It’s not first hand knowledge, but from all accounts, Spaniards and Italians have much less trouble understanding each other than French and Italians. Even though Spanish and French are supposed to be closer in the “genealogy” of languages than Spanish and Italian (but see the discussion about English and Dutch : it doesn’t necessarily means much).
I can understand quite a lot of written Italian (not spoken, generally) but I’m a native French speaker who understood Occitan as a kid (even though I forgot almost all of it), learnt Latin (though I was uninterested and very bad at it) and have some usable knowledge of Spanish. That adds up to quite a lot of of “romance” vocabulary to figure out what an Italian word could mean.
I think that a monolingual French and a monolingual Italian would have a hard time understanding anything. They could probably find out some common ground if trying hard enough but it would be a painful process. Itagnolo might exist but there’s definitely no “Italiench” (or “Sparench”, for that matter)
I’m not a native speaker of either language, but have had formal training in both. Portuguese spoken or sung by a native speaker sounds nothing like Spanish to me, and is more difficult to understand. Many words are similar, it’s true.
I wonder if the Italians and Spanish understanding each other is probably because of the region, exposure, and local vocabulary. Because I, as a native Spanish speaker (but not from Spain), cannot really follow Italian conversations. Again, I can get a word here and there, and in songs I get the gist of the theme, but I don’t think about having a fully functional conversation. Same with my Italian friend when I was speaking Spanish.
Portuguese has always been easier, even before I formally learned it.
Note that I can read Italian fairly well, though. I’ve read Italian wiki entries, for example, and I’ve read song lyrics without lots of difficulty.
If you look at the written languages they are very similar. But the spoken languages are quite different. Hence, a large part of the difference in the spoken languages is what we’d call “accent”. Plus a few things like h -> f in Portuguese, which again is really just an “accent” thing.
It sounds like you were disagreeing with me, but I agree with everything you said. Italian and Spanish sound more similar that Spanish and Portuguese, but once you get used to Portuguese pronunciation, I expect it is much more similar to Spanish than Italian is. You probably are used to the pronunciation.
I don’t hear much Portuguese, but when I do hear it, I can pick out maybe one word out of 20. Written Portuguese is pretty comprehensible, though, knowing Spanish. So again, it’s the pronunciation that makes them seem so different when spoken.
Castilian and Florentine Italian sound quite similar when spoken by natives.
I presume that there was some older term for “rusted” in Spanish which has since fallen out of favor? The knowledge that oxygen causes rust is fairly recent, compared to the timescales on which languages evolve.
Well, I agree that you can tease out a lot of German if you are familiar with obsolete or unusual English words, but I still think don’t think the similarities rise to the level of even German and Swedish. And Swedish is technically more distantly related to German than English is. We English speakers don’t have another language we can point to and say-- I’ve never learned that language but I can pick up a newspaper and pretty much understand what is being said.
Good point. Yes, sarro is a word which I (as a native New Yorker) translate as “schmutz”, but can also mean “rust”.
But, in any case, in my experience, “oxidado” is the first word that comes to Mexican minds, at least, even among those with little education in chemistry and whatnot.
I not only had formal Portuguese training, but lived in Lisbon for two years. My training was in the Brazilian version of the language, so that made it more difficult for me (not for a native speaker so much, though) because of the accent. That was around 1993. Today, I can parse out the written language, but the spoken version is much more difficult. Oddly, Italian is easier for me to pick out words, as it seems closer to Spanish as a spoken language. Continental Portuguese always seemed like a “muffled” language to me. They tend to, for lack of a better description, talk inside their mouths. If you speak this sentence, keeping your lips close together and “shwshing” your esses, you get an idea of it. Italian and Spanish people are more demonstrative and effusive when they speak. I’m not disagreeing with you, by the way, just expanding on the conversation.
I had surprising problems learning Spanish, as whenever I got stuck, I reverted to a French word. It seems that French stuck in my brain instead of anything else, so when we took up Spanish some years later, mon dieu! This is a compartmentalization problem, of course. I knew many people in the Foreign Service who could switch between two or even three languages effortlessly. It’s a real talent.
A subjective opinion of course. Which just might make you right on all else you said. In fact, you got me to thinking as to why I find Portuguese easier to understand than Italian – duh! My Asturian roots and Bable’s proximity to Galician = not that far from from Portuguese…baby steps. Now, if they’d all learn proper Castilian no need for this thread.
When I was 15, I went to Ireland with a group organized by my school; there was a group of French students our age, brought over by Lyon Social Services (to the best of our understanding). Common comprehension wasn’t anywhere as easy as with Italians, but it was solved by everyboy slowing down… and by teaching the French how to “read French like they were Spanish and didn’t have any notions of French”. The pronunciations of French and Spanish seem to have diverged a lot more than our spellings.
