# Latin/Italian: How similar are they?



## Alwaysconfused

I keep hearing that these two languages are very similar...
-but just _how _similar are they *really?


*-G.


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## MidlandsMezzo

Hi

Not so similar that modern Italians would find ancient Latin easy to understand.    I have some knowledge of both languages as I studied Latin to final school exam level and have a working knowledge of colloquial Italian.   

The similarity is mostly in the roots of words - if you know the Latin word it sometimes makes it possible to have a good guess at what the modern Italian word means.

One of the peculiarities of Latin is that there are no words equivalent to a or the and that the verb often comes at the end of a sentence.   The words are also inflected, which means that the nominative, dative, accusative and genitive cases have special word endings which indicate the meaning.    In effect, this means that fewer words are required in Latin to express what would make for a longer sentence in Italian or English.    In modern Italian words are inflected to show singular and plural and genders.

English has many words with roots from Latin and also from Germanic languages and Norman French.   

Hope this is of some help to you.

Regards

MidlandsMezzo


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## Etcetera

I used to study Latin in my first year at the University, and I am studying Italian currently, though very slowly.  And to me the languages seem to be pretty similar: very often I can guess the meaning of a word just because it looks like a similar Latin word. But the grammar structures of the languages differes a lot.


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## Alwaysconfused

Ah, okay.
That's pretty sweet! Thanks to both!
-G


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## MidlandsMezzo

You're very welcome!

Regards

MidlandsMezzo


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## Riccardino

I studied Latin for two years, and am in my second year of Italian. I've never confused the two, mostly because of varying endings. 

The only thing from Latin that has seemed to help a lot is the 3rd principal part of a Latin verb tends to correspond well with its form in the Italian passato remoto.


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## Claire Steiner

In addition to the differences mentioned above, Italian has an extra tense, the Past Anterior, that does not appear in Latin. Italian also has a comapative degree above superlative, which is very difficult to translate into English.


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## modus.irrealis

I don't know if this means anything, but in books about the Romance languages in general, I've often come across the opinion that the Romance languages are all closer to each other than any is to Latin. And personally, knowing a little Latin and a little French, when I've looked at Italian I've thought more in terms of "hey, it's French with different words" than "hey, it's Latin with different words."

I would say that the cases are what give Latin the most different feel for me, since for me it makes Latin have a different kind of grammar than Italian does. Also the reconstructed pronunciation for Latin gives it a different sound than Italian too, in my opinion of course.


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## Alwaysconfused

okay, so...
What about the lay out of the two?
Same/Different order...?


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## claudine2006

I'm Italian and I've studied Latin at school for six years. Latin is not easy at all, even if you are Italian. It's useful because it helps you to understand the etymology of a lot of Italian words, but its grammar is quite difficult. For example, Latin has got _cases_ (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Ablative) that have disapperead in modern Italian.


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## duckie

If Latin is Italian with cases it's like taking all the hard parts of Italian grammar and adding all the hard parts of German grammar and then declaring that no pronounciation exist! People's ideas of fun differs


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## MidlandsMezzo

Hi

Another complication ... I am a trained classical singer.    When we sing Mozart (eg masses or requiem) there is always a debate as to whether to use German/Austrian Latin pronunciation, Italian (as in the Vatican/Roman Church) pronunciation or if, as I do, one lives in an English-speaking country, English Grammar school pronunciation (there is a pronunciation system which we had to use when reading/speaking Latin in class).   

To add to our fun, one of my classmates was a German whose knowledge of Latin was superlative but whose English vocabulary was in a developmental stage as he had only moved to Ireland a few months prior to joining our school, so we had such gems as "And Kaiser (Caesar) crossed the Donau (Danube)".

Yep, I agree that Latin seems to have the most difficult elements of Italian and German blended together.    It is no accident that when I studied German in Grammar school that those of us who had studied Latin prior to taking up German did not find it as difficult as those who had no knowledge of Latin.

What fun we had! 

Regards

MidlandsMezzo


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## BlueWolf

Little analysis about similarities and differences:

*WORDS*
The similarity between the words is very high, even if some words change meaning in time (for example, a tipical word, fortuna, that in Italian means "luck" and in Latin "fate"). Other very common words changed too (for example puer/ragazzo (boy)), but they still share the biggest part of the vocabolary.

*GRAMMATIC*
*Nouns
*One of the biggest difference is of course the cases of the nouns. Let's see only one example of this in the two languages:

*Latin                                     Italian                                English
*Lup*us                                    - *Il lup*o                                  *- The wolf (subject)
Lup*i                                       **- Del* lup*o                               *- Of the wolf
Lup*o                                      **- Al* lup*o                                 *- To the wolf
Lup*um                                   *- Il lup*o                                  *- The wolf (object)
Lup*e                                      *- Lup*o                                    *- Wolf (vocative)
Lup*o                                      **- Con* il lup*o                           *- With the wolf
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Lup*i                                       *- I lup*i* - The wolves (subject)
Lup*orum -                              Dei* lup*i                               *- Of the wolves
Lup*ibus -                                 Ai* lup*i                                  *- To the wolves
Lup*os                                    - *I lup*i                                    *- The wolves (object)
Lup*i* - Lup*i                                      *- Wolves (vocative)
Lup*us                                    *- Il lup*i                                    *- The wolves
Lup*ibus                                 - Con *i lup*i                             *- With the wolves

As you see, Italian has only singular and plural, while Latin has six cases for both them. Moreover, Latin didn't have the articles (definitive or indefinitive), while Italian does.
Latin nouns have three genders, while Italian ones have two. Since usually neuter nouns became masculine in Italian, they cause confusion especially for the plural, that it's similar to a feminine singular (ending with -a). However Italian still has some few "neuter" nouns.

