
The most recent common ancestor of Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and around 25 more obscure regional languages note including Aragonese, Aranese, Aromanian, Asturian, Catalan, Corsican, Friulian, Galician, Gallo, Genoese, Guernésiais, Jèrriais, Ladino, Ladin, Lombard, Mirandese, Moldovan, Occitan, Piedmontese, Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian, and Walloon collectively called the Romance languages. Latin was the language of Ancient Rome, the Catholic Church, government, law, trade, taxonomy, and John Cleese. It's still extensively studied by academics and is an official language of the Vatican, but is considered a dead language because nobody speaks it natively.

First it killed the Romans and now it's killing me."Īn ancient language, the predominant language of the Roman Empire, and for centuries following the Empire's fall it remained the lingua franca of Europe. translation "The Latin language is dead, as dead as it can be. Each chapter is divided into two or three lessons (lectiones) of a few pages each followed by a grammar section (Grammatica Latina) and three exercises (Pensa).- Famous adage of embattled Latin students. It culminates in readings from classical poets and Donatus's Ars Grammatica, the standard Latin school text for a millennium.


