Latin
Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages, those being most notably Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. The Latin alphabet, derived from the Greek, remains the most widely-used alphabet in the world. It is said that 80 percent of scholarly English words are derived from Latin (in a large number of cases by way of French). Moreover, in the Western world, Latin was a lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, being eventually replaced by French in the 18th century and English in the late 19th. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic Church to this day, and thus the official national language of the Vatican. The Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Latin is also still used (drawing heavily on Greek roots) to furnish the names used in the scientific classification of living things. The modern study of Latin, along with Greek, is known as Classics.
Main features
Latin is a synthetic inflectional language: affixes (which usually encode more than one grammatical category) are attached to fixed stems to express gender, number, and case in adjectives, nouns, and pronouns, which is called declension; and person, number, tense, voice, mood, and aspect in verbs, which is called conjugation. There are five declensions (''declinationes'') of nouns and four conjugations of verbs.There are six noun cases:
- nominative (used as the subject of the verb or the predicate nominative),
- genitive (used to indicate relation or possession, often represented by the English ''of'' or the addition of '''s'' to a noun),
- dative (used of the indirect object of the verb, often represented by the English ''to'' or ''for''),
- accusative (used of the direct object of the verb, or object of the preposition in some cases),
- ablative (separation, source, cause, or instrument, often represented by the English ''by'', ''with'', ''from''),
- vocative (used of the person or thing being addressed).In addition, some nouns have a locative case used to express location (otherwise expressed by the ablative with a preposition such as ''in''), but this survival from Proto-Indo-European is found only in the names of lakes, cities, towns, small islands, and a few other words related to locations, such as "house", "ground", and "countryside". Latin itself, being a very old language, is far closer to Proto-Indo-European than are most modern Western European languages; it has, in fact, about the same relationship with PIE as modern Italian or French has to Latin.There are six general tenses in Latin (technically they are tense/aspect/mood complexes). The indicative mood can be used with all of them. The subjunctive mood, however, has only present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses. These tenses in the subjunctive mood do not completely correlate in meaning to the tenses in the indicative. The following examples are of the first conjugation verb "laudare" ("to praise") in the indicative mood and the active voice:
Primary sequence tenses
- present (''laudo'', "I praise")
- imperfect (''laudabam'', "I was praising")
- future (''laudabo'', "I shall praise," "I will praise")
Secondary sequence tenses
- perfect (''laudavi'', "I praised", "I have praised")
- pluperfect (''laudaveram'', "I had praised")
- future perfect (''laudavero'', "I shall have praised," "I will have praised")The future perfect tense can also imply a normal future idea (like in "When I will have run...") and so may also sometimes be included in the primary sequence.
Latin and Romance