*Verbs
*Some tenses are similar to the Italian ones, other aren't. Present and imperfect are very similar for example, while future simple is completely different, since Italian created it from infinitive + present of the verb avere.

*Endings of present
*1st singular: Latin (-o, -io), Italian (-o)
2nd singular: Latin (-as, -es, -is), Italian (-i)
3rd singular: Latin (-at, -et, -it), Italian (-a, -e)
1st plural: Latin (-amus, -emus, -imus), Italian (-iamo)
2nd plural: Latin (-atis, -etis, -itis), Italian (-ate, -ete, -ite)
3rd plural: Latin (-ant, -ent, -unt), Italiano (-ano, -ono)

*Word order
*The deeper difference. The elements of the word in Latin are placed completely different than in Italian. This plus the cases makes a Latin sentence incomprehensible for Italians, even if we understand the single words.


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## claudine2006

MidlandsMezzo said:


> Hi
> 
> Another complication ... I am a trained classical singer. When we sing Mozart (eg masses or requiem) there is always a debate as to whether to use German/Austrian Latin pronunciation, Italian (as in the Vatican/Roman Church) pronunciation or if, as I do, one lives in an English-speaking country, English Grammar school pronunciation (there is a pronunciation system which we had to use when reading/speaking Latin in class).
> 
> MidlandsMezzo


Right, in Italy we use the pronunciation of the Middle Age, in other countries (Spain, for example) they use the pronunciation of the roman empire age.


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## MidlandsMezzo

Hi all

Very interesting to read the more recent posts - I never knew that the Italian Latin pronunciation was of the Middle Ages and that of other countries owed more to Roman (classical) Latin.

Thanks to you all.

Regards

MidlandsMezzo


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## duckie

claudine2006 said:


> Right, in Italy we use the pronunciation of the Middle Age, in other countries (Spain, for example) they use the pronunciation of the roman empire age.



How do they know that?


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## jazyk

Although Italian seems to be the closest to Latin, it has undergone some considerable assimilations that have rendered graphic similarities to Latin less obvious. One example that comes to mind: Latin admittere, Portuguese/Spanish admitir, Italian ammettere.


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## robbie_SWE

I believe that Italian is the closest language to Latin vocabulary than any other, but in all other aspects Italian may be the farthest from original Latin (or Vulgar Latin) than any other Romance language. In the sense of phonology the Sardinian language is the language that is closest to Latin phonology and grammatically Romanian is closest to Latin. Everything is relative! 

 robbie


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## robbie_SWE

jazyk said:


> Although Italian seems to be the closest to Latin, it has undergone some considerable assimilations that have rendered graphic similarities to Latin less obvious. One example that comes to mind: Latin admittere, Portuguese/Spanish admitir, Italian ammettere.


 
...or Romanian *admite* (which seems to have the closest word to the Latin _admittere_ than any other  ).

robbie


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## Outsider

I don't know, in French it's _*admettre*_.


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## robbie_SWE

Outsider said:


> I don't know, in French it's _*admettre*_.


 
Touché Outsider!


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## Outsider

Although, of course, French spelling can be misleading, and pronunciation is what should matter here...


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## DDT

claudine2006 said:


> Right, in Italy we use the pronunciation of the Middle Age, in other countries (Spain, for example) they use the pronunciation of the roman empire age.


Like duckie I am doubtful about that since the correct prononciation is the core of a neverending discussion among classicists...as far as I know there is no clear evidence of the way Latin was pronounced 2000 years ago

DDT


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## modus.irrealis

DDT said:


> Like duckie I am doubtful about that since the correct prononciation is the core of a neverending discussion among classicists...as far as I know there is no clear evidence of the way Latin was pronounced 2000 years ago



I don't know, but it seems to me that there is a general consensus about the main aspects of Classical Latin pronunciation. Maybe there's questions about how early some of the changes in pronunciation occured, so it's tough to say how Augustine spoke, but we know Cicero pronounced the C's in his names as K's.



duckie said:


> How do they know that?



Scholars have all sorts of data they use, from descriptions by Latin speakers themselves, to the way Latin wrote words they borrowed from other langues and how other languages wrote words they borrowed from Latin, to working backwards from the pronunciation of the modern Romance languages.


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## Cnaeius

robbie_SWE said:


> I believe that Italian is the closest language to Latin vocabulary than any other, but in all other aspects Italian may be the farthest from original Latin (or Vulgar Latin) than any other Romance language. In the sense of phonology the Sardinian language is the language that is closest to Latin phonology and grammatically Romanian is closest to Latin. Everything is relative!
> 
> robbie


 
A quite famous and important study of Mario Pei on tonic vowels in words (so referring to phonologic aspects of the language) demonstrated that the closest language to latin, regarding the aspect of tonic vowels, is sardinian, the second italian (so it is not the farthest), in the middle the others, the farthest is French.
Grammatically speaking declensions in latin are only a part of its grammar. Italian, as the other romance languages, has not declensions, but grammatically and most of all syntactically speaking, has a lot of similarities with Latin and fossiles. Romanian, for what i know, has a lot of slavic influence, although it retains a part of latin declensions, but the rest of grammar can be quite far from latin with respect to other romance languages.
In any case i perfectly agree that romance languages can be more similar each other, than they are to latin
Ciao


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## robbie_SWE

Cnaeius said:


