" Latin (lingua lătīna, pronounced [laˈtiːna]) is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. With the Roman conquest, Latin was spread to countries around the Mediterranean, including a large part of Europe. Romance languages, such as Aragonese, Corsican, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, are descended from Latin, while many others, especially European languages, have inherited and acquired much of their vocabulary from it. Latin was the international language of science and scholarship in central and western Europe until the 17th century, when it was gradually replaced by vernacular languages.......Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders, seven noun cases, four verb conjugations, six tenses, three persons, three moods, two voices, two aspects and two numbers. A dual number is present in Archaic Latin. One of the rarer of the seven cases is the locative, only used with nouns that signify a location. The vocative, used in direct discourse, is identical to the nominative except for words of the second declension. Though various authors have proposed differing totals, there are only five fully productive cases. Adjectives and adverbs are compared, and the former are inflected according to case, gender, and number. Although Classical Latin has demonstrative pronouns indicating varying degree of proximity, it doesn't have articles. Later Romance language articles developed from the demonstrative pronouns; e.g., le and la from ille and illa. In terms of vocabulary, however, Latin tends to preserve the original forms of many Indo-European roots. Compared to other Indo-European languages of antiquity, such as Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, the word forms in the Classical era are far more reflective of their etyma.^{[citation needed]} Languages such as Sanskrit, however, tend to be more conservative with regards to grammar."Source: Wikipedia