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Latin is the ancestor of all Romance languages, and was originally spoken only in the region around Rome called Latium. The formal language of the Roman Empire, Latin is the formal language of the Catholic Church up until this day. Moreover, Latin was 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.
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).
The main 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 Castilian only distinctive stress, and in French even stress is no longer distinctive.
Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that Romance languages have, with the exception of Romanian, lost their case endings. Romanian is still equipped with a several cases (though some, notably the ablative, are no longer represented).
See also Latin literature, Latin proverbs, Latin phrases, Roman, New Latin.
External link:
- The Perseus Project, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ , has many useful pages for the study of classical languages and literatures, including dictionaries (which are rather hard to find, so here's a link: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/resolveform?lang=Latin ).
Latin, king of Latins and father of Lavinia who, according to the legend, was the wife of Aeneas.
See Roman Foundation