34 Facts About Latin

Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages.

Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire.

Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders, six or seven noun cases, five declensions, four verb conjugations, six tenses, three persons, three moods, two voices, two or three aspects, and two numbers.

The Latin alphabet is directly derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets.

Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken at that time among lower-class commoners and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence and author Petronius.

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Late Latin is the written language from the 3rd century and its various Vulgar Latin dialects developed in the 6th to 9th centuries into the modern Romance languages.

Medieval Latin was used during the Middle Ages as a literary language from the 9th century to the Renaissance, which then used Renaissance Latin.

Latin has greatly influenced the English language and historically contributed many words to the English lexicon after the Christianization of Anglo-Saxons and the Norman conquest.

In particular, Latin roots are still used in English descriptions of theology, science disciplines (especially anatomy and taxonomy), medicine, and law.

Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin and were originally the popular and informal dialects spoken by various layers of the Latin-speaking population.

Vulgar Latin began to diverge into distinct languages by the 9th century at the latest, when the earliest extant Romance writings begin to appear.

Latin is taught at many high schools, especially in Europe and the Americas.

Variety of organisations, as well as informal Latin 'circuli', have been founded in more recent times to support the use of spoken Latin.

Latin is still spoken in Vatican City, a city-state situated in Rome that is the seat of the Catholic Church.

Works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part, in substantial works or in fragments to be analyzed in philology.

Wheelock's Latin has become the standard text for many American introductory Latin courses.

Latin was or is the official language of European states:.

Ancient pronunciation of Latin has been reconstructed; among the data used for reconstruction are explicit statements about pronunciation by ancient authors, misspellings, puns, ancient etymologies, the spelling of Latin loanwords in other languages, and the historical development of Romance languages.

Thus the nn in Classical Latin "year" is pronounced as a doubled as in English unnamed.

The acute accent, when it is used in modern Latin texts, indicates stress, as in Spanish, rather than length.

Long vowels in Classical Latin are, technically, pronounced as entirely different from short vowels.

Thus, Latin 'siccus' becomes 'secco' in Italian and 'siccu' in Sardinian.

Old Latin had more diphthongs, but most of them changed into long vowels in Classical Latin.

Syllables in Latin are signified by the presence of diphthongs and vowels.

Latin was written in the Latin alphabet, derived from the Etruscan alphabet, which was in turn drawn from the Greek alphabet and ultimately the Phoenician alphabet.

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Classical Latin did not contain sentence punctuation, letter case, or interword spacing, but apices were sometimes used to distinguish length in vowels and the interpunct was used at times to separate words.

Latin is a synthetic, fusional language in the terminology of linguistic typology.

Regular Latin noun belongs to one of five main declensions, a group of nouns with similar inflected forms.

Latin lacks both definite and indefinite articles so can mean either "the boy is running" or "a boy is running".

Latin sometimes uses prepositions, depending on the type of prepositional phrase being used.

Irregular verbs in Latin are esse, "to be"; velle, "to want"; ferre, "to carry"; edere, "to eat"; dare, "to give"; ire, "to go"; posse, "to be able"; fieri, "to happen"; and their compounds.

Six tenses of Latin are divided into two tense systems: the present system, which is made up of the present, imperfect and future tenses, and the perfect system, which is made up of the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect tenses.

Some Latin verbs are deponent, causing their forms to be in the passive voice but retain an active meaning: hortor, hortari, hortatus sum.

The specific dialects of Latin across Latin-speaking regions of the former Roman Empire after its fall were influenced by languages specific to the regions.