> A quite famous and important study of Mario Pei on tonic vowels in words (so referring to phonologic aspects of the language) demonstrated that the closest language to latin, regarding the aspect of tonic vowels, is sardinian, the second italian (so it is not the farthest), in the middle the others, the farthest is French.
> Grammatically speaking declensions in latin are only a part of its grammar. Italian, as the other romance languages, has not declensions, but grammatically and most of all syntactically speaking, has a lot of similarities with Latin and fossiles. Romanian, for what i know, has a lot of slavic influence, although it retains a part of latin declensions, but the rest of grammar can be quite far from latin with respect to other romance languages.
> In any case i perfectly agree that romance languages can be more similar each other, than they are to latin
> Ciao


 
You have some interesting points Cnaeius. I posted that post before actually studying the subject more closely, now I have and I can say that some things that I stated weren't all that correct. From an analysis of the Latin languages and the similarity to Latin (or more precisely Vulgar Latin) by Mario Pei (as you mentioned), the list look like this: 

Sardinian 8%
Italian 12%
Spanish 20%
Romanian 23,5%
Occitan 25%
Portuguese 31%
French 44% 

The numbers represent how much the languages have evolved/changed from the original Vulgar Latin. Apparently Sardinian is the most conservative overall, followed by Italian. But when it comes to grammar Romanian is said to be the most conservative, since the language was isolated from the rest of the Romance world for a long period of time. Sardinian maintained Latin phonology due to its isolation. Only the lexical differences in Romanian differentiates it from Latin, not so much the grammar (except putting an ending to its nouns, mind you Latin had no articles and some other features). 
 
Ciao
 
 robbie


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## Cnaeius

robbie_SWE said:


> But when it comes to grammar Romanian is said to be the most conservative, since the language was isolated from the rest of the Romance world for a long period of time. Sardinian maintained Latin phonology due to its isolation. Only the lexical differences in Romanian differentiates it from Latin, not so much the grammar (except putting an ending to its nouns, mind you Latin had no articles and some other features).
> 
> Ciao
> 
> robbie


 
I would say, to be more precise, that Romanian is the most conservative _in retaining the declensions_. But for the rest of the grammar it can be a very different matter, I do not know if there are numbers as the ones of Mario Pei. I don't think so. There are only considerations (the mine included), some correct, some wrong. And indeed it is a very difficult matter. 
As example Latin has no article but romances have. Included romanian, but in romanian the article is put at the end of the word (lup*ul).* And this feature is not latin. Moreover verbs in romanian are more distant from latin than in the other romance languages.
ciao


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## Outsider

Cnaeius said:


> A quite famous and important study of Mario Pei on tonic vowels in words (so referring to phonologic aspects of the language) demonstrated that the closest language to latin, regarding the aspect of tonic vowels, is sardinian, the second italian (so it is not the farthest), in the middle the others, the farthest is French.


Why make a comparison based on stressed vowels? What's so important about them?

P.S. I really should look into it before commenting any further, but I'm feeling a little skeptical about Mario Pei's numbers, if they'e based on stressed vowels. He claims that Spanish -- which turned several Latin stressed vowels into diphthongs -- has a 20% distance from Vulgar Latin, while Portuguese -- which usually kept the stressed vowels of Vulgar Latin unaltered -- has a 30% distance from it!


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## robbie_SWE

Cnaeius said:


> ...Moreover verbs in romanian are more distant from latin than in the other romance languages.
> ciao


 
What do you mean?? That they are derived from other languages or that they have different tenses?! I can say now that Romanian has the same tenses as the other Romance Languages. The derivation is also mainly from Latin. If you want to compare please check this. 

It's my list of the most common verbs in different languages, including most Romance languages. If you have any questions just let me know!

robbie


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## Cnaeius

robbie_SWE said:


> What do you mean?? That they are derived from other languages or that they have different tenses?! I can say now that Romanian has the same tenses as the other Romance Languages. The derivation is also mainly from Latin. If you want to compare please check this.
> 
> It's my list of the most common verbs in different languages, including most Romance languages. If you have any questions just let me know!
> 
> robbie


 

Certainly they are derived from Latin, but in Romanian the divergence from Latin is higher in the verb conjugations (verbal modes, verbal tenses)! Just have a look to a complete table of conjugations of romanian and compare it to Latin and italian (for example). In any case, i do not know any number of comparison here, only common sense can help
Ciao


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## jazyk

> I can say now that Romanian has the same tenses as the other Romance Languages.


No way, José! Romanian doesn't have a future subjunctive (found in Portuguese and Spanish, but not found in Latin, Italian or French) and an imperfective subjunctive (French doesn't like its imperfective subjunctive very much, _hélas_). Besides, the Romanian subjunctive is identical to the indicative (Slavic influence?) except for the entire conjugation of the verb a fi (to be) and the third person, singular and plural, of all verbs.



> Sardinian 8%
> Italian 12%
> Spanish 20%
> Romanian 23,5%
> Occitan 25%
> Portuguese 31%
> French 44%


I think this is crap.


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## Outsider

I would not count the future subjunctive in such comparisons, as it did not exist in classical Latin.


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## jazyk

> I can say now that Romanian *has the same tenses as the other Romance Languages*.


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## Outsider

Fair enough, Jazyk, but the context of the thread was how similar Italian (and other Romance languages, by extension) are to Latin.


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## jester.

jazyk said:


> I think this is crap.



I agree, although I wouldn't have put it that drastically  

I doubt that such a list can work because there are just too many factors in languages: vocabulary, grammar, morphology, pronunciation, etc.

They can't all be compared in one simple list of percentages. That would, however, in my opinion, be possible if only one element of the language, e.g. vocabulary, is compared.


