When traveling to Rome, visitors are amazed by the number of Ancient Roman buildings. There’s the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Arch of Constantine, the Pantheon —and many more.
These buildings remind us that Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire some two thousand years ago. Back then, in the streets of Rome, people didn’t speak Italian —they spoke Latin.
Contemplating this fact raises the question: “How similar is Italian to Latin?”
Italian evolved from Latin. That’s also the case for the other Romance languages, such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian.
Many Italian vocabulary words come directly from Latin. Some of these are identical to the original Latin term. For example, “luna” (moon) and “mare” (sea) are spelled the same in Latin and Italian.
Others have changed in spelling but are still recognizable. For example: “aqua” (water) in Latin versus “acqua” in Italian. Or the Latin word “capillus” (a hair [on one’s head]) versus “capello” in Italian.
Italian grammar is simpler than Latin grammar. Italian has only two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine), whereas Latin has three (the third is neuter).
Many Latin words change their endings according to grammatical cases. This has mostly disappeared from Italian (except for pronouns).
Let’s compare the Latin phrase “veritas numquam perit” (“truth never perishes”) —attributed to the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca— to its Italian translation: “La verità non perisce mai”.
Notice how “veritas” (the Latin word for “truth”) is very similar to “verità” (the Italian version). Of course, this is no coincidence. This Italian word comes from Latin.
The Latin sentence contains fewer words than its Italian translation (3 versus 5). That’s partly because Latin doesn’t use articles, while Italian does (the Italian word “la” is a definite article —it corresponds to the English word “the”).
Italian and Latin have many similar vocabulary words. Some examples are listed in the table below.
| English | Latin | Italian |
|---|---|---|
| water | aqua | acqua |
| moon | luna | luna |
| sea | mare | mare |
| love | amor | amore |
| friend | amicus | amico |
| hair | capillus | capelli |
| river | flumen | fiume |
| truth | veritas | verità |
| hand | manus | mano |
| dog | canis | cane |
| sun | solis | sole |
| warm | calidum | caldo |
| father | pater | padre |
| brother | frater | fratello |
| old | vetus | vecchio |
| fish | piscis | pescare |
| rain | pluvia | pioggia |
| new | novus | nuovo |
| cold | frigus | freddo |
| guilt | culpa | colpa |
| praise | laus | lode |
| egg | ovum | uovo |
| dangerous | periculosum | pericoloso |
Many Latin words end in “-us” or “-um”. This is noticeable in the Latin phrase “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”) which serves as the motto of the United States.
About 50% of the thousand most common Latin words end with a consonant.
Italian words, in contrast, rarely end with consonants. Only about 2% of the thousand most common Italian words end with a consonant. These include the definite article “il” and a few prepositions (“per” and “con”); most of the remaining cases are loanwords from English (“sport”, “stop”, “club”, etc.).
The Italian phrase “Ti amo” (“I love you”) and the Latin phrase “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) showcase a feature that Italian and Latin have in common.
Neither of these sentences contains a subject pronoun. The English pronoun “I”, by the way, corresponds to the pronouns “io” (in Italian) and “ego” (in Latin).
Italian and Latin allow for leaving out the subject pronoun when that pronoun can be inferred from the context. Here the verb ending suffices to indicate which pronoun has been left out.
In Linguistics terminology, languages where subject pronouns can be left out are called null-subject languages.
Latin is generally considered to be more difficult to learn than Italian. One of the reasons for this is that Latin nouns are declined (their endings change) according to 6 different grammatical cases.
In this way, the ending of a Latin word indicates the grammatical function of that word (subject, object, etc.).
Below is the table of declensions for the Latin word “rēx” (which means “king”).
| Case | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | rēx | rēgēs |
| Accusative | rēgem | rēgēs |
| Genitive | rēgis | rēgum |
| Dative | rēgī | rēgibus |
| Ablative | rēge | rēgibus |
| Vocative | rēx | rēgēs |
The Italian word for “king” is “re”. It comes from the Latin word “rēx” but it is invariable. It always keeps the same form.
In Italian, every noun has a grammatical gender. For instance, the word “uomo” (man) is masculine and the word “donna” (woman) is feminine.
Nouns that represent abstract concepts also have grammatical genders. These genders are more correlated with the word’s ending than its meaning.
For instance, it may seem counterintuitive that the Italian word “mascolinità” (which means “masculinity”) has the feminine grammatical gender; and that the word “femminismo” (“feminism”) has the masculine grammatical gender.
It makes more sense when one notices the pattern that Italian nouns ending in “-ismo” tend to have the masculine gender. This is the case of “femminismo” as well as of “umanesimo” (humanism), “ottimismo” (optimism), and “altruismo” (altruism).
Latin has an extra grammatical gender compared to Italian. In addition to masculine and feminine, Latin has a neuter grammatical gender as well.
Latin differentiates between short and long vowels; a distinction that can change the meaning of a word.
This feature is known as contrastive vowel length or phonemic vowel length in linguistic terms. To denote long vowels, Latin textbooks use horizontal bars or macrons above the vowel.
Pairs of Latin words that are distinguished by vowel length include:
According to linguists, vowel length is not contrastive in Italian, making it different from Latin [2].
In Italian spelling, ‘x’ appears only in loanwords such as ‘taxi’ or ‘relax’, but the letter appears in several Latin words. For example:
| Latin | Italian | English |
|---|---|---|
| rex | re | king |
| vox | voce | voice |
| nix | neve | snow |
| lex | legge | law |
| pax | pace | peace |
| velox | veloce | quick |
As shown above, Latin words containing the letter ‘x’ give rise to Italian words without that letter. The reason is that the Italian borrowings of these words come from the accusative form (which doesn’t contain an x).
| Latin (nominative form) |
Latin (accusative form) |
Italian |
|---|---|---|
| rex | regem | re |
| vox | vocem | voce |
| nix | nivem | neve |
| lex | legem | legge |
| pax | pacem | pace |
| velox | velocem | veloce |
The letter ‘z’, commonly found in Italian vocabulary words, doesn’t typically appear in Latin.
Although a part of the early form of the Latin alphabet, this letter later disappeared due to changes in pronunciation. It was later reintroduced as a borrowing from the Greek alphabet.
| Italian | Latin | English |
|---|---|---|
| Grazie | gratiæ | thanks |
| Pezzo | pettia | piece |
| Piazza | platea | square, plaza |
| Speranza | spes | hope |
The letters ‘k’ and ‘w’ are not used in Italian or Latin and 'w' is not included in the classical Latin alphabet.
Likewise, in its standard form, the Italian alphabet does not include 'w', but it is found in some foreign words that have been incorporated as loanwords, such as ‘weekend’.
Although the letter ‘k’ is part of the classical Latin alphabet, it was seldom used. The reason is that in Latin, the letter ‘c’ is pronounced like ‘k’ (there is no soft ‘c’ in Latin), so ‘k’ was redundant.
Similarly, the letter ‘k’ is not used in Italian, except where it appears in a few loanwords.
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