are made of vertically laminated hard rock maple with a hard rock maple cap. The bridges are measured for specific height requirements for each piano and are hand notched.

Keys and action

Steinway keys are made of Bavarian spruce. The surface of the white keys is made of polymer; earlier, they had been made of elephant ivory. Around the 1950s, Steinway switched from using ivory, and some years later use of ivory for piano keys was outlawed. The action parts are mounted on Steinway's tubular metallic frame. The Steinway hammers are cut from virgin wool felt, containing no admixture of other materials.

In 1962, the New York factory introduced the Permafree action for its grand pianos, using Teflon parts in place of cloth bushings. Using Teflon was less expensive for the company, was intended to withstand wear and humidity changes better than cloth, and eliminated the factory's reliance on a kind of cloth that might not be exactly the same from batch to batch. However, the Teflon bushings (which are relatively rigid and unaffected by humidity) were tightly installed inside parts made of wood, which does expand and contract according to humidity. This made the action become too tight or too loose, especially after changes in the weather, and caused annoying clicking noises while playing. The Teflon bushings were discontinued in 1983, and existing pianos that had them were retrofitted with cloth. The Hamburg factory never implemented the Teflon bushings in its pianos.

Strings and pinblock
The pianos have steel strings in the midsection and treble, with bass strings made of copper-wound steel. The strings are uniformly spaced with one end coiled around the tuning pins, which in turn are inserted in a laminated wooden block called the pinblock or wrestplank. The tuning pins keep the strings tight and are held in place by friction. Steinway also employs front and rear duplex scales, in which the main vibrating section of the string is augmented by a much smaller vibration in the two ends of the string which are fastened in place. Steinway was a friend of the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and this friendship led to the development and Steinway patent in 1872 of front and back aliquots, allowing the traditionally dead sections of strings to vibrate in sympathy with the main string. The result is a fuller, more complex sound.

The pinblock, also known as wrestplank, in Steinways is made of seven layers of hard-textured wood that are glued together, set at a 45° angle to the run of the grain. It is designed to keep the piano in tune longer.

Steinway Artists

In contrast to other piano makers, who presented their pianos to pianists, William Steinway engaged the Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein to play Steinway pianos during Rubinstein's first and only American concert tour from 1872 to 1873, with 215 concerts in 239 days. It was a success for both Rubinstein and Steinway. Thus, the Steinway Artist program was born. Later the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski toured America playing 107 concerts on Steinway pianos in 117 days.

, around 2,000 pianists worldwide are official Steinway Artists, which means that they have chosen to perform on Steinway pianos exclusively, and each owns a Steinway. None is paid to do so. Steinway Artists come from different genres: classical, jazz, pop, and rock. A few examples of Steinway Artists are Daniel Barenboim, Harry Connick Jr., Billy Joel, Evgeny Kissin, Diana Krall, Yundi Li and Lang Lang. Some examples of Immortal Steinway Artists are Irving Berlin, Benjamin Britten, George Gershwin, Vladimir Horowitz, Cole Porter, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Steinway expects Steinway Artists to perform on Steinway pianos where they are available and in appropriate condition. Artur Schnabel complained once that "Steinway refused to let me use their pianos [i.e., Steinway pianos owned by Steinway] unless I would give up playing the Bechstein piano – which I had used for so many years – in Europe. They insisted that I play on Steinway exclusively, everywhere in the world, otherwise they would not give me their pianos in the United States. That is the reason why from 1923 until 1930 I did not return to America. ... [in] 1933, Steinway changed their attitude and agreed to let me use their pianos in the United States, even if I continued elsewhere to play the Bechstein piano ... Thus, from 1933 on, I went every year to America." In 1972, Steinway responded to Garrick Ohlsson's statement that Bösendorfer was "the Rolls-Royce of pianos" by trucking away the Steinway-owned grand piano that Ohlsson was about to give a recital on at Alice Tully Hall in New York City. Ohlsson ended up performing on a Bösendorfer piano borrowed at the eleventh hour, and Steinway would not let him borrow Steinway-owned pianos for some time. Ohlsson has since made peace with Steinway. Angela Hewitt was removed from the Steinway Artist roster around 2002 after she purchased and performed on a Fazioli piano. After the Canadian pianist Louis Lortie was removed from the Steinway Artist roster in 2003, he complained in a newspaper article that Steinway is trying to establish a monopoly on the concert world by becoming "the Microsoft of pianos". A Steinway spokesman said, in response to Lortie's decision to perform a concert on a Fazioli piano, that Steinway does not want anyone on the Steinway Artist roster who does not want to play the Steinway exclusively.

