Latin!!

I've just found out why the word bellus, meaning beautiful, always confused me with the Latin word bellum, which means war!! This has actually bothered me for a while, yet I've constantly forgot to research it!

When I studied Latin I only read and spoke in Classical Latin- a big difference between Classical and "familiar" Latin (called Vulgar Latin or "popular" Latin) is the loss of certain grammatical particles, like ergo, quid, quod, quidem, etc. Some words changed completely, like bellum, which changed to guerra in the later Latin, which is the basis for the word guerrila. Now, the Classical Latin word for "beautiful" is pulcher- and in my classes I always wanted to say that bellum was the word for beautiful, and it was hard to remove my thoughts from that connotation (so I always thought "beautiful war" instead of just "war"). BUT- I now know that the Vulgar Latin word for beautiful is in fact bellus! If you know Latin, you can see why I confused the two- it was because of the declensions, yet that threw me off as well!

SO- old word for war was bellum, new word for beautiful was bellus.

Another case solved! *smokes pipe*