Old Latin → Latin
This is the ladder this app is built to walk you down: a language followed through its own history, with branches taken at the point where they actually happened. Because a language is the largest thing you can learn at once, the roots pay you back several times over.
Latin is the root of this family, and this app can now feed it to you: the Vulgate, the Aeneid, the Gallic War, the Catilinarian orations. Latin is highly inflected, so a "word" here is a form rather than a dictionary entry — knowing amavit does not tick amare, and the page does not pretend otherwise. Reading the root is the cheapest way into the whole family: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and Catalan all descend from it, and the vocabulary you meet here reappears in all of them.| Stage | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Old / Archaic Latin | the earliest inscriptions and the Law of the Twelve Tables | attested in fragments |
| Classical Latin | Cicero, Caesar, Vergil, Ovid — the register everything after measures itself against | attested, and readable here |
| Late and Vulgar Latin | the spoken language the written record ignored, ancestor of the Romance tongues | attested in part; the rest reconstructed |
| the Romance branches | Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Catalan, Romanian | living, and reachable from here |
What is built, and what is not
Built now: modern Latin news text, scored against your own words, with the letters you cannot yet read called out. That is the end of the ladder above and it is real.
Not built: the historical rungs. Reading the Rig Veda, or the Cantar de Mio Cid, or a Tang-era text, needs those corpora prepared the way the modern one is — segmented, ranked, and measured against a reader's words. The corpora are catalogued (GRETIL for Sanskrit, PHI for Latin, Kanseki and CTEXT for Chinese) but the work is not done, so there are no pages for them. When they exist, the ladder above is the order you would climb it in.
One honest caveat about the root: a root is not a shortcut to fluency in one descendant. It is the cheapest route into a whole family, and it is the difference between learning three related languages and learning one language three times. If you only ever want Spanish, going straight at Spanish beats Latin.