Buenos Dias!

I finished the semantics comparisons! Well sort of anyway, I gathered a total of 527 words in Latin, translated them into each language, compared each word and tallied up the points. I still have to put this information into a chi square analysis. I'm not completely sure how I am going to do that, but I will figure it out and publish the results.

For now however, without doing the analysis and just looking at the overall raw scores, I can tell you that Italian received the most points. Spanish came in second place, Portuguese in third, and French in fourth. These scores don't mean much as they are right now though. I only looked at 527 of the words in the entire Latin language. It might have just been the words that I compared that made Italian win; there could be more words in Spanish or French that are more similar to Latin than they are in Italian. So hopefully after I figure out the chi square analysis I will be able to see clearer results.

I also finished collecting tests to take in each of the languages and got some student volunteers to also take them. The tests all go over grammar and vocab and are all level one, except for Spanish which is level three because I already know a little Spanish. Those results should be in by next week, and so should the syntax comparisons. Sorry to keep you in suspense!

Semantics

Ciao!
This week I continued to gather words for my semantics comparisons. I looked at 195 more words, and out of a possible 390 points, Italian received 216, Spanish received 182, Portuguese received 169, and French received 147. So all together I have looked at 380 words, and Italian is in the lead with a total of 393 points out of a possible 760 points. I am going to try to compare at least 500 words total to make sure I have enough data to be as accurate as possible. Then I can move on to comparing the syntax of each language.
Also this week, I started looking into getting the level one tests for each of the languages that I have been working with. It turned out to be a little more difficult than I had anticipated. I emailed some professors at different universities and they were all very helpful, but the problem is that it's hard to find a test in each language that is similar enough for me to compare my scores. Some are more difficult or more specific than others and that's a problem. So I am going to keep searching and hopefully get some tests that I can use.
I also need some of my fellow AP Latin students to take the tests with me. That way I can tell if it is the Latin that is being helpful, and not anything that I have picked up over the last couple of weeks while I was doing my comparisons. So if any of you would like to volunteer, please let me know!
Arrivederci!

¡Hola!
This week I began comparing the semantics of each of the languages. I didn't get very far, but I did get through 182 words. And out of a possible 364 points, Italian received 177, Spanish received 166, Portuguese received 144, and finally French received 130. The more words I compare, the more accurate my analysis will be, so I intend to gather more data over the next week or so to get a more accurate result. I think that the trend will remain the same, with Italian in first place and French in last. But who knows? Maybe French will have a comeback!
¡Adios mis amigos!

Bonjour!

This week I wrapped up the morphological grammar comparisons with participles and imperatives. And guess what! Italian received the most points in both categories! It was a close tie for all of the languages in participle category, but Portuguese came in last. In the imperative category, French came in last but the difference between points was much bigger. 

What I found surprising was that non of the romance languages that I am comparing use a future participle. In Latin the future participle is rare, but it still exists. From what I understood, these other languages use either the future perfect tense or they use a subjunctive auxiliary verb and the future tense, which makes sense.
I also continued gathering data for the semantics comparisons which will be the next big chunk of my project. To compare the semantics, I will take a Latin word and translate it into each of the four languages that I have been comparing. Then I basically do the same thing that I was doing before and look at each word to see which one looks like the Latin word the most. For example if I saw the word for food in Italian, cibo, would I be able recognize its meaning because I know that the word for food in Latin is cibus? In this case I think that I would easily be able to make the connection. It might not be so obvious to other Latin students though, and they might be able to make jumps between the languages that I can't make. So my results will be biased based on what vocabulary I know best and my ability to make connections between the languages.

Hello!
This week I finally finished comparing the subjunctive mood for each of the languages. So, without further ado, the winner, with six points out of a possible eight, is Spanish! French, Portuguese, and Italian all tied for second place with five out of eight points. I did my comparisons a little differently for the subjunctive than I did for the indicatives though. Instead of scoring each person and number in each case, I just scored each case as a whole. So, every tense was worth two points, and they were scored based on whether or not they had a recognizable vowel change and if the tense endings in the subjunctive mood were similar to the ending in the indicative mood.
Here is an example: the present subjunctive for Spanish got the full two points. Here's why, there is a clear vowel shift for each verb ending; -ar verbs drop the a and get an e, and -er and -ir verbs drop their vowels for an a. On top of that, the endings are still the same; second person singular verbs end with an s in the indicative and in the subjunctive. This makes it easy to know what tense the subjunctive is.
Spanish Present active indicative

