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Spanish-Italian Transparency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6959 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes  Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 41 of 52 28 January 2010 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A standard language is the form promoted in schools and the media, it is usually considered by speakers of the language to be more "correct" in some sense than other dialects . Standard Italian is derived from Florentine but is not Florentine . Every Italian can understand florentine but is not the same thing . This happens also with the other dialects of central italy . People that lives near the french border generally speaks a good Italian, but usually at home speaks also dialect
(that can be piedmontese or occitan or franco-provençal) For obvious touristic and businnes reasons many people there speak also a good french ( In Val d'Aosta is taught from the primary school). I have been in cities near the border where many people are tri-lingual (ita-fre-dialect) Italian standard language is full of french influences and probably is the most xenophile language of Europe, full of English words . If you want to hear and laugh about the difference of some Italian dialect watch this video (click the below link) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD3sJzZjgxE&feature=related this guy speaks standard Italian with the accents of some Italian dialects (there are much more) He speaks in Standard Italian with these accents 1)Bergamo(lombardy) 2)Milano(lombardy) 3)Rimini 4)Firenze(Tuscany) 5)Livorno (Tuscany) 6)Umbria 7)Roma 8)Napoli 9)Bari 10)Sicily) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6959 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 42 of 52 28 January 2010 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sorry for the mistakes ( "is taught by the primary school" and "there are many more")
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| Tyre Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5630 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, German Studies: Mandarin | Message 43 of 52 02 February 2010 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I totally agree. Coming from the Spanish side, I'd say there is a feeling of familiarity between Italians and Spaniards. Just one anecdote: I remember talking with an Italian friend about this very topic, and he told me that Spain and Italy are sorelle (sisters). I then added France, and he answered that no, France is a sorellastra (stepsister)... :o) As for the languages, I also think that, if not lexically, Italian is phonetically closer to Spanish than French or even Portuguese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| blitzny Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5515 days ago 14 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian Studies: French, Cantonese, Greek, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 44 of 52 06 February 2010 at 10:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My grandparents once told me that they were speaking Sicilian to a Catalan speaker and
they understood each other, which surprised me. I think the transparency is a little overrated but there are many instances when we can understand each other. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Felidae Diglot Newbie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5406 days ago 28 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French | Message 45 of 52 07 February 2010 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, I understand Spanish (90%) without any study. I also know many keywords and some vocabulary of the Italian Language due to heritage. I also can do basic stuff in French. And I can understand very little spoken Italian.
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| pamination Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5409 days ago 7 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 46 of 52 11 February 2010 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Knowing french and Spanish I still can only get the gist of spoken and written Italian where as I sometimes listen to news on the radio in brazilian portuguese and understand maybe 90% or more, the same with catalan for the most part. I am sure that with just a little exposure to Italian or any romance language the comprehension would come very quick though. Because at first i really didn't understand as much portuguese but after only maybe 1 hour or so studying the main differences between it and Spanish I am now able to almost completely understand the radio... slang and regular speech is probably another matter though...
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| lukav Tetraglot Newbie Italy Joined 5399 days ago 9 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Italian*, French, English, Dutch Studies: German, Spanish | Message 47 of 52 11 February 2010 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thank you for bringing up this topic, which has always interested me deeply.
Are Italian and Spanish mutually intelligible? Well, as many have already said, transparency between them is overrated. Before I started studying Spanish, I could understand what any written text in Spanish was about, but I could only understand 30-40% of spoken Spanish. The problem is that I could even get to understand a full sentence, but then, invariably, the speaker shot a couple of sentences of which I only understood articles and prepositions (el, la...), which means... nothing. Just think of that: when even a single basic word in a sentence isn't understood, most of it goes amiss (e.g. the word "he did", which is "fece" in Italian and "hizo" in Spanish). It may interest non-Spaniards and non-Italians that Italians who do not speak Spanish may attempt to "fake" speaking Spanish by simply - adding -s to all Italian words - turning mute consonants like -t into voiced consonants like -d, as in -ito --> -ido, -ata --> ada. What we do instinctively is actually phonologically correct, because these happen to be the two major phonologic differences between Italian and Spanish!! The former has 99% of its words ending by vowels, the latter has not; the former uses much more t/ps in places where you could find d/bs in the latter. As to Portugues, I assure you that mutual intellegibility is almost zero (when I was in Lisbon, I did not understand more than I would have if I had been in Reykjavik or Delhi...). However, once again, I could catch the main issue of a newspaper's article (but not actually understand the exact content). I am now studying Scandinavian languages, and one of my hugest curiosities is: is the mutual intellegibility among them similar to that between Italian and Spanish? And I have found many answers in this website. Canada38: nothing to add to your wonderful description of a true mechanism. Maybe just one thing: "severing links with other languages", so as to earn in terms of distinctiveness and identity, is not the only mechanism languages appear to develop. For instance, French is different from Italian and Spanish because of such a mechanism, but also because of the "fusion" between the langue d'oi:l and the langue d'oc. Captain Haddock: >>>>>stats comparing Italian to other major Romance languages. Apparently French is the closest, with 89% lexical similarity. JW: >>>>> Maybe lexically, but in terms of rhythm and pronunciation it is much closer to Spanish. I congratulate both for your acute observations. I totally agree with this synthesis. I would like to add this: French is probably more similar to Latin than most people think (non-romance speakers tend to assume that Spanish and Italian are more similar to Latin than French is). Just a couple of obvious example: the latin conjunction "et" has been perfectly preserved only in French; look at the present tense of Latin "to be" (Esse: sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt) and French (e^tre: suis, es, est, sommes, e^tes, sont), and you will see that Spanish (soy, eres, es, somos, sois, son) and Italian (sono, sei, è, siamo, siete, sono) comes only second and third place, respectively, in terms of being closest to Latin. What's more: Spanish has taken from Arabic many words that Italian has not, which would explain some of the differences in terms of "commonly used vocabulary", such as the next one (I am not sure how "carpet" translates in Spanish, but it could very well be one example of Arabic influence) Impiegato: >>One of the main problems between Spanish and Italian is that there are lots of words that differ also in the most commonly used vocabulary, for example the words for "carpet". Impiegato: I am writing you a PM, because I am curious to know whether your theories on "four features" which distinguish French from the other Romance languages, and compare them to mine (unless yours are scientific ones, and thus more reliable!). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5452 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 48 of 52 11 February 2010 at 11:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think the mutual intelligibility among Swedish, Danish and Norwegian is greater than between Spanish and Italian. Written Danish and written Norwegian Bokmål is almost the same. Swedes and Norwegians usually have no difficulties understanding each other. Danish pronunciation can be tricky to Swedes and Norwegians, and Norwegian dialects can be hard to understand for Danes.
Don't forget that French spelling is conservative compared to pronunciation.
Carpet = alfombra, one of the many words of Arabic origin. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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