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Spanish and Italian are much closer than Italian and French
CATALAN
Encara que la noticia ha estat destacada per bastants diaris d´altres paisos, la premsa italiana ha donat un relleu i tambe una visio particular a l´aprovacio del matrimoni entre homosexuals per part del Parlament espanyol
SPANISH
Aunque la noticia ha sido destacada por bastantes diarios de otros paises, la prensa italiana ha dado un relieve y tambien una vision particular a la aprovacion del matrimonio entre homosexuales por parte del parlamento español
CATALAN
El lider de l´oposicio conservadora ha acusat al congres el president del govern d´amagar proves que haurien servit per demanar la il.legalitzacio del Partit Comunista de les terres basques
SPANISH
El lider de la oposicion conservadora ha acusado en el congreso al presidente del gobierno de esconder pruebas que habrian servido para pedir la ilegalizacion del partido comunista de las tierras vascas
El catalan es mas facil que el italiano y el portugues para un español porque sigue el mismo orden estructural que el castellano.
There are three syntactic differences -between Catalan and Castilian- in the two short lines you've reproduced.
1.) al congrès /en el congreso
2.) el president /al presidente
3.) per demanar /para pedir
Apostrophation doesn't exist in Spanish (l'oposició /la oposición) but Catalan also has differences with French (la il·legalització) since it is often left out before "i" and "u".
Translation can also be quite different:
Encara que / Aunque
In these two lines the order would be pretty much the same in all Romance languages.
As I said before Catalan (and Occitan) can be considered "bridge" languages beween French and Castilian. Aragonese would be a bridge between Catalan and Spanish and Asturian-Leonese would be a bridge between Castilian and Portuguese.
The difference is that both Aragonese and Asturian-Leonese are considered dialects of Castilian since they have been mostly assimilated by Castilian. Meanwhile Catalan has an independent literature and history since the first known texts in the 12th century.
Porque es que las personas son muy inquietos. (spanish)
Perche e che le persone sono molto inquieti (italian)
porque es que les persones son molt inquiets (catalan)
Por quomo est quid personas sunt multo inquietos (latin)
Why is it that people are very worried; docile things (english)
Porque es que las personas son muy inquietos. (spanish)
Perche e che le persone sono molti inquieti (italian)
porque es que les persones son molt inquiets (catalan)
Pro quomo est quid personas sunt multi inquietos (latin)
Why is it that people are very worried; docile things (english)
In Catalan it would rather be:
Per què és que les persones són molt inquietes?
THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE.
Area of Distribution and Number of Speakers
Italian (Italiano) is a Romance language currently spoken by some 66,000,000 people, of whom the vast majority live in peninsular Italy (including the Republic of San Marino). France, including Corsica, has about 260,000 Italian speakers and Switzerland more than 500,000 (the canton of Ticino). For a large, if decreasing, proportion of these speakers, standard Italian is not the language of the home, where dialectal forms are used.
Overseas (e.g., in the United States, where it is estimated that there are some 1,500,000 Italian speakers; in Brazil, with about 700,000 and in Argentina, with about 600,000) speakers sometimes do not know the standard language and use only dialect forms.
Standard Italian is widely used in the countries of Malta and Somalia. A pidgin Italian can still be heard in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but has little extension. In Libya , also, its use is now dying out. Relics of a Jewish Italian (see Italkian) survive within Italy; an entire colony of 6,000 Corfu Jews, who used a Venetan dialect (see Venetan language) as a home language, was exterminated during World War II.
Origin and History
Italian dialects developed from Vulgar Latin, the colloquial language of the late Roman empire. The early texts, reflecting the spoken language of Italy, are written in dialects. Possibly the very first text is a riddle from Verona, dating from perhaps the 8th century, but its interpretation is obscure and its language Latinized. More surely Italian are some 10th-century documents from Monte Cassino, after which there are three Central Italian texts of the 11th century. The first literary work of any length is the Tuscan Ritmo Laurenziano ("Laurentian Rhythm") of the late 12th century, followed soon by other compositions from the Marches and Monte Cassino. In the 13th century, lyric poetry was first written in a conventionalized Sicilian dialect that influenced later developments in central Italy.
