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Revision as of 02:00, 20 September 2002

Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire.

Latin is the ancestor of all Romance languages, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. Moreover, Latin was a lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, being eventually replaced by French in the 18th century and English in the late 19th. It remains the formal language of the Catholic Church to this day.

Latin has an extensive flectional system, which mainly operates by appending endings to a fixed stem. Inflection of nouns and adjectives is called declension, and of verbs, conjugation. There are 5 declensions of nouns, and 4 conjugations for verbs. The 7 noun forms are nominative (used for subjects), genitive (show possession), dative (indirect objects), accusative (direct objects), ablative (used with some prepositions), vocative (used to address someone), and locative (shows place).

Romance languages are not derived from Classical Latin but rather from Vulgar Latin. One difference between Latin and Romance is that Romance had distinctive stress whereas Latin had distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo logudorese, there is distinctive length of consonants and stress, in Spanish only distinctive stress, and in French even stress is no longer distinctive.

Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that Romance languages have, excluding Romanian, lost their case endings in most words (some pronouns being exceptions). Romanian is still equipped with a several cases (though some, notably the ablative, are no longer represented).

Latin and English

Latin grammar is not reflected in English. Attempts to make English grammar fit Latin rules -- such as the imaginary prohibition against the split infinitive -- have not worked. However, as many as half the words in English come to us through Latin, including many words of Greek origin, not to mention the thousands of French, Spanish, and Italian words of Latin origin that have also enriched English.

• Phonemes
• Declension
• Conjugation
• Phrases
• Lexicon

Please note that there is also a Latin Misplaced Pages

See also: Latin literature, Latin proverbs, Latin phrases, Brocards, Roman, New Latin, Latin names of European cities, Latin names of European rivers.

External links:

• The Perseus Project has many useful pages for the study of classical languages and literatures, including an interactive Latin dictionary.
• Ethnologue report for Latin

Latin (Latinus), was the king of Latins and father of Lavinia who, according to the legend, was the wife of Aeneas.
See Roman Foundation

See also: Latins