According to musicologist Stuart de Ocampo, "That Steinway aggressively sought out and paid (in various forms) for artist endorsements must be stressed in order to combat an idealistic notion that the greatest flocked to Steinway simply because it was the best." More generally, Stuart de Ocampo endorses the view of Donald W. Fostle, who wrote in a company history of Steinway that "the genius of Steinways ... ultimately lay in their ability to persuade millions of persons across decades and continents that in this realm of supreme subjectivity, individual variation, incertitude, and ever-changing conditions, there was an absolute best. The assertion, repeated often enough, took on the coloration of fact", but Stuart de Ocampo concludes that "Innovations in piano construction carved out a unique sound for the Steinway pianos in the mid-nineteenth century. Medals at fairs and international exhibitions were the basis of Steinway & Sons' early reputation." Paying for pianists' endorsements back then was not specific to Steinway. As there were financial incentives for testimonials, several famous pianists had no qualms about endorsing more than one piano brand. Franz Liszt endorsed Steinway, Bösendorfer, Chickering, Erard, Ibach, Mason & Risch, and Steck at the same time. Today, no pianist is paid by Steinway, and when Steinway Artists loan pianos from Steinway for a concert or recording session the artists do have to pay Steinway for preparing, tuning, and delivering of the piano. According to management academic David Liebeskind, the Steinway Artist program "... is one of the only pure product endorsements programs, as no artist is paid to play on or endorse a Steinway piano."

The Steinway Artist program has been copied by other piano companies, but Steinway's program is unique in that a pianist must promise to play pianos of the Steinway brand only. The Steinway Artist designation restricts a pianist's use of pianos by other makers and implies an obligation to perform on Steinway pianos.

All-Steinway Schools

The All-Steinway School designation is given by Steinway to educational institutions of music in which not less than 90 percent of the pianos are designed by Steinway. Steinway does not offer the pianos free of charge but requires that the institutions buy them. Performance venues, teaching studios, and practice rooms for piano students must be equipped with Steinway pianos. Teaching studios and practice rooms for other students may be equipped with Boston or Essex pianos; some All-Steinway Schools have chosen to have Steinway pianos in these rooms also. It is required that the pianos are kept in performance-quality condition and All-Steinway Schools must have piano technicians that participate in Steinway's technical training programs. If the pianos are not maintained in performance-quality condition, Steinway can withdraw the All-Steinway School designation.

The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio holds the longest partnership with Steinway. They have used Steinway pianos exclusively since 1877, 24 years after Steinway was founded. In 2007, they obtained their 200th Steinway piano, a model D-274 manufactured at Steinway's factory in Hamburg, Germany. Other examples of All-Steinway Schools are the Yale School of Music at Yale University in Connecticut, the Curtis Institute of Music in Pennsylvania, Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Melbourne Faculty of VCA and MCM in Australia, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

In 2007, the Crane School of Music in Potsdam, New York, was added to the All-Steinway School roster, receiving 141 pianos in one $3.8 million order. In 2009, the University of Cincinnati – College-Conservatory of Music in Ohio became designated an All-Steinway School, based on a $4.1 million order of 165 new pianos, one of the largest orders Steinway has ever processed.

, there are approximately 200 All-Steinway Schools around the world.

Piano competitions
Several international piano competitions use Steinway pianos. Since the Cleveland International Piano Competition chose to use only Steinway pianos in 1999, Steinway has been selected exclusively by such competitions as the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, Utah, the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig, Germany, the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, Belgium, the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy, and the Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in Paris.

Awards

The Steinway company and its leaders have won numerous awards, including:
 * In 1839, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg exhibited three pianos at the state trade exhibition in Braunschweig, Germany, and was awarded a gold medal.
 * In 1855, Steinway attended the Metropolitan Mechanics Institute fair in Washington, D.C. and won 1st prize.
 * In 1855, Steinway exhibited at the American Institute Fair in the New York Crystal Palace in what is now Bryant Park in New York City. Steinway won a gold medal. A reporter wrote the following about Steinway: "Their square pianos are characterized by the great power of tone, depth and richness in the bass, a full mellowness in the middle register and brilliant purity in the treble, making a scale perfectly equal and singularly melodious throughout its entire range. In touch, they are all that could be desired."
 * From 1855 to 1862, Steinway pianos received 35 medals in the United States alone, since which time Steinway entered their pianos at international exhibitions only.
 * In 1862, for the International Exhibition in London, Steinway shipped two square pianos and two grand pianos to England (two to Liverpool and two to London) and won 1st prize.
 * In 1867, Steinway won three awards at the International Exposition in Paris: the Grand Gold Medal of Honor, the Grand Annual Testimonial Medal, and honorary membership of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. These awards won in Europe increased the demand for Steinway pianos, thus the reason the family looked into opening a store in London. The International Exposition of 1867 established Steinway as the leading choice for pianos in Europe.
 * In 1876, at the Centennial Exposition in the United States, Steinway received the two highest awards and a certificate of the judges showing a rating of 95.5 of a possible 96.
 * In 1885, Steinway received the gold medal at the International Inventions Exhibition in London and the grand gold medal of the Royal Society of Arts in London.
 * In 2007, the National Medal of Arts was awarded to Henry Z. Steinway and presented by US President George W. Bush in an East Room ceremony at the White House. Henry Z. Steinway received the award for "... his devotion to preserving and promoting quality craftsmanship and performance, as an arts patron and advocate for music and music education; and for continuing the fine tradition of the Steinway piano..."
 * In 2014, Steinway received the Red Dot product design award for the Arabesque limited edition grand piano. The jury wrote: "The design of the Arabesque impresses through elegance and individuality. It thus excellently complements the high-class product line of this renowned manufacturing house."

