Spanish-Portuguese language blunders

Guest   Sat May 31, 2008 10:46 pm GMT
Galician is what makes the continuum, it's basically Portuguese with Spanish phonetics that makes it pretty understandable by both Spanish and Portuguese speakers.
Guest   Sat May 31, 2008 10:51 pm GMT
There's still no continuum...
Guest   Sat May 31, 2008 10:57 pm GMT
In fact all Romance languages are a continuum.
Savant   Sat May 31, 2008 11:17 pm GMT
What do we mean when we say "continuum"? Here's a description Albert Einstein gave on p. 83 of his Relativity: The Special and the General Theory:

The surface of a marble table is spread out in front of me. I can get from any one point on this table to any other point by passing continuously from one point to a "neighboring" one, and repeating this process a (large) number of times, or, in other words, by going from point to point without executing "jumps." I am sure the reader will appreciate with sufficient clearness what I mean here by "neighbouring" and by "jumps" (if he is not too pedantic). We express this property of the surface by describing the latter as a continuum.

Hermann Weyl said "let us stick to time as the most fundamental continuum" and gave the following description on p. 92 of his The Continuum:

So we can gather the following concerning objectively presented time:

1. an individual point in it is non-independent, i.e., is pure nothingness when taken by itself, and exists only as a "point of transition" (which, of course, can in no way be understood mathematically).

2. it is due to the essence of time (and not to contingent imperfections of our medium) that a fixed time-point cannot be exhibited in any way, that always only an approximation, never an exact determination is possible.

Corresponding remarks apply to every intuitively given continuum; in particular, to the continuum of spatial extension.
Hermano   Mon Jun 02, 2008 12:34 am GMT
I never thought about it, but Galician is Portuguese with Spanish pronunciation.
Alexandria   Wed Jun 04, 2008 9:15 pm GMT
I thought she did a good job speaking Spanish, she's not perfect or fluent, but certainly advanced in the language. What does magra mean? Is that Portuguese for flaca/skinny??
zatsu   Wed Jun 04, 2008 9:51 pm GMT
^yeah, not exactly skinny, but thin.
Guest   Wed Jun 04, 2008 11:05 pm GMT
Magro slim
from lat. màcer,cra,crum 'magro'; ver magr-; f.hist. sXIII magro, sXIII magre
Guest   Wed Jun 04, 2008 11:08 pm GMT
In Spanish magro means thin as well:

RAE
magro, gra.

(Del lat. macer, macra).

1. adj. Flaco o enjuto, con poca o ninguna grosura.

2. m. coloq. Carne magra del cerdo próxima al lomo.

3. f. Lonja de jamón.
Guest   Thu Jun 05, 2008 6:16 am GMT
"I thought she did a good job speaking Spanish, she's not perfect or fluent, but certainly advanced in the language."

No. The only thing good was her pronunciation. Otherwise, she didn't say one correct sentence; it was a trainwreck.
P.D.   Fri Jun 06, 2008 1:47 pm GMT
I work for a pharmacy benefit manager on the bilingual line (Spanish) and we often have Portuguese callers who would rather talk to one of us Spanish speakers than wait for them to use an AT&T translator. They mostly do pretty well in Spanish even if it is "Portuñol/Portunhol" and the devices they use on the rare occasion there is no cognate/predictible similarity are mostly well understood. Agora for ahora is not very much of a stretch. Most Portuguese speakers are from places like Massachusetts where there is also a sizable Spanish speaking population so there is some language cross mixing due to geography. This is probably a daily fact of life in the Riverense area on the Brazil/Uruguay border. And maybe to a lesser extent in some areas on the Spain/Portugal border.
P.D.   Fri Jun 06, 2008 2:01 pm GMT
Who would say that Gallego is not part of a continuum? All the Romance languages are part of a continuum, starting with Latin, then Vulgar Latin and over time and distance have become the 100 or so Romance languages we know now (of course only about 10-12 are 'major' languages but there are easily 100 Romance languages and many now extinct ones). Why and how they diverged to the point of having mutual UNintelligibility who knows, even historical linguistics can't explain it. Mostly it is due to substrata and superstrata languages already established in certain geographic regions. In any case, the continuum of romance is best observed with the Iberian romance languages, espeically the western Iberian. If you take into account all aspects of the language, from grammar, orthography, pronunciation, lexicon, pgramatics, etc..Gallego is about as intermediate as can be between two languages, namely, Castilian Spanish and standard Portuguese. A good test I have done is to have some of my native Spanish speaking friends from Latin America and Puerto Rico listen to Gallego radio and read some. They had few if any issues. But they can't understand a word of continental Portuguese and just a little Brazilian Portuguese.