Singular	-ar	-er	-ir	Plural	-ar	-er	-ir
1st	o	e	o	1st	amos	emos	imos
2nd	as	es	es	2nd	àis	èis	is
3rd	a	e	e	3rd	an	en	en

Spanish Subjunctive

Present	-ar	-er	-ir
1st Singular	e	a	a
2nd Singular	es	as	as
3rd Singular	e	a	a
1st Plural	emos	amos	amos
2nd Plural	éis	áis	áis
3rd Plural	en	an	an

One thing that I found interesting while making my comparison was that Portuguese has a future subjunctive. I know, right? It is the only romance language that uses a future subjunctive, and it is used for "if", "when", or "as soon as." The future tense obviously did not get any points because there is no way I would even think to use a future subjunctive just from knowing Latin.
Anyway, next week I will be working on comparing participles and imperatives, and then I will be done with the grammar comparisons!

Hello again!
This past week I have been working on comparing the subjunctive mood for the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Latin languages. It has been a little tricky, it's not as straight forward as comparing the indicatives. I am still in the midst of making the comparisons, so I don't have the results yet. But here is what I have been working on so far. Each language has a present, perfect, imperfect, and pluperfect subjunctive. The subjunctive is marked by a vowel change, and even though the changes might not be the same in one language as they are in Latin, I think that they are still fairly recognizable because either the ending vowel or a vowel in the stem would be different and stand out.
Here is an example of what I am talking about:
In Latin, the vowel changes depending on what degree of conjugation the verb is; either first -are, second -ēre, third -ere, or fourth -ire. So with the first conjugation verb amare, to love, the a would change to an e and the present tense endings would be added onto the end to show what person it's in. So to make "She loves," into a present subjunctive and get "let her love," you would change amat to amet. For second conjugation verbs, the e changes to an ea, for third conjugation verbs, the e changes to an a, and for fourth conjugation verbs the i changes to an ia. 
In Spanish, the verb for love in encantar, to say "she loves," you would add the present third person singular ending and get encanta, and to make it a present subjunctive you change the a to an e and get encante. If I know that the verb is an -ar verb in Spanish, then seeing it end with an e instead of an a would be a red flag for me, and I would know that something is up, and hopefully be able to draw the conclusion that it is a subjunctive.
So that's what I am working on and I hope to get the results for you by next week!

Salve omnia,
This week I finally finished comparing the present active indicative endings for all of the verb forms in each language. Here is what I found: out of a possible 180 points, French received 52 points, Italian received 54 points, Portuguese received 81 points and Spanish received 87 points. All of the languages had the most similarities in the present and perfect tenses and the least amount of similarities in the future and imperfect tenses.
I am sure that you are all just as surprised as I am to see the Italian language in third place. But in its defense whenever Italian had a similarity to Latin, it was given the full two points more often than not. So even though there is a smaller relationship between the two languages, the relationship that is there is very strong.
In addition to comparing the indicative mood, I also started working on comparing the subjunctive mood of each language. The subjunctive mood is the verb form used to express a suggestion, wish, command, or a condition that is contrary to fact. You can usually tell a subjunctive apart from a regular verb by a vowel shift either in the stem or in the ending, and that is what I will be comparing in the next week or two.
I have also been keeping up with gathering words in Latin for my semantics comparison that will take place after the morphology comparison is complete.

Salve!

This week I met with the world renowned Dr. Bigley to help me better understand the French language.  She explained to me how the perfect and pluperfect tenses work in French, and it is a little different from the other languages. Like the other languages, French uses an auxiliary helping word for the passe compose, which is their past tense. But in French there are two helping words that conjugate with the verb, avoir and etre. You use etre when your verb is showing movement, and you use avoir for everything else. 

Once I understood the passe compose, I moved on to comparing the grammatical morphology of ir and er verbs. The endings for ar, er, and ir verbs are slightly different from each other in each tense. For example the Spanish present tense endings for ar, er, and ir verbs is shown below. 

Singular	-ar	-er	-ir	Plural	-ar	-er	-ir
1st	o	e	o	1st	amos	emos	imos
2nd	as	es	es	2nd	àis	èis	is
3rd	a	e	e	3rd	an	en	en

I wasn't able to finish the morphology comparisons due to some technical difficulties. But I plan on finishing this coming week and including it in next week's post.