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## jazyk

> Fair enough, Jazyk, but the context of the thread was how similar Italian (and other Romance languages, by extension) are to Latin.


I wasn't responding to the context of the thread. I responded to Robbie's assertion, which I quoted.


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## robbie_SWE

I agree with you guys on that! I thought the list was bad too, but it is the only list going around. Regarding my comment about the tenses: that came out wrong. I meant to say that Romanian has a lot in common with the other languages apparently not everything, but much. Where it differs, it has to do with something else. I doubt by the way that the subjunctive being identical to the indicative in Romanian is due to Slavic influence.  

Saluti! 

 robbie 

PS: if there's interest, please read this. View attachment VERB CONJUGATION.xls


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## jazyk

> I doubt by the way that the subjunctive being identical to the indicative in Romanian is due to Slavic influence.


What's it due to then? And what do you have against the Slavs?


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## robbie_SWE

jazyk said:


> What's it due to then? And what do you have against the Slavs?


 
I have nothing against Slavs! This is off-topic by the way! Read about the Balkan Sprachbund first. It's geographical and the Greek language has it too.


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## Cnaeius

robbie_SWE said:


> I agree with you guys on that! I thought the list was bad too, but it is the only list going around. Regarding my comment about the tenses: that came out wrong. I meant to say that Romanian has a lot in common with the other languages apparently not everything, but much. Where it differs, it has to do with something else. I doubt by the way that the subjunctive being identical to the indicative in Romanian is due to Slavic influence.
> 
> Saluti!
> 
> robbie
> 
> PS: if there's interest, please read this. View attachment 3777


 
Interesting the two xls, but pay attention to italian conjugation  of facere because there are some errors. Look at www.verbix.com in order to find the correct (more or less) voices and other one. I would correct it but I've not enough time.

About the so called "crap" on Mario Pei numbers: they are crap if referred to what they are not referred, and on this I agree. But if we take them in the meaning in which they were published by Mario Pei study (phonological aspect of the language)....saying they are crap is not very serious I'm sorry...It is quite simple looking who was Mario Pei. 
Ciao


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## robbie_SWE

Cnaeius said:


> Interesting the two xls, but pay attention to italian conjugation of facere because there are some errors. Look at www.verbix.com in order to find the correct (more or less) voices and other one. I would correct it but I've not enough time.
> 
> About the so called "crap" on Mario Pei numbers: they are crap if referred to what they are not referred, and on this I agree. But if we take them in the meaning in which they were published by Mario Pei study (phonological aspect of the language)....saying they are crap is not very serious I'm sorry...It is quite simple looking who was Mario Pei.
> Ciao


 
  C'è molto comico che fai riferimento al verbix! It's exactly from that website I took the Italian part!!! 

Ciao!

robbie


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## jester.

robbie_SWE said:


> C'è molto comico che fai riferimento al verbix! It's exactly from that website I took the Italian part!!!
> 
> Ciao!
> 
> robbie



You got the wrong conjugation becaused you looked for the wrong verb (facere - which, by the way, doesn't even exist ). The right one is "fare".

Ciao


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## robbie_SWE

jester. said:


> You got the wrong conjugation becaused you looked for the wrong verb (facere - which, by the way, doesn't even exist ). The right one is "fare".
> 
> Ciao


 
OOHHHHHH MY GOD!!!  

How can I do such a mistake??!! I've must have lost my marbles! I apologise to all! 

robbie


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## jazyk

> I have nothing against Slavs! This is off-topic by the way! Read about the Balkan Sprachbund first. It's geographical and the Greek language has it too.


I have, and I speak the languages.


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## duckie

Could someone explain to me what indicates that Sardinian is pronounced the closest to Latin? In other words, what is the pronounciation comparison based on, exactly?


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## Outsider

I suppose that when people say that they are referring to the following characteristics of Sardinian:



> Latin short vowels /i/ and /u/ conserve their original sound (in Italian and all western Romance languages they become [é] and [ó]); for example:
> _siccus_ > _sicu_ 'dry' (Italian secco).
> 
> conservation of sounds [k] and [g] before front vowels (/e/ and /i/) in many (but not all) words; for example: _kentu_ 'hundred'; _dèke_ 'ten' or _gheneru_ 'son in law' (Italian _cento_, _dièci_, _genero_).
> 
> no diphthongization as found in other Romance languages; for example: _potet_ > _podet_ 'he can' (Spanish _puede_); _bonus_ > _bónu_ 'good' (Italian _buòno_)...
> 
> Wikipedia


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## winklepicker

Revived as a result of thread on _status_:



DDT said:


> Like duckie I am doubtful about that since the correct pronunciation is the core of a never-ending discussion among classicists...as far as I know there is no clear evidence of the way Latin was pronounced 2000 years ago


 Quite. Tape-recordings of native Latin speakers are a rarity.  Compare English today with English spoken in Shakespeare's time: many people find the old version hard to understand. Go back to Chaucer (died 1400) and 99% of English natives have to have it translated into modern English.

So we have no idea how Latin was spoken not just 600 years ago - but *1600.* Let alone going right back to 753 BC - 2,760 years ago.

And there can be no answer that holds true from 753 BC to 410 AD, and obtained universally from Hadrian's Wall to the Caspian Sea, and from Mauritania to the Red Sea. Nor one that applies equally to the Latin spoken by the emperor and by the slave who carried out his pisspot.

There never was and never could be ONE pronunciation of Latin - it has to have varied from place to place and from social class to social class. Any answer can only be speculation.

