• SplashJackson
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    5 hours ago

    I thought they spoke Latin in the Vatican, aren’t they Latino? Otherwise how do we get such classical Christian idioms like “Romanes eunt domus”?

    • caseyweederman
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      4 hours ago

      Italian is a direct descendant of Latin (along with nearly every other Western language)

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        There’s Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese…there are more Germanic-derived ones than Latin-derived, aren’t there?

        • caseyweederman
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          34 minutes ago

          I was thinking like… English.
          Sure, it’s got German and French and Greek and just a mess of everything, but there’s a lot of Latin in there.

          • samus12345@lemmy.world
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            8 minutes ago

            English is a Germanic language that has had significant Latin and French (which added more Latin) injected into it over the years. It has to be the most mongrel widespread language in existence, which is probably why it’s such a mess when it comes to spelling. Still, it also has a lot of flexibility and word choices because of it.

          • samus12345@lemmy.world
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            1 hour ago

            I’d have to get a list of every country considered “western” and then figure out how many have predominantly Latin-derived and Germanic-derived languages. Too much work. “Nearly every” one of them would most certainly not be Latin-derived, though.

            • Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 hour ago

              Thankfully there’s an entire field of linguistics that’s already done the work. Quick Google search shows 22 Latin descendant languages, and 24 Germanic descendant languages. So slightly more, yeah.

                  • samus12345@lemmy.world
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                    13 minutes ago

                    It has made finding actually useful information harder nowadays, but I’ll still accept the blame for this one.