Which romance language is most similar to latin

I haven't heard the "myth" in a long time, but I know that Romanian has retained Latin style declensions while no other Romance language has. That makes Romanian grammatically very close to Latin and it also means that when one speaks Romanian they are following speech patterns and inflections that are most similar to Latin; at least as far as I understand it.

There are also a handful of original Latin derived words that are preserved in Romanian that are not evident in other Romance languages. So, which is "most similar" would seem to come down to what we are measuring it against. There are certainly "Latin uniquenesses" present in Romanian, but while that perhaps makes it "special" it doesn't necessarily make it "most similar" as you have pointed out.

Just curious, why is this something you're passionate about? Originally Posted by Pink Jazz. Location: near bears but at least no snakes. Originally Posted by kevxu. The reason the myth worked and got circulated was because most people did not know that Romanian was a Latin-root language, so the myth was simply used as an exaggerated form of "Did you know Romanian evolved from Latin? Originally Posted by jtur I love debunking myths is all.

Mario Pei's scores are a composite evaluation using all criteria. I don't know how much weight he gave to each criteria, however, his scorecard seems to not show any bias. Furthermore, it is not justified to assert that something that is widely held is absolutely not true, merely because one authority in this case, Mario Pei expressed a different opinion based on a metric that cannot be empirically shown to be any more accurate or authoritative than any others. It may well be true that in very general terms, Romanian is closer to Latin than any other language, if the subjective criteria are not those selected by Dr.

Pei in his analysis. Linguistics is not an exact science, and the definition of "close" is never fully agreed upon by lingusts. Furthermore, Pei compares the modern languages only with Classical Latin, which was not the spoken Latin that would have influenced the modern languages of farflung parts of the Roman Empire.

It is quite possible that modern Romanians would have no trouble understanding the Vulgar Latin that was spoken by common people of the Roman Empire. We do not know because little is known of Vulgar Latin. Noup,French is like the adopted child in the Latin family while the others are pure blood latin sister countries. Also from all the latins french are the most c Have been traveling to all the Latin countries including France ,very disappointed by this nation ,as they think about themselves the best country in the world which obviously it s not even in top The sardinian language is the closest.

The answer is relatively simple, each Romance language retains some things from ancient Latin that the others may not. If your native language is a Romance language, or you studied one relatively well, you can read and pick out words,phrases and passages in Latin that you can comprehend or figure out to make sense.

However, without good knowledge of Latin itself, one could not read and understand it fully. After all, it is an ancient language and has been "dead" for centuries! For the results to be less biassed, it would be interesting to compare latin to each country old language pool, before the standardization of the vocabulary which imported words from other languages. For example, in romanian there were two main periods that influenced the language. First, the use of the slavon-chirilic alphabet and second, the use of the latin alphabet.

So I think that collecting the archaic words would be a better approach. Im sure the result would be more interesting. Closest living languages to Latin are: italian language first , romanian language second , spanish language third. It is essentially vulgar latin. This is well known.

Roman soldiers were isolated in mountain villages. It changed very little. I watched an entire tv show dedicated to the similarities on etymology and morphology of this now endangered language.

If I find it, I'll post it here. That is certainly not the Lords prayer in any celtic language that's for sure Funnily enough though, Welsh inherited a lot of Latin nouns for new ideas How similar your current language is to that of the invadors who conquered your ancestors is only interesting for a tourist, during its initial time in the country. What is really interesting is the quality of life most people have in that country. The closest language to latin is vulgar latin.

Nobody can prove a thing. Linguistics, history, archaeology and other sciences are at different sides on this matter. History was written by the winners. Maybe 3 or 2 thousands years ago we were speaking various forms of one language and we were able to understand each other.

These talks lead nowhere. Have a good life everyone! Vulger Italian of the Legionares that conquored and moved in on Portugal were more like Occitanian. Southern French sounds like Detroit. From this text , there is clear that in order to make thois comparison and draw a conclusion, a certain number of criteria were established. In order to combine these criteria and draw a final conclusion it is a question of what weight one put for each citeria and ponder them.

