A number of historical phases of the language have been recognized, each distinguished by subtle differences in vocabulary, usage, spelling, morphology, and syntax. There are no hard and fast rules of classification;

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Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, Romansh and other Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin. There are also many Latin

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The ancient pronunciation of Latin has been reconstructed; among the data used for reconstruction are explicit statements about pronunciation by

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Latin was written in the Latin alphabet, derived from the Etruscan alphabet, which was in turn drawn from the Greek alphabet and ultimately the Phoenician alphabet. This alphabet has continued to be used over the centuries as the script for the Romance, Celtic,

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As Latin is an Italic language, most of its vocabulary is likewise Italic, ultimately from the ancestral Proto-Indo-European language.

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The phrases are mentioned with accents to show where stress is placed. In Latin, words are normally stressed either on the second-to-last (penultimate) syllable, called in Latin paenultima

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Latin is a synthetic, fusional languagein the terminology of linguistic typology. In more traditional terminology, it is an inflected language, but typologists are apt to say "inflecting". Words include an objective semantic element and markers specifying the grammatical use of

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