That won't stop the professors from discussing it though.


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## Outsider

winklepicker said:


> Revived as a result of thread on _status_:
> 
> Quite. Tape-recordings of native Latin speakers are a rarity.  Compare English today with English spoken in Shakespeare's time: many people find the old version hard to understand. Go back to Chaucer (died 1400) and 99% of English natives have to have it translated into modern English.
> 
> So we have no idea how Latin was spoken not just 600 years ago - but *1600.* Let alone going right back to 753 BC - 2,760 years ago.


You don't need tape recorders to have an idea of how people pronounced Latin.



winklepicker said:


> And there can be no answer that holds true from 753 BC to 410 AD, and obtained universally from Hadrian's Wall to the Caspian Sea, and from Mauritania to the Red Sea. Nor one that applies equally to the Latin spoken by the emperor and by the slave who carried out his pisspot.
> 
> There never was and never could be ONE pronunciation of Latin - it has to have varied from place to place and from social class to social class. Any answer can only be speculation.


Now you contradict yourself. If it is true that we simply don't know how Latin was pronounced, as you claim, on what basis do you state that there were regional and social variations in its pronunciations?


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## duckie

I never really did understand the claims made on that wikipedia page on Sardinian earlier, with statements such as 'Latin short vowels /i/ and /u/ conserve their original sound' - how is it know what their original sound was in Latin?


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## Outsider

From their spelling.


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## winklepicker

Outsider said:


> You don't need tape recorders to have an idea of how people pronounced Latin.


 
No. But without them it's just that - an idea. Not a fact.



> Now you contradict yourself. If it is true that we simply don't know how Latin was pronounced, as you claim, on what basis do you state that there were regional and social variations in its pronunciations?





> ...how is it know what their original sound was in Latin?





> From their spelling.


 
I suspect you're playing devil's advocate here, Outsider. I'm sure you know quite well that the language of _De Bello Gallico_ is not the language of the Vindolanda tablets, and that the forum inscription from 500 BC differs (a lot actually!) from Vulgar Latin and the language of the Golden Age. _(All these links to Wikipedia - but there are many other sources.)_

You are very good at stimulating the thread with your controversial remarks, but I can't believe you'll make many converts!


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## modus.irrealis

winklepicker said:


> No. But without them it's just that - an idea. Not a fact.



It really depends on what you mean by fact, which is always a problematic concept when you deal with historical science, and reconstructing the pronunciation of a language of a certain time and place is just a part of historical linguistics. You have all sorts of evidence and you try to formulate the best possible hypothesis to explain that evidence (of course, if there's too little evidence, there's not much you can do, but Latin, of all languages, hardly falls under that category). So, unless you're willing to label all investigations into the past as ideas and speculations, I don't see what's all that different about reconstructing pronunciation?

Although I agree with you that pronunciation varied according to era, region, social class, etc., but scholars recognize that and take that into account.


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## Outsider

winklepicker said:


> I suspect you're playing devil's advocate here, Outsider. I'm sure you know quite well that the language of _De Bello Gallico_ is not the language of the Vindolanda tablets, and that the forum inscription from 500 BC differs (a lot actually!) from Vulgar Latin and the language of the Golden Age. _(All these links to Wikipedia - but there are many other sources.)_
> 
> You are very good at stimulating the thread with your controversial remarks, but I can't believe you'll make many converts!


Applying your own standards, the conclusions you're attempting to draw from those texts are "just ideas, not a fact".


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## winklepicker

Outsider said:


> Applying your own standards, the conclusions you're attempting to draw from those texts are "just ideas, not a fact".


True. But I have at least offered some evidence rather than a bland assertion of an unsupported opinion!


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## Outsider

There is evidence about the pronunciation of Latin, as well. You just have to care enough to look for it.


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## Spectre scolaire

If you only look at vocabulary, phonetics and/or morphology I don’t think there is any good answer to this question. You have to go much deeper into the _structure_, if not the _typology_ of the two languages. _BlueWolf_ is alluding to this in his contribution #13 by saying that _word order_ in Latin is fundamentally different. I think I’d like to put more into this than he actually does. In fact, he does not elaborate on this point at all, and yet when he openly admits that _word order_ «makes a Latin sentence incomprehensible for Italians», we should ask ourselves why. 

Latin was a synthetic language, it had six cases and it had the faculty of making huge nominal cluster sentences by heaping all sort of participial constructions on to each other. Italian is an analytic language, and nominal forms of the verb are very limited. Now, of course, one can ask how natural this complexity was being felt during the Roman Golden Age. Certainly, the written language lived a life of its own and Roman authors simply made use of the potential which the language actually offered in order to construct intricate, but extrememly precise sentences.

I don’t think, however, that the structure we meet in Classical Latin was artificial to such a degree that there was a chasm between written and spoken language. Many students of Latin would tend to look at a sentence in Livy as something too amazing to be true. In fact, Livy is absolutely impossible to understand unless you proceed to a proper analysis of each sentence – but, if you have done this so many times that you have got used to the sentence structure, and (of course) have acquired a reasonably large vocabulary, you may be able to read Livy _ex tempore_, and just enjoy it!

The reason why I don’t believe in any particularly artificial character of Classical Latin is that there are modern languages which behave in exactly the same way – in terms of complexity. _Turkish_ is such a language, and it is indeed a very good characteristic to say that «Turkish is some sort of upside down Latin». As Turkish is equally famous among linguists for its stunning regularity, there is a good reason to have a look at this language in order to get a feeling as to how Latin is being felt by, say, _BlueWolf_. And Turkish is actually spoken today – Latin is not!

