In Latin, "stō, stare" retained the meaning "to stand", until local forms of Vulgar Latin began to use it as a copula in certain circumstances. Today, this survives in that several Romance languages (Galician-Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan) use it as one of their two copulae, and there is also a Romance tendency for a past participle derived from "*steh2-" to replace the original one of the copula (this occurs in French, Italian and the main dialects of Catalan). See also Romance copula.