Sarah K. answered • 07/19/20
Latin School Graduate with 6 Years of Study
This is a fascinating question, because it necessitates careful consideration of what constitutes a Romance language, as well as the traits that define it as such. It's easy to remark similarities in vocabulary among Romance languages — the word for "always" in Latin, semper, is recognizable in Italian (sempre), Spanish (siempre), Asturian (siempres), and Sassarese (sempri). However, the Gallo-Romance languages — including French, Occitan and Gascon — comprise more innovations than the above Italo-Western languages, and their word for "always" more closely resembles toujours.
As a consequence of the Latin language's clearly-defined and rarely irregular grammar, all Romance languages share at least some aspects of Latin subject-verb agreement and noun declension. Still, there are major differences among them: for example, most Gallo-Romance languages are subject-obligatory (whereas all the rest of the Romance languages are pro-drop languages).
Ultimately, while Latin was once a cohesive language, as the Roman Empire declined the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with the western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence. These dialects diverged from classical Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. As a result, while it is possible to recognize elements of Latin grammar and vocabulary within every Romance language, the project of reconstructing the ancient tongue solely from modern dialects would be nearly impossible.
