The Italian Language

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The most important change was the loss of the case system (declensions or inflectional modification), that is, noun and adjective endings which varied depending on the function of the noun in the phrase. Declensions are analogue to verb endings, which vary depending on time, mood and speaker. Declensions determine the possession, the indirect object, etc. Much of what Latin could say using these declensions was could now only be said by adopting a more rigid word order and developing prepositions in place of the dative, genitive and ablative. Latin word order was extremely flexible because logical relations between words could be detected from the declensions alone, regardless of word order, a flexibility which was lost in Romance languages, including Italian.

The only Latin language to retain declensions, albeit in a simplified manner, is Romanian, which has three cases: nominative/accusative, dative/genitive and vocative. In non-Latin languages we still find declensions: German alone of the Germanic languages, retains declensions, although in a simplified form. The Slavic languages have a more developed system, while the non-Indo-European languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, may have ten or more cases.

The table bellow should give some idea of the relationship:

Locative in Classical Latin was no longer considered a declension, but the form was retained in certain expressions.
In modern Italian there are some vestiges, however, of the declensions: most personal pronouns have a nominal, accusative and at times dative form:

The disappearance of the declensions, substituted by prepositions, was a process which was already taking place in Vulgar Latin during Imperial times, as we can see bellow:

All Latin languages, possibly influenced by Greek, created both the definite and indefinite articles. In most cases the indefinite is identical with the numeral 1.With the exception of Romanian, which places the definite article at the end of words, all other languages place it before.

Verbs also changed. The passive voice was abandoned, while a new future came into existence, composed of the infinitive plus the present of the verb to have:

Except in Romanian, the neuter gender disappeared and most words which were neuter became masculine. Some neutral plural words became singular feminine in Italian, because the neuter plural termination in a was confused with the feminine singular a.

There is, however, a vestige of the neuter in Italian, with the article “lo” in “non lo so”, for example, where the “lo” stands for “it”: “I don’t know it.”

Another claim to the existence of the neuter is the number of words that change gender between singular and plural. Virtually all these plurals are irregular: