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Revision as of 14:14, 18 October 2001 by Zundark (talk | contribs) (add links, minor rewording)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Latin is the ancestor of all Romance languages, and was originally spoken only in the city of Rome. The main difference between Latin and Romance is that Romance had distinctive stress whereas Latin had distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo loguodorese, there is distinctive length of consonants and stress, in Castilian only distinctive stress, and in French even stress is no longer distinctive. Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that Romance languages lost the case endings.
Latin grammar
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.
Note: Neuter nouns of all declension classes share two properties:
- The forms for nominative singular and accusative singular are identical.
- The same holds for nominative and accusative plural, they usually both end in -a.
Since this behavior tends to obscure the situation, neuter paradigma words were generally avoided (though this isn't always possible).
/Phrases /Lexicon
- see also Latin literature