Of these modern languages, Romanian, not Italian, remains the closest living language to the original
The closest living common language to Latin is Italian.
It can be argued that Romanian is close to Latin in terms of grammar but Portuguese is closest in vocabulary.
Romanian is more conservative than other Romance languages in nominal morphology. Romanian has preserved declension, collapsing Latin’s five cases into two, the nominative/accusative and genitive/dative, and retains the neuter gender as well. However, the verbal morphology of Romanian has shown the same move towards a compound perfect and future tense as the other Romance languages. While most parts of the Romanian grammar and morphology are based on Vulgar Latin, there are however some features that are only shared with other languages of the Balkans and cannot be found in other Romance languages.
The languages of this linguistic area belong to distinct branches of the Indo-European languages: Bulgarian and Albanian, and in some cases Greek and Serbian.
Among the shared features, there are the postponed definite article, the syncretism of genitive and dative cases, the formation of the future and perfect tenses, as well as the avoidance of infinitive.
Up to 20% of the vocabulary of Romanian is of Slavic origin. This had originally been much larger but there was an attempt in the 19th century to get rid of these Slavonisms. Romanian linguists made an effort to re-Latinize their language by incorporating words from French and Italian. About 38% of the number of words in Romanian are of French or Italian origin. About 300 words found only in Romanian (in all dialects) or with a cognate in the Albanian language are generally thought to be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to the pastoral life (for example: balaur=dragon; brânză=cheese; mal=shore). Some linguists believe that in fact Albanians are Dacians who were not Romanized, and migrated south. Many words in Romanian have also been borrowed from Greek, Hungarian, Turkish and German, etc.
The fact that Romania has, for most of its history, been subjugated to
the control of various empires has allowed the Romanian language to
lose much of its original Latin vocabulary.
That’s nonsense. Only an Italian nationalist would claim that
or an ignorant person who assumes that Italian would be the closest
simply because Rome is in Italy…(ignoring all the history of Italy from the invasion of the Visigoths to its reunification in the 19th century).
That’s nonsense. Only an Italian nationalist would claim that
or an ignorant person who assumes that Italian would be the closest
simply because Rome is in Italy…
That’s right! Only those damn Italian nationalists would have the gall to make statements like this! We need to declare martial law! Someone needs to empower a posse commitatus so that we can hunt these people down and drag them through the streets like the dogs they are! I bet these ignorant nationalists even resort to ad hominem attacks against the impeccable logic of others!
The chutzpah! The effrontery!
Accipere quam facere injuriam praestat .
-FV
I dare say that this debate is slightly immaterial.
I managed rather well with English and French; I used my knowledge of French and Latin as a stepping stone to Spanish.
There are certain advantages to knowing English (especially technical scientific/medical terminology), which have been directly borrowed from Latin. I suppose that each of the Romance languages have their own bit of grammar, vocabulary and syntax from Latin.
My advice to you is to learn those languages which are your focus, then move to Latin, then to the other Romance languages.
On sait que c’est le francais qui est le plus comme le latin parce que c’est la plus belle langue du monde! Et puis c’est le latin. C’est vrai parce que je dis ca! Le francais vient directement du latin vulgar … euh, non, pas du tout! Le francais n’est pas du latin vulgar, comment peut-on dire que le francais est une langue vulgare?! Le francais est une langue parfaite, unique! Il vient du peuple francais, le peuple le plus intelligent du monde…
Translation : I am quite amused by this thread.
Ben Franklin’s advice is to study a Romance language before studying Latin. Having never studied Latin, I shall not add my opinion.
Viuat Ben!
… heu, mortuus, maledicte.