Grammatical Morphology

Hello!

This week I started comparing the languages based on their grammatical morphology. I started with the active indicative endings for -ar verbs. I also decided to compare Spanish to Latin, even though my comparisons might be biased because I am more familiar with Spanish than I am with the other three languages. I figure it won't hurt to compare the two, because I can always take it out when I make my prediction of which language is easiest to learn from Latin.
I ran into a little bit of confusion when it came to the pluperfect, or past perfect tense. Some of the languages that I am comparing to Latin use an auxiliary helping verb for the pluperfect tense. For example in English we use the word “had” to show a pluperfect, and the other languages like French, Spanish and Italian also use an auxiliary helping word. But in Latin the pluperfect active indicative does not use an auxiliary helping word; you know it's a pluperfect by looking at the verb's ending. The issue was how many points to give to the pluperfect tenses for the languages that have a helping word. When going from the Latin pluperfect to another language's pluperfect, it would be difficult to make the connection. But I know, English so I am used to having an auxiliary helping verb. So I decided to give the pluperfect chart three points out of six because even though it didn't match the Latin, it was still recognizable.

So far, Spanish is in the lead and French is in last place. I'm surprised that Italian isn't winning, but who knows, maybe it'll come through in the end.

This week my goal was to gain a better understanding of how I would be comparing the different languages. I met with Mr.Ryan, the Latin and Linguistics teacher at BASIS, and he showed me how to look for similarities in the semantics, morphology, and syntax of the different languages.
I decided to start by comparing the grammatical morphology of Latin to the grammatical morphology of French,Italian, and Portuguese. In linguistics, studying morphology is studying a languages morphemes which are the small grammatical units that make up a word like it's root or it's tense endings. I plan on starting by comparing the tense endings in each language. For example, the present ending for second person singular verbs in Latin is -s. The French present tense ending for second person singular verbs is also -s, but for Italian it is -ai. In this case, based on a 0-2 point scale, French would get two points and Italian would get zero.
After comparing the grammatical morphology, I'll move on to comparing semantics. Linguistics semantics is the study of the meaning of words or phrases in a language. I will randomly select around 300 words in Latin to compare to the same words in the other three languages. Then, I will look at a word in Latin and in the other languages, and see if they look similar enough that I could understand the basic meaning of the word because it looks like the Latin word. For example, Cibus -i m, is the word for "food" in Latin. In Italian, the word for food is Cibo, m and in French it's Nourriture, f. Since I already knew that cibus meant food in Latin, it would be rather easy to look at cibo in Italian and know that it means food, but nourriture looks nothing like cibus. In this example, Italian would receive two points and French would receive zero.
While I am comparing the grammatical morphology and semantics of the languages, I will be keeping an eye out to also make comparisons in derivational morphology. Derivational morphology is taking the root of one word, and using it to create other words. Like taking the word "brave" and turning it into "bravely." There are patterns in Latin that show up in other languages, like adding -tio, tionis to a word in Latin is the same thing as adding -tion to a word in English or -cion is Spanish.
And finally I will compare the syntax of each language, which is the language's sentence structure. I will take a sentence in Latin, and compare it to the same sentence in French, Italian, and Portuguese and compare the word orders.
I'll keep you updated on how it goes!

My name is Kelsey Knott and I am a senior this year at BASIS Flagstaff. One of the perks of being a senior at BASIS is being able to do your own research project; my project will focus of the linguistic relationship between the Latin language and the modern romance languages.
I started taking Latin in eighth grade because I thought it would make learning other languages easier. I want to be a linguist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and in order to enter into that career field I need to be able to speak as many different languages as I can.
I was mostly interested in learning Spanish since it is so common in the United States, so I started take classes on Rosetta Stone. After taking five years of Latin, I want to see if it will actually help me learn other languages.
Since I already enrolled in a Spanish class, I couldn't determine if Latin was helping me learn the language or if the class was. So I picked three other languages that also come from Latin: Portuguese, French, and Italian. I will predict which language is most closely related to Latin and should be easiest to learn by comparing the semantics, morphology, and syntax of words in each language. Then I can see if my predictions are correct by taking a test in each language.

I want to know how powerful the so-called “Dead Language” is. Can I leave the Latin classroom being able to understand not only Latin, but also other languages that are very similar to Latin? Or is spending five years learning Latin a waste of time? 

Let's find out!