 In many descendants, several of the long vowels underwent some form of diphthongization, most extensively in Old French where five of the seven long vowels were affected by breaking.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 '.