(And that line about baby talk totally cracked me up, I know the feeling)
“Disminuya su velocidad” is something you’d see in some Latin American locations. In Spain it’s “disminuya la velocidad” (until that damn Anglo posessive gets everywhere, it sure is making inroads fast).
Continuing on the theme of “RedFury and Nava are from the same country but have different lingüistic backgrounds and that modifies their ability to understand other Romance languages”, I’ve had some coworkers who kept being told “pronounce, damnit!” or even occasionally “I have no fucking idea what you just said, write it down” and handed a piece of paper - sometimes by people whose dialect was in theory very close to theirs. I’ve had others whose regional accent/dialect disappeared completely and they started speaking “newscaster” (although slightly [del]slower[/del]less fast than in their usual dialect) when they were visiting customers from another region. The first ones would be no more understandable to someone from a different country, never mind a different language, than to someone from a different town - but those I’ve met were Ron types (this one for example, he’s from Huelva and I’ve heard people from Seville or Cádiz tell him “pronounce damnit!”).
Also note, in reference to KarlGrenze’s posts, that I’ve been referring to conversations between people from both languages. When we were in Costa Rica, a coworker from Madrid made the mistake of saying he was surprised to understand the Ticos so easily and a Tica gave us a paragraph of which we could get… uh… the articles? The coworker said “uh?”; I told him “cheli*, dude, she just spoke in Costa Rican cheli” and gave him a line in Ribero of which, again, he couldn’t get a word (well, yes, the articles). Mutual understanding is influenced by dialectal variations, but also by whether the people speaking are making an effort to be understood by the other one: an overhead conversation can easily be… in cheli.
cheli: a dialect/slang from Madrid (not “the” dialect of Madrid, this one has class connotations); think cockney. Me no comprende a fucking word of it. Well, yeah: the articles.
Nava, dear, estoy como estuvo tu coworker en Costa Rica – donde he tenido el placer de estar varias veces: N.P.I. de que hablas-- seguro no necesito traducir lo ultimo.
In any event, all I said is I love Nava and wish we’d speak the same language. Witch we kind of do as is – she just cheers for a very obscure (though proud) football team. I can respect that.
Pero es que tú ya no hablas español, macho, hablas Espanglis. O al menos lo escribes
What Red said was “Nava, dear, that leaves me like your coworker in Costa Rica, where I’ve been several times: no fucking idea what you’re talking about - I’m sure I don’t need to translate the last part.”
My response, “but you don’t even speak Spanish any more, dude, you speak Spanglish - or at least you write it.”
Do you understand the following sentence, Red?
Alcorzamos polalberca y la vuelta nel voy y vengo.
Context will provide some information, but alcorzar is Ribero (not even Maño), el voy y vengo is a Navarrese expression; initially it was the name of a free bus service which goes to villages during their weekish-long summer fiestas, so people can “get there and back” easy and cheaply - it’s become extended to indicate any public transportation method which can be used to go somewhere and come back in the same day (el voy y vengo de Madrid: the fast trains from Pamplona/Tafalla/Tudela to Madrid, which let you get to Madrid in the morning and come back to sleep at home). Alberca is used only in some dialects: it means a water deposit or a swimming pool. If I was saying the same to someone who’s not ribero I’d say vamos andando, atajando por el depósito y volvemos en el autobús ése que es gratis (we walk there, using the shortcut that goes by the water deposit, and we take the free bus to come back). And I did something which is usually done in English but not in Spanish, write it with the contractions I’d actually pronounce.
In Spanish, mutual understanding between people who have different dialects can be improved or made harder very easily, 90% of it is word choice.
As I’ve said in many a thread on mutual comprehension-- if the two people are trying their best to be understood, that is on thing; if they’re just rattling off in their normal way of speaking, that is another.
John Mace, if I rattle off to RedFury in the same way I do to my brothers, he wouldn’t understand me. My mother and the other Not From Around Here aunt have been known to ask for clarification on a term when my paternal family slips into speaking Cuenco (the Basque aunt counts as From Around Here, as usually the word producing problems happens to be a loan from Basque).
Now, that is something we English speakers can experience. Even in the US there are some accents that are so pronounced, a non-local will have trouble understanding them. In the UK, of course, it’s even more pronounced (no pun intended). I challenge any American to go to certain parts of Scotland, listen in on a conversation without knowing the context, and try to understand what is being said.
That is kind of what it looks like, but there’s definitely a good deal of Scots vocabulary you have to learn to completely understand it. Of all the examples here, this is probably the closest to the Spanish-Italian relationship, IMHO, but I think Scots and English may be a tad bit too close. So, if there were a language, say, midway between Scots and Frisian, maybe we’d have a good analogy.
