That’s what I was going to say. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Netherlands on business. While it’s true that Dutch is closely related to English in a linguistic sense, in reality it is totally unintelligible to an English-speaker. Fortunately almost every Dutch person speaks perfect English.
As I understand it, Dutch is fairly closely related to Anglo-Saxon, and presumably Anglo-Saxon is even closer to modern English than Dutch is. But that’s still not very close: A modern English speaker (with no significant knowledge of other languages) isn’t really going to be able to get anything of meaning from, say, Beowulf.
Middle English (like what Chaucer wrote) might be a reasonable comparison (it’s sort-of intelligible to a modern speaker if you take it slowly), but with the complication that nobody speaks it any more.
Ok, now I’m intrigued. There was the latin butyrum which gave us in french, italian and english: buerre, burro and butter. Old Spanish, whatever that is, had butero, so that’s cool. Modern spanish for butter, however, is mantequilla, which is, ah, quite different. What happened here, does anyone know? I know manteca means lard so at some point people diminutized lard to come up with a name for butter and dropped the original and cognate with its fellow languages?
Yes.
See also: Old Spanish “can” (“dog”, from “canus”), dropped in favor of “perro” (origin disputed, I believe); Old Spanish “sinistra” (“left”) dropped in favor of “izquierda” (from Basque); and many other word replacements.
It’s this process, more than anything else, which makes Italian (to get back to the OP), for example, much less than fully intelligible to a Spanish speaker (and vice versa).
I think it was Isaac Asimov in one essay said that English was Norman Latin overlaid on anglosaxon German. He suggested English was relatively unique in being 2 languages. We have a fancy Latin word for the hoitytoity to use and a short one for the simple folk.
He gives the example from Shakespeare “the marine sea incardinated, the green turned red.” (repeats in simple words for the peons in the pit)
In other situations the peasants raise cows or pigs but when it reaches the (Norman) lords table it’s beef or pork.
I suppose romance languages are less likely to have this duality and hence less variety of common word to choose from and so deviate from each other? The only exception maybe the Arab words borrowed in Spanish…
Yes, and the process that gets sort of reversed when we pick the words that we know to be Latinate: can and siniestra are both still in perfect good health - they’re less frequent than perro and izquierda (plus siniestro has some meanings that izquierdo doesn’t), but still expected to be a part of the vocabulary of any Spaniard who finished compulsory education (for people currently of working age that’s up to age 14 or 16). Not everyone who got that much schooling picked up what he should have, of course, but those specific examples are among the things you’re supposed to know.
My Italian lets me understand classic Spanish speakers pretty well, and be understood by them also…but it is a different story with the dialect spoken in Northern Mexico and Tiajuana, which is probably related to Spanish as Sicilian is to Italian. I can barely understand Sicilians and Sardinians, given that my Italian is with a Northern bias.
The way I heard it was that if you go to Italy and speak French in a Spanish accent, you’ll be able to get along.
And if you go to Lisbon and speak Spanish with a French accent, you’ll also get along.
I’ve always said that Portuguese sounds, to me, like Spanish being spoken by someone with a French accent. But I believe the vocabulary is more similar between Italian and Spanish than between French and either one of those.
I must pick this nit:
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red”.
Sorry.
I don’t really speak either German or Yiddish but from my fragmentary recall of junior high and high school German I recognize enough meaning in Yiddish to follow it decently well.
I noticed that on the internet when I was less fluent in English. Several times people were impressed by my use of rare “big words”. Which was in fact the result of my lack of familiarity with English. The only word I would know would be a cognate of French, and sometimes this cognate happened to be a very obscure word in English. I remember in particular an American online friend who was amazed, after checking a dictionary, that I would use a word she didn’t know the existence of (don’t remember which word).
(Note : I can’t help feeling that English speakers are using “baby talk” when they see an ophthalmologist and refer to him as an “eye doctor”)
No, it’s not really unique in that way. Japanese imported an enormous amount of Chinese vocabulary , to the extent that most kanji characters have two readings: one from Japanese, and one from Chinese. (That’s apart from the fact that the kanji characters were also taken from the Chinese, and also apart from the large part of the Japanese vocabulary derived from English and other European languages.)
Once again, I’ll bring up the example of “oxidado”, which is the usual Spanish term for “rusted”. But a Spanish speaker learning English is likely to guess that the usual English word is “oxidated,” thus sounding like some white-coated laboratory scientist (to native English ears).
Similarly, a sign which in English would read “SLOW DOWN” typically in Spanish is “DISMINUYA SU VELOCIDAD”. A cognate translation in English makes you sound like Spock, or a bookish nerd, or maybe some fusty British scholar: “Diminish your velocity”!
There are some examples as well in French, since it borrowed some Germanic vocabulary during the early middle-ages. Forest and forêt (Latin root, note that the accent on the French word stands for a lost “s”), wood and bois (cognates with a Germanic root). Constable/connétable (Latin) and Marshall/Maréchal (Germanic) both originally meaning the same thing : the guy in charge of horses.
They’re rare on the overall, though.
Maybe I am just thick, but as a fully bilingual person (Spa/Eng) I have an easier time with Portuguese than I do with Italian – though it might have something to do with the fact that I also speak a bit of Bable at my Dad’s insistence. I understand Italians somewhat (hand gestures simplify the exchage) but again, IMO, I have an easier time with Portuguese – never mind Galician, which appears to be a cross between the two (Spa & Por). With Italians I often find myself looking for a common word.
All anecdotal of course…
Sorry, a quick search showed I was mistaken. “bois” means “wood” but is in fact a cognate of “bush”.
Nope. Sicilian and Italian are two different dialects. With some minor differences Mexican Spanish and Castillan (standard Spanish) are the same language. Note for a similar situation that, as a native French speaker, I might I’ve trouble understanding Quebec French, but the issue is accent (or possibly extensive use of slang) not differences in language.
Sicilian and Italian might be on par with, say, Catalan and Spanish.
I speak Italian, never learned any Spanish. When I’ve been to Spain I’ve had the kind of conversation Nava describes: I speak Italian, they speak Spanish, everyone has a fair idea what’s going on. I’ve done the same thing in an email conversation with a Spanish-speaker, and I can read non-fancy Spanish (glossy magazine articles, stuff like that) with a decent degree of understanding, so it does work with written text to some extent.
I wonder if a parallel might be Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic? I don’t know anything about Scots…
I don’t think the difficulty between English and other Germanic languages is so much the lexicon as the word order, esepcially the position of verbs in the sentence. If you take a Dutch or German sentence and apply English verb-ordering conventions to it, the family resemblance between the languages becomes more apparent. The meaning of unfamiliar words can often be guessed at if you think of similar but obsolete English words.