Latin language
From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.
Latin is an old language that was spoken by the Romans. People do not speak or write this language very much any more, but many students around the world study it in school.
The Roman Catholic Church still uses Latin as its official language.
Many words used in science and medicine were created from Latin words, or are Latin words. Many languages spoken today came from the Latin language. Those languages are called Romance languages. The five largest Romance languages are French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Other Indo-European languages are related to Latin.
[edit] Basic structure and grammar
Latin has almost the same structure as Ancient Greek, but it uses a separate alphabet. Latin has six different noun cases, but only five are unique: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, and Ablative.
The final case, the Vocative case, is almost always the same as the Nominative case. Latin nouns are declined, or changed, according to how they are used in the sentence. A noun can be declined five different ways. These ways are called declensions. The declensions are numbered 1 through 5 (1st Declension, 2nd Declension, ...), and each one has unique endings that identify the noun's declension. When a noun is declined, ten forms are made, 2 for each of the noun cases. Verbs also have a similar thing done to them; changing a verb is called conjugation. When a verb is conjugated, six forms are made. There are 6 factors that can change a verb: person, number, tense, voice, and mood. In all, there are 120 possible forms for Latin verbs.
