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Spanish & Portuguese- the same language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| jtmc18 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7246 days ago 119 posts - 140 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 1 of 14 15 November 2006 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been studying Spanish for quite some time and am now finding that I can now understand a lot of spoken and written Portuguese. It seems that the vocabulary and sentence structure of the two languages are remarkably similar. I realize that the sounds of the two languages are a bit different, but taken all together the similarities seem to outweigh the differences.
I know several Brazilians who are adamant that Portuguese is a distinct language, but I am wondering if this is really the case. Why are Spanish and Portuguese classified as two different languages and not as dialects of each other? Is this for purely social or historical reasons or are there linguistic considerations? I realize that Arabic and Chinese are composed of dialects that are not mutually intelligible, and yet they are considered part of the same language. Why is this not the case with Spanish and Portuguese? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 2 of 14 16 November 2006 at 2:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Your question deals more with the definitions of "language" and "dialect", which are overlapping terms. But it seems that separate languages will have separate histories, literary corpuses, vocabularies, grammar standards, regions of use, and so on, even if they're mutually intelligible. Dialects will share some of these in common. For example, the Arabic dialects all co-inhabit a large area where there is one shared literary history and one recognized language standard. Spanish and Portuguese, however, have gone their own separate ways.
Funnily enough, the Brazilians I know sometimes joke that Portuguese and Spanish are the same language, but communication is difficult (if possible) when I see them trying to talk to Spanish speakers. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sapedro Triglot Senior Member Portugal descredito.blogspot. Joined 7119 days ago 216 posts - 219 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Greek | Message 3 of 14 16 November 2006 at 5:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's hard for Spanish to understand spoken Portuguese, unless we speak very, very, very slow. We eat unstressed vowels, you know ? :P
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| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6891 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 4 of 14 16 November 2006 at 6:39am | IP Logged | |||||
That's very true! Written Portuguese is understandable but the spoken form... I also find Brazilian Portuguese slightly easier to understand than European Portuguese. It seems that they don't eat their unstressed vowels quite as much. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| zorglub Pentaglot Senior Member France Joined 7001 days ago 441 posts - 504 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (Written), Turkish, Mandarin | Message 5 of 14 16 November 2006 at 7:18am | IP Logged | |||||
====== Latin America Spanish and portuguese speakers may be more understandable to each other, because the pronunciation is clearer (my feeling). But the Spanyards do not understand spoken Portuguese from Portugal, as a rule. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 14 16 November 2006 at 8:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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The distinction between languages and dialects is a mess. On one side we have the Chinese who for political reasons claim that there is one Chinese language with more than a billion speakers, even though speakers of its 'dialects' can't understand each others but have to rely on a common writing system (that isn't even phonetic). On the other side we have those who (with support from "the Ethnologue") claim the existence of separate languages wherever there are two people who can't understand each other.
As Sapedro points out there is in fact not complete and easy interintelligibility between Castilian ("Spanish") and Portuguese, and there are many other cases where we would be forced to bundle good ol' languages if we decided to lump Portuguese and Spanish together. For instance we would end up with just one slavic language (or maybe two or three if we tried hard), and the Scandinavian languages would end up as Icelandic versus 'the rest'. There would also be consequences for non-Indoeuropean languages, but I shall refrain from discussing those. Even if we decided to operate with an Ibero-Romance 'superlanguage' we would still have to deal with internal differences within its 'dialects'. European Portuguese would still be different from Brazilian Portuguese, and we would still have to choose which one we want to learn, - it would just be more complicated if these differences were described as variants within dialects within one language. There would still be films and books and schools and grammars and academies for both Spanish and Portuguese even if we decided to call them dialects, - no practical gain of any kind. And with very heterogenous languages the borders would be fuzzy, - for instance Spaniards and Italians also to some extent understand each other. So is there any valid reason not to include Italian into the new superSpanish language? And with Italian gobbled up, why not French too? Then it would be Romanian versus 'the rest'. In short we would just make unnecessary problems for ourselves by operating with those superlanguages, and we wouldn't solve any kind of problems. I would prefer much prefer to stay someway midway between the Ethnologues and the Eugolonhtes (Ethnologue spelled backwards). Let's keep Portuguese and Spanish (Castilian) and Catalan separate and then we can discuss what to do with Galician and the dwindling pockets of Leonese and Aragonese. Edited by Iversen on 16 November 2006 at 8:10am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lcsr Diglot Newbie Portugal Joined 6418 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 7 of 14 04 May 2007 at 7:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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I get the impression some people think Portuguese and Spanish are more similar than they actually are...
Not taking grammar and pronunciation differences into account, have a look at the following sentence ("a peach on a chair next to a window"). All the words are common words and they're all different. A monolingual speaker would not understand the other version at all. ES: Un melocotón en una silla cerca de una ventana PT: Um pêssego numa cadeira perto de uma janela Galician-Portuguese originated in the area that is now Galicia, while Castillian originates in the area around Burgos. Those two regions are at least 700km apart. So, it makes no sense to say the two languages are dialects when they evolved independently from Vulgar Latin. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Talairan Tetraglot Senior Member Spain Joined 6593 days ago 194 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Afrikaans, English*, Gypsy/Romani, Dutch Studies: Spanish, Flemish, Galician, Aramaic | Message 8 of 14 04 May 2007 at 11:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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E no Galego (and in Galician): Un pexego nunha cadeira preto dunha xanela. :)
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