Hello. I am wondering specifically about the derivation of facultas, but also in a wider context, about words similarly derived from adjectives in -ilis. From what I have found to read about this, -ul was the pre-Early Latin (or, "Archaic Latin", as derived from Proto-Italic, if one can say that) nominative neuter form of said -ilis, replaced by the time of Classical Latin by -ile. Abstract nouns like facultas and difficultas passed through Early and into Classical Latin from the Archaic tongue in those forms. What I am wondering, is: what did archaic declentives such as facul and difficul actually mean? Were they substantivizations of the adjectives, and so essentially nouns, or did they retain their adjectival meaning in being suffixed with -tas? I rather tend to think the former, since there would seem to have to be some semantic shift in the stem word for (for instance) the meaning of facultas to be differentiated from that of facilitas. In other words, it seems likely to myself that facultas "ability" < facul "the able (one)", a normal substantivization of facilis, rather than facultas "ability" < facul "easy", which seems to give semantic problems. Please give me some feedback/discuss.