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'''Latin''' is an ancient [[Indo-European language]] that was originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding [[Rome]]. It gained wide currency, especially in [[Europe]], as the official language of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and, after Rome's conversion to Christianity, of the [[Roman Catholic Church]]. Principally through the influence of the Church, it became the language of later medieval European scholars and philosophers. Because Latin is a highly inflectional and [[synthetic]] language, word order is to some extent variable, compared with mostly [[analytic]] languages such as English, which has lost the ancient noun-case system inherited from [[Proto-Indo-European]] except in pronouns, although in prose the Romans tended to favor a SOV word order. [[Syntax]] is revealed through a systemic structure of affixes attached to word stems. The Latin alphabet, derived from the [[Etruscan]] and [[Greek]] [[alphabets]] (''each of which is derived from the earlier [[Phoenician]] alphabet''  

'''Latin''' is an ancient [[Indo-European language]] that was originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding [[Rome]]. It gained wide currency, especially in [[Europe]], as the official language of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and, after Rome's conversion to Christianity, of the [[Roman Catholic Church]]. Principally through the influence of the Church, it became the language of later medieval European scholars and philosophers. Because Latin is a highly inflectional and [[synthetic]] language, word order is to some extent variable, compared with mostly [[analytic]] languages such as English, which has lost the ancient noun-case system inherited from [[Proto-Indo-European]] except in pronouns, although in prose the Romans tended to favor a SOV word order. [[Syntax]] is revealed through a systemic structure of affixes attached to word stems. The Latin alphabet, derived from the [[Etruscan]] and [[Greek]] [[alphabets]] (''each of which is derived from the earlier [[Phoenician]] alphabet''