Romanian the closest living language to Latin - NOT! (biggest, Spanish, origin)
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You have to ask, "Which Latin?" The empire had many different versions of Latin, even within the Italian Peninsula. "Regional dialect" doesn't even begin to cover it.
I saw people are saying Romanian is heavily influenced by Slavic languages.
Romanian speaking here. Of course Romanian has been influenced by Slavic languages, because Romania looks like an island of romance-speaking country surrounded by a sea of Slavic speaking languages, such as Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian. But the amount of words coming from this sea is insignificant compared to the amount of words that are found in both Romanian and Latin. I can understand let's say 80 percent of a Latin text without ever taking any language course. Extra, look at my name. Remus. It is a pretty common name in Romania, and it is found in one of the Roman legends, with Romulus and Remus. Extra+extra, the word Roman and Romanian are similar, right? There is a strong bound here.
Romanian is the closest living language to Classical Latin (used by the upper class, elite) while Spanish/Italian/French/Portuguese is Vulgar Latin (commonly used by peasants)
Example of how close Romanian is to Classical Latin:
My mothers house.
C.Latin : Casa matris meae
Romanian: Casa mamei mele
V.Latin: casa de matre meae
Spanish: la casa de mi madre
Italian: la casa della mia madre
Portuguese: la casa da minha mãe
That's why most Romance speakers cant understand Romanian but if you look at the way it is written you can figure out what they are saying just because it is so Latin based.
Romanian is the closest living language to Classical Latin (used by the upper class, elite) while Spanish/Italian/French/Portuguese is Vulgar Latin (commonly used by peasants)
Example of how close Romanian is to Classical Latin:
My mothers house.
C.Latin : Casa matris meae
Romanian: Casa mamei mele
V.Latin: casa de matre meae
Spanish: la casa de mi madre
Italian: la casa della mia madre
Portuguese: la casa da minha mãe
That's why most Romance speakers cant understand Romanian but if you look at the way it is written you can figure out what they are saying just because it is so Latin based.
While Pei's analysis may have merit based on his weighting of various factors, when we consider pronunciation alone ( "real" language), French has to be the least similar to ancient Latin. Modern Italian is to Latin, as I like to say, as Ebonics is to English. It's only the scholarly grammarians who insist languages follow constant rules.
All languages are influenced by their contemporary neighboring languages. Some things are more easily co-opted and expressed in a one language than another. Eg- "pull ova" (phonetic spelling) is "sweater" in Russian.
For years I thought the Sicilian "ya-mo nee-na" (phonetics) for "Let's go" was a slurring (as Sicilians commonly do) of the Italian "Andiamo". --turns out it's from Arabic.
We do know how ancient Latin was spoken because Latin remained the language of discourse among Europeans (diplomacy and science) well into the 17th century, used continuously since ancient times.
The ancient "upper class" Romans spoke Greek in their social activities.
An interesting bit of minutia that may have some bearing on the earlier comment that Sardinian may be the closest to Latin, and Latin comes from Dacia: the genome of an ancient skeleton from the Caucasius (not all that far from Dacia) was recently determined and found to be closest to modern Sardinians !?
Romanian is the closest living language to Classical Latin (used by the upper class, elite) while Spanish/Italian/French/Portuguese is Vulgar Latin (commonly used by peasants)
And of the four languages derived from vulgar Latin, French started to diverge from Latin centuries before Italian, Spanish and Portuguese did. As a result, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese have more in common with each other than they do with French.
Not really, all "neolatin" languages started to diverge at the same time as vulgar latin changed to accomodate to reality.
Vulgar latin became much simpler to accomodate church readings, deeds, public edicts to what people really spoke.
The main difference beteen Spanish and French is pronunciation, phonetics, a difference with langue d'oeil, not langue d'oc spoken by most of France during antiquity.
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