Romance languages

The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages or New Latin languages, are a subset of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Latin dialects spoken by the common people in what is known as Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan Europa latina, French Europe latine, Romanian Europa latină) as Vulgar Latin later evolved in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire.

History

The term "Romance" comes from the Romance word romance or romanz, from Latin romanice, the adverbial form of romanicus, in expressions like parabolare romanice ("to speak in Roman").

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The modern Romance languages differ from Classical Latin in a number of fundamental respects:

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• No declensions, that is, they generally no longer alter a noun to indicate its grammatical role, though there may be a few exceptions such as in pronouns. An exception is Romanian, which continues to use declensions.
• Only two grammatical genders, rather than the three of Classical Latin (except Romanian and Italian to a small extent, and except several gender-neutral pronouns in Spanish, Italian, Catalan etc.)
• Introduction of grammatical articles, based on Latin demonstratives
• Latin future tense scrapped, and new future and conditional tenses introduced, based on infinitive + present or imperfect tense of habere (to have), fused to form new inflections.
• Latin synthetic perfect tenses replaced by new compound forms with be or have + past participle (except Portuguese and French, where the Latin plusquamperfect tense has been retained and Romanian, which has 2 perfect tenses - one synthetic and one compound - that have the same meaning and also has a synthetic plusquamperfect tense in the indicative mood that is formed using the suffix "-se", derived from the suffix used in Latin to form the subjunctive plusquamperfect, "-isse").