As an aside, if you don't mind, how close is Sardo to Latin? Can you rather easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are proficient in Sardo). Thanks!
So I would say that "modern" Sardo (defining the "old" as the first written texts some centuries ago) it's close enough to Latin to see where every word comes from, but definitely too far to give you understanding.
I can understand Spanish though :) (context: we've been in the Spanish Kingdom for like 400 years, and the language have been influenced a lot, many shared words.)
I can understand them though, but mostly because I know Italian. (Romansh also sounds to me somewhat Portuguese and Slavic at the same time, it's a very cool language).
I would say that it still lack many Latin features (for example cases, neutral gender), and sentence construction is generally different enough that native speaker wouldn't have a significant advantage to other romance language speakers.
I guess the statement about "closeness" comes from the study (Pei, Mario 1949) referenced in the Wikipedia page about Sardinian language that somehow developed a metric and tested several languages against their parent one. Apparently Sardo has the lowest distance from Latin among Romance languages.
On a more practical side, I speak Sardo and studied Latin in high school. I cannot easily read Latin texts without a dictionary at hand and a little grammar review. I guess their similarity arises when you compare the written languages but most of us experience Sardo as a spoken-only language and many find it difficult to follow in written form. On the contrary we experience Latin as a written only language. Who knows, probably it would be a lot easier for us to understand spoken Latin.
And don't get me started on written versus spoken! Then again, my dad's dialect might look like Welsh if anyone thought to write it down. But on my mom's side, Zeneize does have a sort-of official written form, and if I read carefully I sometimes have an idea of what's going on :)
Also worth noting there are different dialects of Sardo (such as Logudorese, in the north, if I remember the name correctly). And some dialects are closer to Latin than others.
In Italy/Sardinia dialects can be so far apart from one another that it's difficult to understand one another.
[0]http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
I don't think that's quite right: Welsh is a Gaelic language and English is Germanic, so they're from different families, while Sardinian & Italian are much more closely related.
http://www.ayecan.com/read_scots/burns_museum.html
> Though his position in society wis ower laich for him tae hae the richt tae vote, Robert wis nanetheless passionate aboot politics and made his writin desk his ballot box. Scunnerin the weel-daein and pooerfu, hooanever could prove a fykie business.
> Robert Burns loved the lassies. He fell in love aften an wi ease, and wi mony weemun frae a wheen o backgrunds. The wey he treatit his lovers wis different ilka time, and ilka relationship affected Robert in its ain weys.
Beyond that, it frankly just "looks" a bit more latin, with s's at the end of words for plurals, and more u's than Italian has.
I think it also has fewer loan words, and has staid in some cases closer to older Latin words: 'domu' for house rather than 'casa'.
BTW Sardo is actually not one language, but a set of languages spoken in the island.
Anyway, I doubt it is close enough to Latin to be mutually intelligible, as all modern Romance languages are derived from Vulgar Latin, which is known to be very different form the written Classical Latin.