The Latin phrase “veritas numquam perit” (“truth never perishes”) is attributed to the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca. By comparing this phrase to its Italian translation (“La verità non perisce mai”), we will showcase some differences and similarities between Italian and Latin.
Notice how “veritas” (the Latin word for “truth”) closely resembles “verità” (the Italian version). This is no coincidence: a majority of Italian vocabulary words come from Latin; and though their spelling has often changed a little, the connection remains easy to notice.
Also, the Italian version of the phrase contains more words than the Latin version. The word “la” is an Italian definite article. It corresponds to the English word “the”. In contrast, Latin is a language that does not use articles.
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.
Italian and Latin exhibit many linguistic similarities, especially in the vocabulary because a substantial portion of Italian vocabulary can be traced back to its Latin roots. When it comes to grammar, however, the differences are more apparent. Italian is somewhat easier to learn than Latin, particularly for English speakers.
To learn more about Latin and other ancient languages, see this article on the similarities between Sanskrit and Latin.
For comparisons of Latin to other modern languages, see the articles on Latin vs Spanish, and Latin vs French.
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