romance (Latin based) languages

[Q Rutilius]

I have been wondering what modern Latin based language is closest to roman Latin; which the least like Latin? I would assume that Italian is most like Latin and that French is least like Latin. But, no doubt I am completely wrong.

[M. Demetrius]

Romanian, some say, is close to Latin, and there's a small-area dialect in Eastern Europe that is supposed to be really close.

[greekwarrior34]

In my opinion this is a very difficult question. All the romance languages have grammar, words, expressions, etc close to Latin but others expressions, words, etc have been developed. For example, the majority of specialist will tell you that French is the language more developed and different from Latin; however, French preserves literal forms of Latin, as "et" (and) or "est" (he is), forms that the other romance languages have not.
There isn't a clear guideline of the evolution of languages (however we can study some of them, for example ph->f, but they are few compared to all the other changes which are chaotic), so a language (like French) could be very developed in pronunciation compared to Spanish, for example, but forms of the verb sum (esse) are practically identical to Latin.


Anyway, assuming Latin pronunciation was very close to modern Spanish -as some specialist (non-spaniard) say- I probably would say that Spanish or even Catalan are very close languages to Latin.

[Medusa Gladiatrix]

I would say Spanish is still pretty close to Latin, in my opinion closer than Italian.

[SigniferOne]

French is very far from Latin than the above, comparatively. The Romans never imagined that so many apostrophes could be squeezed into a single sentence!

[Endre Fodstad]

It would be impressive of them to dream such a thing at all since the apostrophe itself doesn't turn up until the 15th century or so. ..