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!