LATIN: AN INFLECTED LANGUAGE

We have observed the Indo-European ancestry of Latin and traced its recorded history from being the language of a city-state in central Italy to the language of a vastly larger territory, and then, as a result of the Empire's collapse and invasion, the language of a smaller but still significant part of Europe, which, in a later age of colonization, carried it to the Americas and other parts of the world – vast expansion, then shrinkage, followed long after by a second diffusion. But that is the external history of Latin, its career through time and space. What is the nature of this language that has lasted so long and traveled so far? In order to grasp the sometimes dramatic ways in which Latin changed, it is not necessary to study or learn it, but merely to understand how it worked, which is quite simple.

What makes the history of Latin becoming the Romance languages so fascinating is the combination of remarkable continuity with dramatic changes. The similarities between the mother and the daughters are close and palpable. And yet a great revolution has occurred in the course of the centuries, and the nature of the daughter languages is fundamentally different from that of the mother. Latin is an inflected language, whereas French, Spanish, and Italian – at least in regard to nouns and adjectives – are not. Rather, they are of a type called “isolating.