I think Latin and Italian – from a _typological_ point of view – are so different that any discussion about more superficial features like phonetics or vocabulary will never properly answer the question: «How dissimilar [sic] are they?»


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## epicentro

“A key reason for Latin and Italian not having the same name is the spread of Latin beyond Italy, living rise to further complexes such as French and Spanish. It can, howewer, be argued that Italian bears a greater resemblance to Latin than Modern Greek does to Classical Greek and than contemporary English does to Old English/Anglo-Saxon” (Tom McArthur, “The English Languages”, 1998, Cambridge Univesity Press, p. 88)

“If we take into account both inherited and borrowed Latin vocabulary, THE MOST “ROMANCE” OF THE LANGUAGES IS ITALIAN, AND THE LEAST, RUMANIAN” (Rebecca Posner, “The Romance Languages”, 1996, Cambridge University Press, p. 94)

“Italian is considered by many to be the most beautiful of the world’s languages. As the transmitter of the great culture of the Renaissance, its influence on the other languages of Western Europe has been profound. ITALIAN is one of the Romance languages, and HAS REMAINED CLOSER TO THE ORIGINAL LATIN THAN ANY OF THE OTHERS” (Kenneth Katzner, “The Languages of the World”, p. 66)


“ON LEXICAL AN SYNTACTIC GROUNDS, I regard standard ITALIAN as THE PRIME 
CANDIDATE FOR THE STATUS OF ROMANCE ARCHETYPE, as a language which has most 
in common with each of the others. In some ways IT IS SO CLOSE TO LATIN THAT IS HAS 
EVEN BEEN MISTAKEN FOR A COLLOQUIAL VARIETY OF THE LATIN LITERARY 
LANGUAGE. ROUND THE “INNER CORE” REPRESENTED BY standard ITALIAN, THE OTHER LANGUAGES CLUSTER WITH GREATER OR LESS COHESION”. (Rebecca Posner, “The Romance Languages”, 1996, Cambridge University Press, pp.37-38)



“We can distinguish between a Proto-Romanian period (seventh-ninth centuries), preceding the disintegration into Daco-, Macedo-, Megleno-, and Istro-Romanian, and an Old Romanian period (ninth through early sixteenth centuries), the latter extending from the breakup of the Romanian linguistic unity to the earliest written attestation of Daco-Romanian and MARKED BY MASSIVE SLAVIC LINGUISTIC INTERFERENCE, which has left Romanian a Romance language heavily overlaid with SLAVIC elements (IN ALL PARTS OF ITS LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE). From a typological point of view, ROMANIAN IS CHARACTERIZED BY MANY BALKANISM, MAKING IT A PRIME MEMBER, along with Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian (and only peripherally Serbo-Croatian and Modern Greek), OF THE BALKAN LANGUAGE LEAGUE” (Balazs Nagy, Nagy, János M. Bak, Marcell Sebők, Central European University Press, 1999)


"Specific text examples illustrate the development from Vulgar Latin to Italian on the lexical, morphological and syntactic levels. A comparison with French and Spanish, through the use of parallele texts, reveals the varying degrees of distance to Latin of Romance languages today, with French the fursthest away, Italian the closest and Spanish in a position midway between them" (Di Gunilla M. Anderman, Margaret Rogers, Peter Newmark "Word, Text, Translation") 

"OF ALL THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES of modern Europe, ITALIAN, for obvious reasons, was THE CLOSEST TO LATIN AS SPOKEN AND WRITTEN BY THE ROMANS: awareness of this simple fact led Italian scholars, from the thirteenth century onwards, into self-conscious efforts to purify their own language as a vehicle for composition and criticism by retrospective analysis of models surviving from classical antiquity" (Glynne Wickham, "The Medieval Theatre", Cambridge University Press)

"As for the modern standards, it is generally agreed that ITALIAN STAND CLOSEST TO THE ORIGINAL LATIN AND IS THE MOST CENTRAL, that is, most easily intelligibile to other Romanic speakers" (Robert Clifford
Ostergren, John G. Rice, "The Europeans")

"...But Latin was gradually displaced as the language of intellectual life for some countries in the course of the seventeenth century. Italians (e.g. Galileo) had for many years been ready to tackle the most important issues in their vernacular, but this readiness came in large part from their awareness that ITALIAN WAS THE CLOSEST LIVING LANGUAGE TO LATIN" (D. Garber, M. Ayers, "The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy", Cambridge University Press, 2003)


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## robbie_SWE

Concerning some of your quotes (you didn't have to capitalize the important bits; we're competent enough to perceive them ourselves): 

1. You excluded the work of the Italian-American linguist Mario Pei. He analyzed the evolutionary degree of languages in comparison to their inheritance language Latin (comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation). His results were:


· Sardinian: 8%; 
· Italian: 12%; 
· Spanish: 20%; 
· *Romanian*: 23.5%; 
· Occitan: 25%; 
· Portuguese: 31%; 
· French: 44%.


So "your" theories, according to Pei's data, get punctured. Sardinian (I and many others consider Sardinian as a separate language and NOT an Italian dialect) is much closer to Latin than Italian. 

2. Hate to repeat it again, but even if Romanian was effected by the Slavic languages bordering its linguistic sphere it's still quite interesting that modern Romanian vocabulary consists of up to 90 % Latin words (be it from French, Italian or constructed words) and that grammar is overwhelmingly Latin. 

So I would advise you to read more recent essays and articles on the matter (send me a PM and I'll send you some links). 

