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!