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.
At the end of all your comparisons, once a winner has been determined, what are you going to do with that information? Are you going to try to learn the language that's in first place and compare how easy it is to learn to the language in last place?
ReplyDeleteI am going to use the information to predict which language is most closely related to Latin, and then take some tests in each language to see if my predictions were accurate.
DeleteHi Kelsey, can you explain why you hypothesized that Italian would be the most similar? Also, I think it would be helpful to show us examples of what you are describing in the future - like show an example of how close Italian an Latin can be.
ReplyDeleteI think it is just widely assumed that Latin and Italian would be closely related because they are both centered in Italy. Also I have noticed that a lot of words in Latin are almost the same in Latin, but the endings are different.
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