If you were to create a language with Italian vocabulary and Romanian grammar, how close would it be to Latin?
Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at
4:36 am
It's known that Italian has the closest vocabulary to Latin, and Romanian has the closest grammar. If you were to put them together, just how close would you be to recreating Latin (obviously, Latin's still around - I'm just asking this out of fun).
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Tagged with: grammar • latin • vocabulary
Filed under: Written and Spoken Latin
I don’t know how this is "known", because it is not true in any general sense. It is true of some specific details of Romanian that it is a bit like Latin (having noun cases mostly), but in many other ways Romanian is like the surrounding Balkan languages. But anyway it is also known (and this is REALLY known) very many features of Latin are either lost in ALL Roman languages (e.g., the word equus ‘horse’, the future tense like amabo, the tendency to put the verb at the end, the partcle -que ‘and’, the ablative case, most of the case endings even for the case that Romanian has but uses different endings for, and millions of other features) or retained in some languages other than Italian and Romanian (e.g., the word equa ‘mare’, which only survives in Spanish as yegua). So no putting these two together would not give you anything like Latin.
you would be very very close friend
One big mistake in the answer of Alaric. Romanian differs dramatically from the so called Balkan languages. Where is the relation between Romanian and Bulgarian, Bosnian, Croatian,Serbian, Albanian or Greek?
Probably not as close as you would think – basically, it sounds like you would just take Italian and add a little more complexity to the grammar. I am not familiar with Romanian, but I am sure that it is not nearly as difficult as Latin. All of the Romance languages lost a lot of the grammar when the Latin language broke down, as Latin has a very complex case system and a subjunctive that is an absolute nightmare. Depending on the type of clause, or whether it is fact or opinion that is being stated in the same type of clause, knowing when to use the subjunctive and when not use it can be very difficult. As seen in later authors, its use was not consistent with how it was used by earlier authors. So even the Romans had difficulties with their own language. (We are having this exact same problem in English, by the way, just in the reverse. The later Romans used the subjunctive when it wasn’t required and we don’t use it when it is.) Perhaps your re-creation might be somewhat close to Medieval Latin, as by that point the language had broken down somewhat, but nothing earlier.
t’s not true that Italian has the closest vocabulary to Latin, the closest language to latin is SARDINIAN, a language spoken by one million people on an italian island in the center of mediterranean sea
there they speak a language that looks like the latin spoken by the ancient romans