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Romance language most similar to Latin. | ||
Tags: Romance Languages | Latin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 5939 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes  | Message 17 of 42 25 January 2009 at 4:31am | IP Logged | ||
Latin in Italy itself had received foreign influence, particularly by the Germanic invaders in the north and Greek and Arabic in the south. According to wikipedia "Italian is considered to be one of the closest resembling Latin in terms of vocabulary, though Romanian most closely preserves the noun declension system of Classical Latin, and Spanish the verb conjugation system (see Old Latin), while Sardinian is the most conservative in terms of phonology.". Edited by Alkeides on 25 January 2009 at 4:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tim.mccravy Newbie United States Joined 5571 days ago 19 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 18 of 42 27 January 2009 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Italian preserves the purest vulgar Latin vocabulary. Sardinia was colonized by the Romans before the /K/ to /S/ shift in the Latin C before E or I, and also preserves very closely an earlier Latin vocabulary, so I suppose its closest to classical Latin. Sardinian pronouns developed differently, too, not being derived from Illus/Ille/Illa, etc. I suppose the island was somewhat isolated.
Romanian perserved a remnant of the Latin case system, but that's probably because the Slavs who settled near Romania spoke languages which relied heavily on case, but Romanian also absorbed a good bit of Slavic vocabulary and some slavic structures alien to the Romance languages (attaching the definite article to the end of nouns, for instance). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tim.mccravy Newbie United States Joined 5571 days ago 19 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 19 of 42 27 January 2009 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wikipedia is a bit misleading here. Although its true that Spanish and Portuguese did preserve a very complex verb system, the the most complex tenses in Spanish aren't formed the way they were in Latin. Ibero-romance created new compound tenses following infinitive verbs with forms of "habere," and then "haber" gradually turned into an ending. "fabulare-habeo" for instance, became hablare in Spanish. The conditional tense was created the same way, and in fact didn't even exist in Latin. And then you have to consider that Spanish is rife with compound tenses, also (he hablado, hubiera hablado, habia hablado, etc). Not to mention that these tenses also exist in other romance languages, often formed the same way, they've just fell into disuse. The passe compose, for instance, still exists as a literary tense in French.
According to wikipedia "Italian is considered to be one of the closest resembling Latin in terms of vocabulary, though Romanian most closely preserves the noun declension system of Classical Latin, and Spanish the verb conjugation system (see Old Latin), while Sardinian is the most conservative in terms of phonology.".[/QUOTE] 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6494 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 42 28 January 2009 at 3:01am | IP Logged | ||
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As I have written before Romanian has preserved some of the distinctions of Latin in the nominal system, but not necessarily the actual content. The neuter has little to do with Latin neutrum, as it is a combination of masculine singular and feminine plural. The cases nominative/accusative and genetive/dative (plus traces of a vocative) correspond rather closely with the system in Greek which may be reason enogh that it has survived. The point to investigate here would be whether the decline and fall of the more elaborate system Ancient Greek happened before or concurrently with the parallel developments in Romanian. I have no idea whether this is the case, and there may even be too few surviving sources from the critical period to give an answer to that. But it is not the only case where Greek and Romanian have developed along the same lines, cfr. the weakening of the infinitive.
Edited by Iversen on 28 January 2009 at 3:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6063 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 21 of 42 28 January 2009 at 9:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Languages in the Balkans are considered to share a number of features, presumably resulting from mutual contact. It is quite likely, in my amateur opinion, that Romanian was influenced by Greek, including in declension. Resemblances to Classical Latin declension would be a coincidence.
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| Olekander Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5674 days ago 122 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, French, Russian | Message 22 of 42 29 January 2009 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a quick note "Le passé composé" is not the tense you meant to talk about, the purely literary tense is the past historique, or "passé simple".
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| tim.mccravy Newbie United States Joined 5571 days ago 19 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 23 of 42 30 January 2009 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Just a quick note "Le passé composé" is not the tense you meant to talk about, the purely literary tense is the past historique, or "passé simple". "
That's right, sorry, I got them mixed up. Again, College french was never my real "language love" I suppose... :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kerol Bilingual Hexaglot Newbie Spain Joined 5914 days ago 13 posts - 24 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, English, Italian, Portuguese | Message 24 of 42 24 July 2009 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Where was Latin from? The Latium. It happens that names usually show the origin. So the answer is clear. The Lazio. (Let's take into account though that Standard Italian was based on Tuscan, and not the Latium)
But yep, probably it sounded closer to Sardinian. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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