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.