Oh, and by the way : No, a french speaker can’t understand a spanish speaker. Even reading spanish, though one can recognize part of the words, it’s unlikely that one could actually understand the sentence’s meaning.
As an experience, I’m picking totally at random a sentence in a spanish book :
“Dende entonses no hay cristiano que se atreva a crusar de noche, y lo mas corajudos han guelto a mitad de camino y cuentan cosas estrañas”
Apart “no”, “cristiano” “que” “de” “se” and possibly “cuentan” and “cosas”, the rest doesn’t make sense for a french speaker who didn’t study spanish. “mas” and “crusar” would look like french words (“mais” and “croiser” but the french speaker would be mistaken about their meaning) He wouldn’t have any clue about what this sentence mean. And as I said, I picked it at random.
In english, you would understand : “dende entonces no hay christian who himself atreva to cruise of noche, y the but corajudos han guelto to mitad of camino y telling things estrañas”
Of course, when you know some spanish, the similarity of many other words , like for instance “camino” and “chemin, cheminer”, “corajudo” and “courageux”, “estrañas” and “étrange” can be noticed, but it’s really not obvious at all without knowing first the meaning of said words, especially since they aren’t pronounced at all in the same way.
This is not correct Spanish anywhere. It seems to be written in the dialect of the Argentinian gaucho so I am assuming it was taken from some literary work and that was some Argentinian peasant speaking. A native speaker from Spain would understand the basic meaning but it would sound very strange.
In correct Castilian Spanish:
Dende = Desde
entonses = entonces
crusar = cruzar
corajudo = valiente
güelto = vuelto
estrañas = extrañas
The translation would be: Since then, (since that event, since that time) there is no person (cristiano has the generic meaning of “person”) who will dare cross at night and the most courageous have turned around when half way and tell strange tales.
Even people speaking different Spanish dialects would have some difficulty and migh need some explanations and clarifications. Many words have different meaning in different countries.
Portuguese and Spanish adopted many Arab words, that does not make them any less Romance. Similarly for Romanian, adopting Slavic words does not make it any less Romance. These languages were influenced by others spoken in the region.
Actually, even when spoken, the similarities can be remarkable. For instance, French seems to be somewhat idiosyncratic with all of its elision and dropped sounds, but l’autre (m. & f. “the other”) is very much like Spanish masculine el otro and fem. * la otra*. Most striking of all is an example from Romanian. Those interested in comparative linguistics are familiar with the term cognate, used to describe a pair of equivalent words from related languages. The exact meaning need not be the same, but usually is related in some way, for instance German Tisch (table) and English dish. Anyway, in Romanian, the word for cousin is kumnat, which may not look like cognate in print, but is strikingly like it in pronunciation, if you consider the way a Romance language speaker would pronounce cognate.
I also remember certain aspects of spoken colloquial Castilian Spanish as being more similar structurally to French than Latin American Spanish normally is.
For example, “to do,” first person, past tense:
French: j’ai fait
Castilian Spanish: yo he hecho
Latin American Spanish: yo hice
Asteroide: *Has there been any kind of research as to why German for instance has something like Latin grammar, but less Latin rooted vocabulary - where Italian eg has retained the Latin rooted words but considerably simplified the grammar ?
Or am I attributing some non-existant cause and effect here ?*
German is not a Romance language. Any resemblance to Latin or the Romance languages is probably due to a shared descent from Proto-Indo-European. German is in the Germanic family, which includes Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages. English recieved a considerable amount of French vocabulary, but it is still a Germanic language.
True, but that wasn’t what I meant to say. What I meant is that to my ear at least, the past perfect tense, which is parallel in structure to the most commonly used past tense in French, is much more commonly used in daily speech in Spain than it is in Latin America.
Consider also that there used to be a more wide-spread Balkan Romance area. If I’m not mistaken, Dalmatian was spoken in the area of Croatia until late in the 1800s, and there are still pockets of Romanian dialects spoken in Greece.
One more thing: it’s nice to know there are other people who realize that Romanian is a Romance language as well. I had almost lost hope after hearing “But it sounds so much like Russian!” so many times.