Hope you keep in mind that respecting other foreros and their opinions is not an exception, but a rule! 

robbie


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## epicentro

Spectre scolaire said:


> Latin was a synthetic language, it had six cases and it had the faculty of making huge nominal cluster sentences by heaping all sort of participial constructions on to each other. Italian is an analytic language, and


 
Hi, 
I've to tell you that you are wrong. 

Actually all the Indo-European languages are synthetic.

_Italian is obviously a synthetic language._

The fact that Italian has ALSO analytic constructions (as well as all the indo-european languages: also Latin of course) does not mean it is not a synthetic language.


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## epicentro

Spectre scolaire said:


> I think Latin and Italian – from a _typological_ point of view – are so different that any discussion about more superficial features like phonetics or vocabulary will never properly answer the question: «How dissimilar [sic] are they?»


 
Hi again spectre scolaire,  

That's a point of view, but remember Italian is actually a synthetic language before assuming a _typological_ point of view.

When you say that phonetics and vocabulary are not important, I feel the need to let you know that present linguistics considers phonetics as the most characterizing trait of a language. It's not a superficial element at all.
 Differently from you, I think the loss of the cases is the superficial element of comparison. I think the greatest difference between Latin and the Romance languages is actually phonological: the Romance languages have lost the sense of the vowel lenght! But among the NATIONAL Romance languages there is a language that keeps the Latin sense of the consont lenght also as distinctive factor: and this is the Italian language.

Latin: Erat (he was); Errat (he wanders) > Italian: Era (he was); Erra (he wanders)

Greetings!


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## epicentro

robbie_SWE said:


> 1. You excluded the work of the Italian-American linguist Mario Pei. He analyzed the evolutionary degree of languages in comparison to their inheritance language Latin (comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation). His results were:
> 
> · Sardinian: 8%;
> · Italian: 12%;
> · Spanish: 20%;
> · *Romanian*: 23.5%;
> · Occitan: 25%;
> · Portuguese: 31%;
> · French: 44%.


 
Firt of all, 
Goodevening!

1.You ask me not to capitalize but you actually capitalized Rumanian... ;-)

2. I do not exclude Mario Pei, but I excluded the NON-national Languages. Mario Pei considered Italian as the closest NATIONAL language to Latin. Sardinian is one of the Languages of Italy.

3. This you are posting here remind me exactly and article I read on the wikipedia.. Mario Pei works are not recent.



robbie_SWE said:


> So "your" theories, according to Pei's data, get punctured. Sardinian (I and many others consider Sardinian as a separate language and NOT an Italian dialect) is much closer to Latin than Italian.


 
1.I didn't use a theory, I used data and quotes from scholars. On the contrary here I read "theories" from users. But I liked to read their theories. Everyone is free to have his own theories here. That's a good and democratic thing

2.Pei's data confirm Italian is the closest national language to Latin. Sardinian is not an Ialian dialect and noone did ever consider it as an Italian dialect: but it is a language of Italy. 




robbie_SWE said:


> 2. Hate to repeat it again, but even if Romanian was effected by the Slavic languages bordering its linguistic sphere it's still quite interesting that modern Romanian vocabulary consists of up to 90 % Latin words (be it from French, Italian or constructed words) and that grammar is overwhelmingly Latin.


 
1.That's true. Rumanian brought a lot of words from French and also from Italian during the last 150 years. It should be interesting to see how many Latine derivatives Rumanian had before the linguistic reformation.
I read several works on Rumanian and I've usually read at the moment its ordinary vocabulary is 80% Latin (90% seems too much in accordance with what I read and studied). By the way do not confond the direct Slavic derivates which resisted to the attempt to latinize Rumanian as much as possible with the "Slavicisms" and "Balkanism" we can find in the Rumanian phonetics and grammar. Also you have to consider rumanian semantics is not very faithfull to the latin one. About the pronunciation, the Rumanian one sounds very "eastern" to the other neolatin speakes. 

2. As regards the Rumanian grammar I think first of all it reflects the fact Rumanian is a member of the Balkan linguistic Union. And I know enough about the Rumanian grammar, don't worry. Also what you would like to emply.




robbie_SWE said:


> So I would advise you to read more recent essays and articles on the matter (send me a PM and I'll send you some links).


 
Thanks for the suggest, my friend! But I would like to make you notice the works I quoted are recent enough while you quoted a work that is not so recent.

Btw, I would like to start a conversation via PM with you in order to talk about romance languages ecc...

It is a good Idea: at least because it seems we are forgetting the matter of this topic!

So I wait for your PMs ;-)




robbie_SWE said:


> Hope you keep in mind that respecting other foreros and their opinions is not an exception, but a rule!


 
Oh, my friend, I always respect other foreos and their opinion. A regards opinions, I would like to tell you, my dear friend, that I think (this is my personal opinion) Rumanian language is not a matter concerning this topic.



Saluti,

Davide


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## MARIO_08161958

I'm Italian and I can assure you that Latin is not so different from Italian above all concerning how to write a word.
However if you listen to a person who is reading a short piece of Caesar, Cicero or whatelse is really, deeply different from Italian. In fact you won't understand clearly what are the right words told but you will have a general knowledge of what the passage is about.
Also concerning grammar these two languages have not so much in common. In Latin there are cases which suggest you what is the function of the word, Italian has lost cases. If in Latin the position of the words is not too important, in Italian the words must be put with order otherwise we don't understand anything at all!
bye bye


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## robbie_SWE

Have been reading a bunch of articles on the subject and I have to ask something: are we talking about Italian in comparison to Classical Latin or Vulgar Latin? 

