![]() Latin had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), while Italian has only masc. What is the difference between Latin and Italian? - Latin didn’t have articles while Italian does. Is Latin closer to Italian or Spanish? - Italian is the closest national language to Latin, followed by Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, and the most divergent being French. … Italian is seen to be one of the closest Romance Languages to Vulgar Latin and resembles it closely in syntax compared to Classical Latin words. Standard Italian arose from Tuscany, evolving directly from Vulgar Latin, and it has evolved little in the last 1000 years. Italian is very similar to Latin in terms of vocabulary. For Italian, Latin remains its most distinct alma mater, or “dear mother.” If you truly wish to understand the living language of Italian, you must first spend some time with a dead language. Italian also has far fewer word borrowings from Germanic languages the barbarian tribes the Roman Empire pushed up against on its frontiers had a tremendous impact on language development once the Roman armies were removed. It also shares some technical translation points that other Romance languages have lost – Italian speakers still make a distinction between “short” and “long” consonants, a factor that most other Romance languages have done away with. But it does share a great deal of vocabulary, still in recognisable form to any Latin speaker. Italian has changed a great deal over the course of fifteen or sixteen centuries since it began to emerge as a distinct language. Of course, it’s misleading to think that Italian is very similar to Latin – if an Italian time-travelled back to the year 1, they would not be able to communicate beyond perhaps a word or two. The spoken version is what eventually evolved into Italian, and so reviewing written texts is often misleading when considering language evolution. In ancient Rome there were two forms of Latin – the spoken, known as Vulgar Latin, and the written, known as Literary Latin (or, often, simply Latin). Of course, if you pick up a book on Latin you may not immediately see how close Italian is to that language. Since Italy was the center of Roman civilisation, Italian was the least corrupted descendent. While the Roman Empire brought (and imposed) Latin onto many far-flung areas, once the empire began to contract and fail, Latin became corrupted by regional dialects, and so languages such as French or Spanish began to form as individual sets. The evolution of Latin into Italian Language is one reason for this. According to the Ethnologue, Lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian. According to many sources, Italian is the closest language to Latin in terms of vocabulary. Latin may be an old language but it influences many modern languages.
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