Inheritance and succession

The fifteenth entry is a substituição vulgar, and the word that stops an English reader is the one that looks easiest. Vulgar in Portuguese is a flat, unloaded adjective meaning common, ordinary, the everyday sort: um caso vulgar is a run-of-the-mill case, and o nome vulgar de uma planta is the name people use rather than the one the botanist uses. Latin vulgaris said exactly that, from vulgus, the crowd, and the clause on this page is named accordingly: it is the plain kind of substitution, the one that simply says who inherits if the person named first cannot. English took the same word and let it slide into a verdict on manners, so that « vulgar » now says coarse, and says it about a person. The older sense survives only where a fixed phrase has sheltered it, and there it is unmistakable: « Vulgar Latin » is the Latin of ordinary speakers, « a vulgar fraction » is a common fraction and nothing worse, and « the vulgar tongue » was the language everybody actually spoke. So when a civil-law text in English writes « vulgar substitution », nothing rude is being alleged about anybody.