If the subject concerns the latter then Italian is the closest (syntax, vocabulary and morphology), even if I agree with MARIO_08161958 that understanding what is said would be much harder. 

I would also have liked to discuss this subject together with all the Romance languages, but I'm to lazy to open another thread (somebody, please take a hint and do it for me! ). 

 robbie


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## Corsicum

*“Sardinian,Italian,Spanish;Romanian,Occitan, Portuguese,French….”*

Just to note that Corsican language is also very closed to Latin language. 
Corsican(Cf ISO) is a spoken and written on the islands of Corsica and northern Sardinia (400 000 locutori Gallurese). 
_"Di matterna latina u Corsu sempre suttu ha "_


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## franz rod

> Just to note that Corsican language is also very closed to Latin language.




Corsican is considered as an Italian dialect.  It's deeply influenced by Tuscan.


Latin/Italian: how different they are?

Well, at first we have to do a distinction between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin:
Classical Latin is quite different from Italian;
Vulgar Latin is very similar to Italian, in fact in two century (first b.C., first a.D.) it changed a lot:

The cases:  the final consonant started to fall, so the order of words and the use of preposition becomes more important due to avoided misunderstanding.

The vocabulary:  The people  use a different vocabulary from the "upper class"

For example:  
Venio in domum  (I come home)
Venio ad casam  (said by people)
Vengo a casa (in Italian) 
domus was the house of upper class, casa was a hut and this word remained in Italian.  Domus remain in word like Duomo ("the house of the Lord)
the consonant of some word like "ad" was assimilated by the consonant of the following word.  In Italian this assimilation produce the doubling of the consonant --> a'kkasa.

The use of infinitive subordinates started to disappeared as in Italian.  We can see this in the text written the late centuries of roman empire.

The pronunce of letter like C and G changed and become similar to Italian.


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## Corsicum

Hi,
Caru franz rod,
Corsican : Language or dialect, if you want, …no matter for this topic.(Cf ISO)
I understand that Latin is the:
_"Mother for some dialects Italo roman and Grandmother for Italian"_
Am I right ?

So, for your demonstration, we can add a step “dialect” :
Now, we have, well alive *“in”* : _“vengu *in* casa”, “veni *in* casa”.o “*in* casa veni”_
Some Italian dialects are more closed to Latin than Italian.(Including way of life)
Speaking about relation ship of Latin language, some Italian dialects are more relevant than Italian.

*Understand Mother to understand Grandmother.*


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## robbie_SWE

franz rod said:


> Corsican is considered as an Italian dialect. It's deeply influenced by Tuscan.
> 
> 
> Latin/Italian: how different they are?
> 
> Well, at first we have to do a distinction between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin:
> Classical Latin is quite different from Italian;
> Vulgar Latin is very similar to Italian, in fact in two century (first b.C., first a.D.) it changed a lot:
> 
> The cases: the final consonant started to fall, so the order of words and the use of preposition becomes more important due to avoided misunderstanding.
> 
> The vocabulary: The people use a different vocabulary from the "upper class"
> 
> For example:
> Venio in domum (I come home)
> Venio ad casam (said by people)
> Vengo a casa (in Italian)
> domus was the house of upper class, casa was a hut and this word remained in Italian. Domus remain in word like Duomo ("the house of the Lord)
> the consonant of some word like "ad" was assimilated by the consonant of the following word. In Italian this assimilation produce the doubling of the consonant --> a'kkasa.
> 
> The use of infinitive subordinates started to disappeared as in Italian. We can see this in the text written the late centuries of roman empire.
> 
> The pronunce of letter like C and G changed and become similar to Italian.


 
Thanks! That's exactly what I wanted: an illustrative example. 
 
This discussion should henceforth deal with the closeness between Italian and Vulgar Latin. Classical Latin should be excluded from this thread and be more efficiently discussed in another thread. 

 robbie


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## franz rod

> Corsican : Language or dialect, if you want, …no matter for this topic



Yes, there's no clear distinction between dialect and language:  every "national language" was at first a "dialect";   for example French was the language spoken in Paris and then it became the language of whole French.
But Corsican dialect was strongly affected by tuscan due to immigration (for example the Napolone family came from Tuscany), political (thanks to Pisa and then to Genova which influenced Corsican also with its own dialect) and economic influences.
In fact Italian is more similiar to Corsican then to the dialect spoken in Milan.




> Some Italian dialects are more closed to Latin than Italian.



Mmm, I don't think so.  The evolution of different dialects is often similar and they infuenced each other.  For example the literature of Sicily influenced also the work of Dante 700 years ago.  The Tuscan of Petrarca and Boccaccio influenced the poetic and prose production in whole Italy. 




> _"Mother for some dialects Italo roman and Grandmother for Italian"_



Why mother of dialects and grandmother of Italian?  We can perfectly read text written in Tuscan 7 or 8 centuries ago without any problem.
However I prefer an another definition:
"Latin is the Italian of 2000 yers ago, Italian is nowdays Latin".


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## Corsicum

franz rod said:


> "Latin is the Italian of 2000 yers ago, Italian is nowdays Latin".



Yes, an elegant "Latin" definition we can apply to Italo-Romance languages

Thanks, Ringrazi


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## montelatici

It would seem to me that the people that live closest to Latium today would today speak a language that is closest to Latin.  But then, let us not let logic get in the way of discourse.


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## Flaminius

*Moderator Note:

Hello to all,

I begin to wonder if this thread has not already had a go at all reasonable arguments regarding this topic.

The thread is now closed lest it should degenerate into a chat about everything but the thread topic.

Cheers,
Flaminius LA moderator
*


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