Latin language
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
Latin is an old language that was spoken by the Romans. People do not speak or write this language very much any more, but many students around the world study it in school.
The Roman Catholic Church still uses Latin as its official language.
Many words used in science and medicine were created from Latin words, or are Latin words.
There were two varieties of Latin, Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin. Classical Latin was the literary standard variety used by the Romans and is the one used by the Roman Catholic Church and studied by many students around the world. Vulgar Latin, on the contrary, was the more common spoken variety used by the Romans.
Latin was the most important language in the Middle Ages. It was taught in all European schools, and all universities used Latin as the teaching language. Latin lost its importance only in the Reformation.
Many languages spoken today came from the Latin language. Those languages are called Romance languages. The five largest Romance languages are French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Other Indo-European languages are related to Latin. The Romance languages are very close to each other, and it is possible for the speakers of one Romance language to understand another to at least some extent. for example, the speakers of Portuguese can well understand Spanish. It can be said that the Romance languages are modern dialects of Latin.
[change] Basic structure and grammar
Latin has almost the same structure as Ancient Greek. It uses a different alphabet,though. Latin has seven different noun cases, but only five are unique: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, and Ablative.
The final case, the Vocative case, is almost always the same as the Nominative case. Latin nouns are declined, or changed, according to how they are used in the sentence. A noun can be declined five different ways. These ways are called declensions. The declensions are numbered 1 through 5 (1st Declension, 2nd Declension, ...), and each one has unique endings that identify the noun's declension. When a noun is declined, ten forms are made, 2 for each of the noun cases. Verbs also have a similar thing done to them; changing a verb is called conjugation. When a verb is conjugated, six forms are made. There are 6 factors that can change a verb: person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. In all, there are 120 possible forms for Latin verbs.