Patented inventions
Steinway has been granted 139 patents in piano making; the first in 1857. Some examples of these are:
 * Patent No. 26,532 (December 20, 1859): The bass strings are "overstrung" above the treble strings to provide more length and better tonal quality. The invention won 1st prize medal at the 1862 International Exhibition in London. Today, the invention is a standard feature of grand piano construction.
 * Patent No. 126,848 (May 14, 1872): Steinway invented the duplex scale on the principle of enabling the freely oscillating parts of the string, directly in front of and behind the segment of the string actually struck, also to resound. The outcome is a large range and fullness of overtones – one of the characteristics of the Steinway sound.
 * Patent No. 127,383 (May 28, 1872): In a Steinway piano, the cast iron plate rests on wooden dowels without actually touching the soundboard. It is lightly curved, creating a large hollow between the plate and the soundboard. This cavity acts as a reinforcement of the resonant properties.
 * Patent No. 156,388 (October 27, 1874): Steinway claims the invention of the middle piano pedal. The sostenuto pedal gives the pianist an ability to create what is called an organ pedal point by keeping a specific note's damper, or notes' dampers, in their open position(s), allowing those strings to continue to sound while other notes can be played without continuing to resonate. The sostenuto pedal was previously perfected, with a patent application, by M. Waldo Hanchett of Syracuse, New York. However, Steinway succeeded in patenting the device, despite Hanchett's five-months-old application.

 * Patent No. 170,645 (November 30, 1875): Steinway's Regulation Action Pilot, also known as Capstan Screw, lifts the parts that drive the hammer toward the string. The Steinway device was easily adjustable, but more importantly allowed the action to be quickly separated from the keys, an advance that greatly simplified servicing the piano.
 * Patent No. 233,710 (October 26, 1880): The bridge transmits the vibration of the strings to the soundboard. In a Steinway piano, the bridge consists of vertically glued laminations in a quartersawn orientation. With this continuity of  grain, the sound traverses the bridge along its entire length, a principle that ensures that vibrations are easily developed and forwarded.
 * Patent No. 314,742 (March 31, 1885): The rims of Hamburg-made Steinways are made of layers of hard rock maple and mahogany; the New York-made rims use layers of hard rock maple only. The layers are glued and pressed together into one piece in one operation.
 * Patent No. 2,051,633 (August 18, 1936): The soundboard resembles a membrane. The special molding, gradually tapering from the center to the edge, provides great flexibility and freer vibration across the board.
 * Patent No. 3,091,149 (May 28, 1963): A pinblock designed to keep the piano in tune longer. Seven layers of hard maple are glued together, each successive layer at a 45° angle to the one before it.

Music
Steinway pianos have appeared in numerous records and concerts. A few examples include:

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Steinway & Sons


text:
Vincent R. Impellitteri

Vincent Richard Impellitteri (born Vincenzo Impellitteri; February 4, 1900 – January 29, 1987) was an Italian-American politician and judge who served as the 101st Mayor of New York City from 1950 to 1953. He was elected as a Democrat and president of the City Council in 1945 and reelected in 1949. When Mayor William O'Dwyer resigned in 1950, he became acting mayor. He lost the Democratic primary for the nomination for the rest of the term but was subsequently elected mayor on a new ticket, the "Experience Party". He lost the Democratic primary when he ran for a full term in 1953 and became a judge in 1954.

Early life
Born Vincenzo Impellitteri in Isnello, Sicily, he moved with his family to the United States as an infant in 1901. They settled in Ansonia, Connecticut, where Impellitteri spent most of his youth. He was a Catholic. He enlisted in the United States Navy for World War I. He served as a radioman with the rank of petty officer third class on board the destroyer USS Stockton, which was based in Queenstown, Ireland, and performed convoy escort and antisubmarine duty. He left the Navy after the war and became a U.S. citizen in 1922. After that, Impellitteri attended the Fordham University School of Law (where he received his LL.B. in 1924) while working successively as a night bellboy and manager at a Broadway hotel. He married Elizabeth (Betty) Agnes McLaughlin in 1926.

