All the Romance languages have diverged from Classical Latin in different ways. Probably the one which has measurably diverged the least is Sardinian (look it up), which has very few speakers anymore – but even this is debatable. In terms of commonly used words and grammatical features, the fact that standard Italian retains Latin’s most common plural noun endings (-i for masculine, -e (formerly -ae) for feminine) makes it feel rather more Latinate than most of its cousin languages.
ETA: Romanian, like Italian, retains those “-i/-e” plurals, which may be part if why someone upthread found it to be more Latin-like than other a Romance languages.
Igspay tillsay peaksay ay ormfay ofay atinlay. (Or is that “illstay eakspay”?)
Correcting my post above: Apparently, about a million people claim to speak Sardinian, not “a very few.”
Lingua francas, no apostrophe.
Although that feels wrong. It should be Linguae franca, like “courts martial”, “attorneys general” … or “eggs Benedict”
If Italian is Vulgar Latin, aren’t Spanish, French, Romanian, Catalan, etc…?
I mean, they are all languages that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken in their respective regions.
I’d think that the point when the various proto-Romance languages ceased to be mutually intelligible would be the point that Latin really “died”.
Classic literary Latin was the language of the Church, and thereby the language of scholarship in the Christian world from Roman times up through probably the 17th century or so, but it wasn’t really “living” in the sense of having native speakers.
And, FWIW, having taken a bunch of Spanish in school was a LOT more useful in Italy than I’d ever imagined it would be. I could puzzle things out a lot easier in Italian with my Spanish knowledge than I can things in Dutch, which is linguistically pretty close to English. (best way to puzzle Dutch out was to actually read it out loud!)
Indeed. It’s simply incorrect to say that Italian has not changed as much from Latin as Modern English has from Old English. In fact, I doubt you could find many (any?) European languages that have changed as much since 1066 AD as English has.
Since “lingua franca” comes from Italian (or from the original Lingua Franca), and not from Latin, the plural would be “lingue franche” – but that’s really far too obscure for most English-speakers, so “lingua francas” is fine as the plural.
Roughly AD 800.
thanks for the correction.
From what I’ve read, that being mostly the relevant Wiki articles, Sardinian is the most conservative phonetically speaking, as it retains some consonant clusters like /kt/ that have been lost in its sister languages. The incidence of this feature varies with the dialect. Morphologically, however, Romanian seems to be the most conservative as its case system (for ordinary nouns) still exists, although the four or five cases of Classical Latin have merged into two–if memory serves one for nominative and accusative, and the other for genitive, dative, and the rest.
Speaking of languages dying, it was only a few years ago I read about some Native American language that was down to just two surviving native speakers–and they disliked each other intensely. Sometimes languages die before they die!
As early as the third or fourth century there appeared the Appendix Probi, or presumably so, since we only know it today from a transcription of centuries later. At any rate, it shows that features (or “mistakes”, as Probus thought them) already familiar to us from the Romance languages of today were already becoming evident, like mesa for mensa[sup]1[/sup]
as in modern Spanish.
As it was a written document, I would imagine that the Appendix was aimed at others who could read and write, which arguably would mean an elite of sorts–of education anyway, if not the elite. Arguably not even educated classes were keeping Classical Latin alive by then, so we could say it was dead by the earliest days of the Empire, as someone already said.
[sup]1[/sup]Page 7, line 152 of the link.