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.

Hello!
This week I finally finished comparing the subjunctive mood for each of the languages. So, without further ado, the winner, with six points out of a possible eight, is Spanish! French, Portuguese, and Italian all tied for second place with five out of eight points. I did my comparisons a little differently for the subjunctive than I did for the indicatives though. Instead of scoring each person and number in each case, I just scored each case as a whole. So, every tense was worth two points, and they were scored based on whether or not they had a recognizable vowel change and if the tense endings in the subjunctive mood were similar to the ending in the indicative mood.
Here is an example: the present subjunctive for Spanish got the full two points. Here's why, there is a clear vowel shift for each verb ending; -ar verbs drop the a and get an e, and -er and -ir verbs drop their vowels for an a. On top of that, the endings are still the same; second person singular verbs end with an s in the indicative and in the subjunctive. This makes it easy to know what tense the subjunctive is.
Spanish Present active indicative

Singular	-ar	-er	-ir	Plural	-ar	-er	-ir
1st	o	e	o	1st	amos	emos	imos
2nd	as	es	es	2nd	àis	èis	is
3rd	a	e	e	3rd	an	en	en

Spanish Subjunctive

Present	-ar	-er	-ir
1st Singular	e	a	a
2nd Singular	es	as	as
3rd Singular	e	a	a
1st Plural	emos	amos	amos
2nd Plural	éis	áis	áis
3rd Plural	en	an	an

One thing that I found interesting while making my comparison was that Portuguese has a future subjunctive. I know, right? It is the only romance language that uses a future subjunctive, and it is used for "if", "when", or "as soon as." The future tense obviously did not get any points because there is no way I would even think to use a future subjunctive just from knowing Latin.
Anyway, next week I will be working on comparing participles and imperatives, and then I will be done with the grammar comparisons!

Hello again!
This past week I have been working on comparing the subjunctive mood for the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Latin languages. It has been a little tricky, it's not as straight forward as comparing the indicatives. I am still in the midst of making the comparisons, so I don't have the results yet. But here is what I have been working on so far. Each language has a present, perfect, imperfect, and pluperfect subjunctive. The subjunctive is marked by a vowel change, and even though the changes might not be the same in one language as they are in Latin, I think that they are still fairly recognizable because either the ending vowel or a vowel in the stem would be different and stand out.
Here is an example of what I am talking about:
In Latin, the vowel changes depending on what degree of conjugation the verb is; either first -are, second -ēre, third -ere, or fourth -ire. So with the first conjugation verb amare, to love, the a would change to an e and the present tense endings would be added onto the end to show what person it's in. So to make "She loves," into a present subjunctive and get "let her love," you would change amat to amet. For second conjugation verbs, the e changes to an ea, for third conjugation verbs, the e changes to an a, and for fourth conjugation verbs the i changes to an ia. 
In Spanish, the verb for love in encantar, to say "she loves," you would add the present third person singular ending and get encanta, and to make it a present subjunctive you change the a to an e and get encante. If I know that the verb is an -ar verb in Spanish, then seeing it end with an e instead of an a would be a red flag for me, and I would know that something is up, and hopefully be able to draw the conclusion that it is a subjunctive.
So that's what I am working on and I hope to get the results for you by next week!