This caused me no end of headaches. I was being posted to Lisbon, but the only Portuguese class available at the time was Brazilian, so I had six months of Brazilian pronunciation and phrasing. When I got to Lisbon, I could barely understand the locals. The Portuguese tend to “talk inside their mouths” and swallow a lot of what they are saying. Brazilians are much more effusive and vocal. One notable difference in pronunciation is the letter “d” in many words, particularly when it’s the second “d”. So in Brazilian, the word “saudade” is pronounced “so-dadji”, while in Portugal it’s pronounced (approximately) “so-dodd” and is muffled.
The evolution of language is a good analogy for evolution of species, especially when countering ignorant arguments like “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” or “show me a fish that gave birth to a frog.”
With language, it’s easier to demonstrate the process. French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese all came from (Vulgar) Latin, but at no point did a Latin speaking mother give birth to a Spanish speaking baby. The various groups of people migrated and their languages slowly diverged until they became more and more unintelligible to one another. Latin in general doesn’t exist anymore, at least it’s not used in the wild, since these other languages have supplanted it.
Speciation is where populations evolve to become different species, to the point that they can no longer interbreed, much like language evolves to become unintelligible. Spanish and Portuguese haven’t diverged so much from each other (similar to Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian), so they’re a lot like horses and donkeys that have a very close common ancestor and can kind of sort of interbreed, but the resulting mules are almost always infertile. Italian is perhaps like zebras. Not as closely related as Spanish/Portuguese (Horses/Donkeys) but still from that same common ancestor, Latin.
It’s not that hard to imagine. Look at English.
A person with a strong Australian accent can be very difficult to understand, even ignoring things like Chook=chicken, Guhdie=Hello. You can see how, if it were not for international commerce and modern audio-visual media, things would continue to get more divergent. I’ve had similar experiences with Newfoundlanders - I worked with one who had to repeat slowly every sentence to be understood. When I watched the movie for Billy Elliot I had to turn on subtitles. You can imagine regional differences were exacerbated when travel outside the local area was severely limited, and the elite who would travel had a common language (Latin) to use instead.
Also I was in Barcelona a few years ago (before the recent riots) and they were quite proud in pushing Catalan over Spanish.
(A Canadian comedian once long ago was talking about his time in England during WWII. He encountered a large crowd in the road and asked what was happening. The only reply he got was “falla falla fallorie”. He says - “It took me five minutes to figure out some guy fell off a truck.”)
When I spent a few weeks in Australia an American who was living there told me the joke about a nurse asking a patient if he had come to the hospital to die. “No, I came yester die.”
I grew up speaking the South Texas dialect of Spanish along with English. WRT Portuguese, I find that I can understand the written language, but not the spoken language.
One place to check when you want to know how languages are related is the website Ethnologue. First go to the home page for it at https://www.ethnologue.com/. Then at the bottom you can see the place where it says “Browse by”. Click on “Language Families” below that. Then click on “Indo-European” (since I presume you know that Spanish and Portuguese are Indo-European). Go down towards the bottom where it says “Italic”. Under that is “Romance” and under that is “Italo-Western” and under that is “Western” and under that is “Ibero-Romance” and under that is “West Iberian”. Under “West Iberian” is “Castilian” and under that is “Spanish”, while also under “West Iberian” is “Portuguese-Galician” and under that is “Portuguese”. So the Ethnologue says that the relationship for Spanish and Portuguese is more complicated than they’re just both being Romance languages.
I have seen texts dated to the period whereby the local Romance is, literally, referred to as “romance”.
Vernaculars became codified very gradually as they evolved. It was really with the coming of print that they truly coalesced into standardized modern forms due to the wider spread of publications. The first comprehensive treatise of Castillian grammar was by Nebrija in Spain in 1492, which when combined with Castilian political dominance led to that form becoming the “standard” Spanish (and according to Wikipedia was the first such work in any of the modern European languages); then came the Real Academia in the 1700s and a century after that the Americas added their voice through Bello’s Spanish Grammar for the Americas in the mid-1800s.
And of course today a bunch of Kids On My Lawn are undoing all that work of centuries through smartphone text and/or blind obedience to bad autocorrect…
Thank you. From this and other sources it seems pretty clear that there wasn’t a recognized “Iberian” language post-Latin that diverged into Spanish and Portuguese, but rather that even very early on, the languages that would become S and P diverged, with Latin being there last common ancestor.
One of my favorite words for showing regional differences in Brazil is dentista (dentist).
A native of São Paulo will say “denTEEsta” with a super crisp T on the tip of the tongue and a nice sibilant S.
A native of Rio will say “denCHEEshta”, something entirely different.
As my better half is a carioca, my preference is the latter.
No idea how it sounds in Continental Portuguese.
More like the former. I always liked it when our teacher would say things like ‘spaghetti’, which came out ‘spa-GECH-ee’.
I don’t really know Portuguese at all, but I do read documents in colonial era (1500-1700s) Spanish at times. Earlier Spanish has more superficial similarities to Portuguese, such as the use of the tilde to substitute for “n” after a vowel, more use of f in place of h…or alternating between the two (forno=horno)…and more double letters such as ss (passa for pasa), and the use of ç in some positions. These features become even more pronounced if you go further back - for instance, early versions of “El Cid.”