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Romance language most similar to Latin.

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Iversen
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 Message 9 of 42
16 December 2008 at 6:42pm | IP Logged 
There is also a weekly news broadcast in Latin from Finland.

I personally don't find the Romansch dialects quite as close to Latin as Sardic, - though it has to be said that I haven't yet read a complete grammar for this illdefined bundle of dialects (or languages). But I have a few short books in some of their variants in my possession, and I also have read more on the internet some time ago when we had a thread about that theme, so I'm not just guessing..

Their most prominent trait right now is that they have been through some phonological changes at an early time that have given them a very marked preference for diphtongs instead of single vowels. They belong historically to a group of Northern Italian dialects (or whatever it is) that you rarely hear or read nowadays, but I have read through some of the older documents from that area (including some old documents in Veneto). However in Italy there has clearly been a development towards uniform standard Italian, and Romantsch is so to say the leftovers from this process.

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Alkeides
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 Message 10 of 42
18 December 2008 at 1:06am | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
There is also a weekly news broadcast in Latin from Finland.

I personally don't find the Romansch dialects quite as close to Latin as Sardic, - though it has to be said that I haven't yet read a complete grammar for this illdefined bundle of dialects (or languages). But I have a few short books in some of their variants in my possession, and I also have read more on the internet some time ago when we had a thread about that theme, so I'm not just guessing..

Their most prominent trait right now is that they have been through some phonological changes at an early time that have given them a very marked preference for diphtongs instead of single vowels. They belong historically to a group of Northern Italian dialects (or whatever it is) that you rarely hear or read nowadays, but I have read through some of the older documents from that area (including some old documents in Veneto). However in Italy there has clearly been a development towards uniform standard Italian, and Romantsch is so to say the leftovers from this process.

ScorpioMartianus.com is a Latin podcast with news in Latin, and IMO, he does better than the Nuntii Latini announcers in pronunciation. ;p The site is down currently but he has some YouTube clips

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LittleKey
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 Message 11 of 42
09 January 2009 at 12:22am | IP Logged 
I would say Italian. And besides, it has the word Latin in it.
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William Camden
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 Message 12 of 42
18 January 2009 at 2:07pm | IP Logged 
I have only dabbled in Latin, but I would say Italian is closest (another language I have dabbled in).

Sardinian may be closer but I have no direct knowledge of it at all. Sardinian was already unintelligible to Tuscany Italian speakers in Dante's time, it seems.
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Theodisce
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 Message 13 of 42
19 January 2009 at 9:55am | IP Logged 
From the geographical point of view, Italian is spoken in what was once a core of Roman Empire, so we could assume, that Italian has perserved Latin features at the highest degree. Noun derivation seems to be very simple in many cases, for example you just substitute Latin ending -us for -o when dealing with masculine nouns. Indeed, Italian nouns seem to be the most conservative in Romance family, while verb system resembles rather French than Latin.

Edited by Theodisce on 19 January 2009 at 9:57am

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William Camden
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 Message 14 of 42
20 January 2009 at 11:32am | IP Logged 
Latin as spoken outside Italy was affected by the languages of the "barbarian" tribes, even when it replaced them. The extent to which this happened is unclear, however, because few records of these other languages remain.
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Sabato
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 Message 16 of 42
24 January 2009 at 9:50pm | IP Logged 
Theodisce wrote:
I'd like also to ask native Romance speakres, if they can undestand Latin withouth studying it.


No, not really. Obviously I can pick up a few words here and there, but usually it is not enough even to make out the meaning of a single sentence, much less an entire paragraph.


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