Latin Lives

Sardinian is considered to be closer to Latin than Romanian, and arguably Italian and Spanish are closer to Latin too.

According to a book that I haven't read[1], but is cited by Wikipedia[2], "A 1949 study by Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent (Latin, in the case of Romance languages) by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation, indicated the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin): Sardinian 8%, Italian 12%, Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%."

[1] Pei, Mario (1949). Story of Language. ISBN 03-9700-400-1 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language

Using your way of putting it I think all Romance languages have a legit claim to "being Latin". [I seem to recall reading that there were time periods in which all the local languages were still casually called "Latin" while being quite distinct.] Some are more conservative than others in terms of preserved phonetics or grammar etc. But none of them "are Latin", and yet all descended from it quite naturally. Is Romanian, which has had some changes over centuries just as any other, any "more Latin" or "less Latin" than Italian, Spanish, Portuguese -- each of these having unique and sometimes overlapping changes relative to Latin?

Take some trivial word like "bene". The Italians say "bene". Their spelling is the same, so OK, it superficially resembles Latin when it's written out. But the Spaniards say "bien". That diphthong "ie" looks like a radical change but IIRC it's actually capturing the fact that the length of the Latin word's first vowel is different from the 2nd one. Less Latin? Who is to say, really? Then the Portuguese say "bem", which looks ridiculous with that M in there ... until you realize that nasal consonants come and go, they change into each other in certain positions, is it really "less Latin"? Would it really be shocking if some Roman pronounced an M in some position we think of today as having Ns? We don't have recordings or time machines so we can't say if they did.

At some point in my own amateurish study of Romance languages I realized this sort of thing and gave up trying to classify as "less Latin" and "more Latin". If you want to make a statement about who's speaking Latin today, the best way to capture it is that they all are, really (and at the same time, they are not).

We can deduce facts about how the Romans pronounced Latin sounds by:

* descriptions of the sounds by the Roman grammarians

* wordplay, onomatopoeia, spelling errors in graffiti, etc.

* the way in which sounds from other languages (particularly Greek) were adapted into Latin

* the way in which sounds of Latin were adapted into other languages

* comparative reconstruction of the Romance languages

* evidence from metrical poetry, which provides particular clues about consonant and vowel length

A very readable book on is W. Sidney Allen's _Vox Latina_.

[edit: meant to reply to immediately following sister of this post.]

I have heard similar anecdotal evidence on Italian, and it's linguistic similarity to Spanish would support that. I'm a little surprised that Portuguese strayed so far.

I've heard some academics who specialize in the phonology. I always thought it would sound like Italian, but the reconstruction actually sounded a lot more like French.