| Group | Italic (with Oscan, Umbrian etc.), Latino-Faliscan (with Faliscan) |
| Geography | The Italic tribe of Latini occupied lands on the left bank of the Tiber river in the 10th and the 9th century BC. With the expansion of Rome, one of the city-states of Latium, the language spread all over Italy and finally becomes an international tongue of the Mediterranean world. |
| History | The history of the language is usually divided into thre major periods: Archaic Latin represented by a few inscriptions from the 6th to the 3th century BC; Classical Latin from the 2nd BC to the 2nd AD with a rich collection of brilliant texts, poetry, speeches etc.; and finally Late Latin, when a gap arises between the written language and the colloquial, popular form of it. While the written language is based on the classical dogmas is was used in the Middle Ages and even in the previous century in science and philosophy of Europe, Popular Latin gave birth to Romance languages spoken by Roman and Italian colonists in Gaul, Iberia, and the Balkans. Today Latin is the official language of Vatican. |
| Phonetics | Latin preserves numerous archaic Indo-European traits which make it close to Celtic, Greek and Hittite languages. Long and short vowels were strictly differentiated (malum 'evil' and ma'lum 'apple'). The Indo-European labiovelar sound *kw was in use, though it was labialized in other Italic tongues. Unstressed syllables in the middle of the word often dropped vowels. The "rhotacism" process was widespread: *s between vowels became r. No sibilant or aspirated consonant existed in Classical Latin, but in Late Latin such sounds as [ts] appeared before i, e. |
| Nominal Morphology | The principal means for morphology was the inflection: Latin nouns and adjectives had three genders, two numbers and up to seven cases (in Archaic Latin). The system of inflections is quite archaic, with several Latin innovations, e.g. the ending -ae instead of -ás in genitive singular of á-stems. Five types of declension are typically Italic. Indirect cases used the formant -b- also witnessed in Celtic, Illyrian, Indo-Iranian, and Greek. |
| Verbal Morphology | Each verb could have up to 50 forms in Latin: they were distributed between the infect (imperfect) and perfect stems. There are three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), two voices (active and passive). The Latin passive marker -r is common for Tocharian, Anatolian, Celtic languages. Prefixed verbs were in wide use and sometimes changed drastically the meaning of the word. |
| Lexicon | The basic Latin vocabulary contains a lot of traces of neighbouring languages: Italic (bós 'bull', lupus 'wolf') or non-Indo-European (Etruscan: histrio 'actor', persona 'mask'). In Classical Latin plenty of Greek loanwords appeared: as linguists claim, their number in Latin exceeds 7000. |
| Writing | Latin alphabet |
| Close Contacts | Etruscan (7-4 cent. BC), neighbouring Italic dialects (7-2 cent. BC), Greek (since the 3rd cent. BC), Gaulish (since the 1st cent. BC), etc. |
| Sample | Archaic Latin:
Honc oino ploirume cosentiont R[omai] Duonoro optumo fuise viro Luciom Scipione: filios Barbati Consol, censor, aidilis hic fuet a[pud vos]: Hec cepit Corsica Aleriaque urbe: Dedet Tempestatebus aide meretod. Classical Latin:
(Epitaph to Lucius Scipio Barbatus, 3rd century BC.) |
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