I am no linguist and I know very little of German, but I think you are refering to the use of declinations in German and in Latin.
Not only Latin, but Greek and Saxon had declinations, so I think the declinations in German are a reminiscent of the Saxon ones.
Europeans tend to have a better ablity to decipher languages. I know a girl from the Netherlands. She speaks French, Dutch, German and English. I received a fax in Spanish. And she deciphered it in about 15 minutes.
My brother and sister both has Serbo-Croation as their first language. They had no trouble picking up Russian.
A lot of it is political. In the former Yugoslavia, Croatian and Serbian are called different languages. Now I was reading Montenigrin is considered different from Serbian.
During the period between WWI and WWII the Czechs didn’t even acknowledge Slovak as a language.
It wasn’t till the 70s when Belgium officially dropped the word Flemish and started using Dutch.
A lot of it is based on information like they say well this language uses different words. This is misleading. For instance here in the US we say “I will fill up my car with GAS.” in England “I will fill up my car with PETROL.” Just because it is two different words doesn’t mean it is a different language.
Jamaicans speak English. They speak fast so they are hard to understand but when they speak slower you can understand them.
It is said the Occtin (Sp?) (AKA Provencal et at) Catalan and Portuguese (Galician website says it is a seperate language while others consider it Portuguese) with Italian and Sardinian are closer together. Spanish takes in the Arab influence. French is further apart taking in Germanic influences.
Ironically linguists say there is more difference between supposed DIALECTS of NORTH Italian and SOUTH Italian then between some of the Romance Languages.
There is an old saying “languages are a dialect with an army to back it up.”
Funny, most Dutch-speaking Belgians still call their language “vlaamse” and acknowledge its (slight) difference from standard Dutch.
Anyway, I won’t go over the numerous other naive and oversimplified elements of your post. I can only suggest you take a college course in linguistics or at the very least buy a non-pedestrian primer on the subject. Maybe then you won’t talk to the board like we’re total idiots.
Thanks Sérgio, this would certainly make more sense than my vague assumption that German and Russian declinations (sp?) are directly descended from Latin - do you know if the Saxon grammar was Latin influenced ?
In French and Italian, personal pronouns are declined (io, mi, me etc) but I guess that’s about it - nothing like the multiple cases of Russian and German, and presumably a bunch of other languages I know nothing about.
Old English grammar, along with that of Latin, and other heavily declined languages (eg. Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, etc.) is derived from Proto-Indo-European. Similarities among Latin, German, or Russian are generally due to their common descent from Proto-Indo-European.
Anecdotal observations follow:
I took English from 3rd grade, German from 7th and French from 10th. Then some years followed and I learned Spanish when I was 30+. In the meantime, my knowledge of French and German all but vanished and when travelling through France nowadays, whenever I try to speak what little French I know, I can only come up with Spanish words. And even if ‘trabajo’ and ‘travaille’ clearly have the same roots, the French tend to give me a ‘Huh?’. I can read some light text in Italian and get about 75% of it. I wouldn’t even consider Umberto Eco. An Italian can understand me, speaking Spanish, and I can get what they say, if they speak slowly. Of course, come next April, it’ll be ten years since I left Spain and I do feel that my brain isn’t as tuned to the language as it was. hen I visit, it takes me 2-3 days to get up to speed, whereas English is with me all the time.
Similar speaking styles and mannerisms can also help understanding. Being of Argentine descent I find the Italian style of speaking very similar to Argentine Spanish. I expect a Mexican would have a harder time understanding Italian than an Argentine.
Correct. Considering that the Angles and Saxons migrated from Germany to Britain around 450, I would imagine that there was a high degree of similarity between German and English in those days, at least if it was the right kind of German.
German does use declination, but it’s a lot simpler than that of Latin. Most verbs don’t have case endings, except masculine and neuter words, ending in consonants, that may add an -e for the dative case. All dative plurals add -n if they don’t have it already. As for plurals specifically, they are treated as if they were a fourth gender; you don’t have to deal with masculine, feminine, or neuter plurals, they’re just plurals. On the other hand, the declination of articles and adjectives is a bit more complicated.
