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.