English has a tremendous number of Latin direct or indirect words, but ypou van not understand it. Do you know why? Because of the grammar. A language is more stable as its grammar is stable and beginns to change when grammar begins to change.

Everyone here experimented in his own contries that whe moving to various region, they had a problem in the beginning understanding the local verncular.

That was due to different words and different pronounciation. Once they learned the local words and pronounciation, there was no longer a problem. Because the grammar was the same. Absolutely pent subject matter, appreciate it for selective information. This comment section is in dire need for cleaning, until then, unsubscribed. Thanks for sharing out this content it are really fastidious. Please have your say and write a comment. Comment rules: 1 Please write something relevant to the post.

Romance languages are split into two groups, Western and Eastern. Grammar :. There is a common belief that Romanian is the closest language to Latin, but Romanian is probably only the closest in grammar.

Romanian preserved certain features of Vulgar Latin grammar that other Romance languages lost. But, the pronunciation and vocabulary is not as similar to Latin when compared to Italian or Spanish. This is because Romanian was influenced by the surrounding Slavic languages. Pronunciation :. According to Wikipedia, Sardinian is the closest living language to Latin in phonology. There are ten vowels in Latin; a,e,i,o,u short and a,e,i,o,u long. In continental Romance languages the short vowels e,i,o and u evolved into different sounds while in Sardinian the short vowels evolved and pronounced as long vowels.

This probably helped to retain the original pronunciation. Image by Piermario. Vocabulary :. According to Wikipedia, Italian is the closest living language to Latin in vocabulary. This is because other Romance languages were influenced by their native Germanic, Slavic or Celtic languages such but in Rome, Latin was their native language.

Image by Gerald Queen. Heritage :. Sardinian is the least evolved Romance language because the island was isolated from the changes that continental Vulgar Latin went through. Romance Language 'Family Tree'. According to a study by Mario Pei, this is the percentage of difference between Romance languages and Latin:.

Romanian Personally, I don't find it surprising that Italian is the closest because Latin originally came from Italy. More information and resource list :. Comparative grammar of the Romance languages - Nativlang. Vulgar Latin - Wikipedia. Romanian grammar - Wikipedia. Classification of Romance languages - Wikipedia. People state that Romanian is closest in some aspects grammar mainly , and that to learn a romance language studying latin may give you a leg up which in my opinion just study the language , but for what language would this be uniquely bad for?

This question is a very difficult one, since there is no clear way of measuring how much a language has changed. Also, some traces are kept by some and other traces by other languages, it means that some have been phonetically more conservative, while others, morphologically, syntactically etc.

For instance, romanian has changed a lot phonectically speaking, more than italian did, but it retains a simplified version of latin's noun case inflections. Asking a question like that is like asking which sibling looks more like their parents.

One might say one of them have the hair that looks like her mother's, othe might say he has his dad's eyes, or even that she has the same personality as her father, but they all have different characteristics of their parents — none of them looks more like the other in a meaningful way.

That's why you see so many different answers for this question, it is a matter of how do you analyse the languages to compare them. It also depends on which dialect of a certain language you're comparing. EDIT: you said in your question that portuguese and french may be good candidates for least similar because of their nasal vowels, however, it is not a good argument because it is known that classical latin had nasal vowels as well, to make it even more complicated. French is a good candidate for the most evolved form of Latin.

I'd love to put all the linguists who made those claims together in a small room and make them come to some sort of agreement. Be aware that these are contradictory statements.

Obviously, they can't be all correct -- but there could be some truth to all of them. However, it does reinforce the saying that you shouldn't believe everything you read or hear -- even if what you hear comes straight from professional sources.

Note that, from all the above statements, one language that's conspicuously absent is French. Does that mean French is the least similar to Latin? There are also several French descendants such as creole languages that are farther from Latin.

Do those count as Romance languages? Some people will say yes, some people will say no. It's not a clear-cut answer. However, since there are no shortages of "This is the language closest to Latin" claims, and I've yet to hear one for French, makes me think that, well, French may be the best fit as an answer to your question -- barring any additional linguistic archaeology. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

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