My name is Kelsey Knott and I am a senior this year at BASIS Flagstaff. One of the perks of being a senior at BASIS is being able to do your own research project; my project will focus of the linguistic relationship between the Latin language and the modern romance languages.
I started taking Latin in eighth grade because I thought it would make learning other languages easier. I want to be a linguist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and in order to enter into that career field I need to be able to speak as many different languages as I can.
I was mostly interested in learning Spanish since it is so common in the United States, so I started take classes on Rosetta Stone. After taking five years of Latin, I want to see if it will actually help me learn other languages.
Since I already enrolled in a Spanish class, I couldn't determine if Latin was helping me learn the language or if the class was. So I picked three other languages that also come from Latin: Portuguese, French, and Italian. I will predict which language is most closely related to Latin and should be easiest to learn by comparing the semantics, morphology, and syntax of words in each language. Then I can see if my predictions are correct by taking a test in each language.

I want to know how powerful the so-called “Dead Language” is. Can I leave the Latin classroom being able to understand not only Latin, but also other languages that are very similar to Latin? Or is spending five years learning Latin a waste of time? 

Let's find out!