Start of career
Following his admission to the bar, he worked in private practice alongside influential Democratic attorney Martin Thomas Conboy Jr. He served as a state Assistant District Attorney from 1929 to 1938. After returning to private practice for three years as a specialist in criminal law, he served as legal secretary to New York Supreme Court Justice Peter Schmuck, later moving to the chambers of Joseph A. Gavagan in an analogous role. He was reportedly a close associate of gangster Tommy Lucchese, who helped Impellitteri's rise in politics. On the other hand, a report in the New York World-Telegram indicated that Impelliteri opposed organized crime and corruption and had failed to rise through the city Democratic Party's ranks because he had "the injudicious good taste to snub Frank Costello", the gambler and racketeer who was said to control the Tammany Hall organization behind the scenes.

In 1945, Mayor William O'Dwyer picked Impellitteri to run for President of the City Council on the Tammany Hall slate. He ran on the Democratic and American Labor Party lines in 1945, but when he was up for reelection in 1949, he ran on the Democratic Party line alone.

According to historian Robert Caro, Impelliteri was drafted into his first elected role by Democratic Party leadership, who selected his name from a municipal employee directory. The party was seeking an Italian American Manhattan resident to bring balance to the citywide ticket and thought an employee in his position would be easy to persuade on political matters.

Mayor of New York City
On August 31, 1950, O'Dwyer, pursued by both federal and state investigators, was suddenly appointed by President Harry S. Truman as United States ambassador to Mexico, where he would be beyond the reach of officials who wanted his public testimony in several matters on which he preferred not to speak. Under the City Charter of the era, City Council President Impellitteri became acting mayor upon O'Dwyer's resignation. The Tammany Hall bosses determined that Impellitteri was unsuitable for the role and refused to nominate him as the Democratic candidate for the special election in November 1950; instead, highly regarded New York State Supreme Court Judge Ferdinand Pecora, who was also given the Liberal Party line, ran as the nominee. Impellitteri ignored the machine and ran independently under the new "Experience Party" banner. He also popularized the slogan "unbought and unbossed" during his 1950 campaign.

Impellitteri was the first mayor since the consolidation of greater New York in 1898 who was elected without a major party's ballot line, and his election was a populist uprising against the political system. The results were:

 * Vincent Impellitteri (Experience Party) 1,161,175 votes
 * Ferdinand Pecora (Democratic/Liberal) 935,351
 * Edward Corsi (Republican) 382,372
 * Paul L. Ross (American Labor) 147,578

Impellitteri's inauguration, held on November 14, 1950, absent either a band or a platform, was swift and straightforward. Outside City Hall, he pledged to "do my level best to justify the confidence you have reposed in me."

Shortly after Impellitteri's succession, the Kings County District Attorney arrested bookmaker Harry Gross in September 1950 as part of a corruption investigation that caused nearly 500 police officers of all ranks to resign, retire, or be fired. Impellitteri opposed the corruption, vigorously supporting the Brooklyn District Attorney, Miles McDonald, and firing anyone in his administration associated with former Mayor William O'Dwyer.

Impellitteri is credited with trying to rein in the budget, raising the bus and subway fare to fifteen cents, establishing parking meters on city streets for enhanced revenue, and increasing the sales tax. He aspired to be a new light in city politics, but his administration met with some resistance from the established order. At the time, Robert Moses wielded significant influence; according to Robert Caro (in his Moses biography The Power Broker), Impellitteri deferred to Moses on all matters of appointments and policy and is described as a puppet on Robert Moses' strings. The Italian author Carlo Levi documented the mayor's 1950 visit to his birthplace in Sicily.

Impellitteri ran for a full term in 1953. He was defeated in the Democratic primary by then Manhattan Borough President Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Although New York City Comptroller Lazarus Joseph usually sided in the New York City Board of Estimate with Impellitteri during the latter's term in office, Joseph supported Wagner for the Democratic nomination.

Later career and retirement
After becoming mayor, Wagner appointed Impelliteri a New York City Criminal Court judge. He retired from the bench in 1965. Following the death of his wife in 1967, he lived at the New York Athletic Club's City House on Central Park South. After he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1983, he maintained his Athletic Club residence but primarily resided in convalescent homes, most notably the Carolton Convalescent Hospital in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Philanthropy
Impelliteri became a patron of The Lambs Club in 1949.

Death and burial
He died of heart failure on January 29, 1987, at Bridgeport Hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Impellitteri was buried at Mount Saint Peter Catholic Cemetery in Derby, Connecticut.

title: Vincent R. Impellitteri