A friend of mine is adamant that an Italian speaker can understand perfectly what a Spanish speaker is saying and vice versa. While I would imagine that there might be various terms, vocabulary etc that are shared or similar I find it slightly hard to believe that speakers of one of the languages would have no problem communicating with speakers of the other.
What I have read is that Italians can read Spanish newspapers ok, but not vice versa, and that the two languages are mutually unintelligible when spoken.
-FrL-
However, google is starting to make me think I’m wrong. I’ve found nothing “official,” but saw several anecdotal bits of evidence consisting of someone claiming to know one of the languages and judging the other to be fairly intelligible, both written and spoken.
-FrL-
A coworker of mine was in Italy in WWII in an outfit with a bunch of Latinos from southern California. He said that in a very short time, a matter of days, the Latinos picked up Italian.
If you have a mind which works that way having a working knowledge of either Italian or Spanish or Portuguese or Catalan or Romanian means that you have a good chance of de-cyphering the basic meaning of one of the other languages in written form - especially with a clear context.
I’d guess that with only the “clean” C pronunciation Latin American Spanish would be easier for an Italian to understand.
When my mom’s cousins visit from Italy, we manage to understand each other pretty well. They speak in italian, we respond in spanish. As long as we don’t get too fancy with our ideas and are willing to repeat ourselves, we manage to communicate.
This type of question comes up a lot in GQ, and it’s always important to consider whether the people involved are making an effort to understand and be understood or not. There is a lot of shared vocabulary and grammar between the two languages, and the pronunciation is much more similar to each other than either is to French. If an Italian speaker and a Spanish speaker want to be able to communicate, they certainly could. Does that make the languages mutually intelligible? Depends on the circumstances.
My first language is English and I became fluent in Spanish. I once spent about a week hanging out with Italians in Spain. The Italians knew some English, the basics they learned in school, and essentially no Spanish. I could generally understand them when they spoke in Italian. However, for them to understand me I had to speak in English. My attempts at “Spatalian” were completely unintelligible.
During a weekend trip with an Italian, a Mexican, a Colombian, and a Liechtensteiner, the Italian and the Spanish speakers talked and understood in their respective languages. Considering they were all English school students, they should have been trying to speak in English (the Liechstensteiner and Colombian spoke German or English).
In another thread, Nava mentioned ‘Itagnolo’ - apparently a pidgin intermediate language that arises spontaneously between Italian and Spanish speakers when the necessity arises.
[side issue]Ain’t it the truth? Some years ago I joined a group that taught English as a second language to Spanish speakers around here.
They spoke Spanish to each other, they listened to Spanish language radio and TV, they read Spanish language newspapers and magazines. I was supposed to teach them English in one hour sessions, twice a week.
I gave it up as a hopeless job.[/side issue]
Where is Nava,, one of my favorite posters?
Here, sorry. Gee, guess you guys DO miss me!
I can understand northern Italian and TV Italian about 99% and guess the other 1% from context, both written and spoken. Haven’t been to Napoli. Several anecdotes and details I’ve mentioned before:
A Spaniard and an Italian are talking animatedly. An outside observer can tell which is which because the Spaniard moves only his forearms, while the Italian moves the whole arm; in any case, they pose a threat to anybody trying to walk past them in the narrow hallway. An American walks up to them and tells the Spaniard “oh, I didn’t know you spoke Italian!” The two latinos turn, stare at the American, decide he’s serious, and then the Spaniard replies “I don’t, I was speaking in Spanish.” “Oh. (turning to the Italian) Oh, then you speak Spanish?” “No, I was speaking Italian.” For the next few days, the Americans would occasionally come to me and to the other Hispanics in the team and ask for confirmation that yes, the member of the Italian and Spanish teams were talking each in his language again. Oh, and the people from those two teams spoke quite bad English, most had had only one or two years of it in school.
Put an Italian and Spaniard in the same room. After half an hour, they start creating a pidgin, as each member of the couple learns new words from the other.
Many times, Spanish includes a word that’s derived from the same root as the Italian word. While this Spanish word is less usual than another one from a different origin, it’s not so unusual that we can’t understand an Italian speaker and remember to use our “unusual” word rather than its usual sister, to make it easier for him to understand us.
I’ve seen ads in monster*.es* asking for people for jobs in Italy, with very specific technical qualifications, which included the following: “You DO NOT need to be able to speak Italian. In our experience, people from Spain do fine without it and learn it very fast. It is NOT A REQUIREMENT AT ALL.” Bolding theirs, translation mine.
Looking for some Giovanni Guareschi in the original now… 
I think this is like a New Yorker talking to someone from L.A. 
So I assume everyone means Castilian Spanish. What about Catalan?
[Though I imagine just about every Catalan speaker alive now also speaks Castilian]
not me. My coworker’s compatriots were mostly from Mexican roots.
Damn. I thought this was the lead-in to a dirty joke.
Second that. As a mexicano, my first language is Spanish. If the person is speaking slowly and using “basic” Italian (not using high-school level terms), I can understand them. I find easier to decipher written Italian. But this is also the case with *Romance * languages. I can understand French and Portuguese if the other person is speaking at an understandable pace and with a basic vocabulary. I once met a Brazilian tourist in Edinburg, Texas that was visiting UT-Pan American. She was a “back-packer” tourist visiting Mexico and the Texas-Mexico border adventuring only by using her Portuguese. She asked me for directions in Portuguese, I understood what she said because she spoke it slowly and used the shared vocab. I answered her in Spanish at basic level and she understood.
As Dad liked to say when Catalans asked him “Catalan or Castilian?”, “I haven’t spoken Castilian one single day in my whole life!” My Hispanic coworkers were from Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia; like me, they’d often have to switch to Italian+Spanish over English when working with the Italians - we just understood each other more easily than in English, with most.
The Spaniard who was windmilling with the Italian was from Valencia (where they speak both Spanish and Valenciano, which depending on the politics of the person you ask is either a dialect of Catalan, Catalan with a Spanish accent or its own language); 3 people in that 12-people team had southern accents. Like people from my area, until 1978 those were told constantly that they didn’t speak Castilian.
Catalan is spoken in parts of France and Italy as well, plus many younger Spanish-Catalans are being raised monolingual, so not everybody who speaks Catalan speaks Spanish. Bilingual Catalans or Galegos understand Italian even more easily than the rest of Spain; those who are monolingual for political reasons will claim not to understand anything in any language other than Catalan (unless there’s money involved, at which point they suddenly can talk the pants off a UN translator).