Standard language and Dialects
Standard Italian began to be developed in the 13th and 14th centuries as a literary dialect. At first basically a Florentine dialect, stripped of local peculiarities, it has since acquired some characteristics of the dialect of Rome in particular and has always been heavily influenced by Latin. It overlies a wide variety of dialects, which are sometimes considered to represent a fundamental differentiation between northern and southern Italy that dates from Roman times.
Today, however, these variant dialects form a continuum of intelligibility, although geographically distant dialects may be radically different. The northern dialects include what are often called the Gallo-Italian dialects (Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, Emilian-Romagnol); as the influence of a Celtic (Gaulish) substratum is discernible, some linguists consider them separate languages pertaining to the Gallo-Romance Subgroup. The other northern group of dialects, spoken in northeastern Italy, is called Venetan (including Venetian, Veronese, Trevisan, and Paduan dialects, etc.). Istrian, which is spoken on the peninsula now divided between Croatia and Slovenia, with a tiny portion belonging to Italy, is sometimes considered yet another northern Italian dialect, or an independent language of the Balkano-Romance Subgroup. The Tuscan dialects (including those of Corsica) are often held to form a linguistic group of their own, while in the south and east three broad dialect areas are grouped loosely together: (1) the dialects of the Marche (Marchigiano), Umbria, and Rome; (2) Abruzzian, Apulian, Neapolitan, Campanian, and Lucanian; and (3) Calabrian, Otrantan, and Sicilian, which are believed by some to be influenced by the Greek once spoken there (which still survives in isolated pockets on the extreme southern portion of the peninsula).
In modern Italy dialects are still the primary spoken idiom, though the standard Italian is virtually the only written language. Speakers of an Italian dialect, even one as superficially different as Sicilian, can with effort understand standard Italian, however, and can even learn it by such means as listening to radio programs. For most Italians their first contact with the standard language comes in primary school, in which until recently it was the only dialect used; standard Italian is virtually the only dialect of culture in modern Italy, and with immigration from the south to the industrial north it is becoming increasingly the language of intercommunication.
Phonology
The sound system of Italian did not evolve further than that of Vulgar Latin. The vocal system consists of 7 vowels and is considered triangular (as that of Classical Latin and modern Spanish):
The consonant system is characterized by the palatalization of c, g, t, d in front of e and i (cf. CL hodie => It. oggi=>hoy, hoy dia) and the intervocal gemination (cf. CL legere => It. leggere=> leer); the palatalization of Latin c to [t] is similar to that in the Balkano-Romance languages. The consonantic i [=j] became [d] (written g) (cf. CL justus => It. giusto=> justo). The clusters cl, fl, pl were transformed to chi [ki], fi, pi (cf. CL clamâre => It. chiamare=>clamar, CL flama => It. fiamma=>llama/flama, CL plangere => It. piangere=> llorar, (latin plorare) . A lot of assimilations occurred to alleviate the pronunciation (cf. CL administratione(m) => It. amministrazione=>adminstracion, CL sexus => It. sesso=> sexo). The intervocal voiceless consonants tended to become voiced (cf. CL apothêca => It. bottega=> bodega).
See also the Occurrence of Diphthongs Replacing Stressed Short Vowels in Romance Languages
the Development of Latin Intervocalic p and t in Romance Languages.
the Results of Palatalization of Consonant Clusters.
Orthography
Italian orthography is rather simple as it follows a phonetic (like Spanish) and not an etymologcal pattern (like French and English).
Grammar
Italian grammar is like that of the other Western Romance languages, especially similar to the modern French grammar. It shows agreement of adjectives and nouns, the use of definite and indefinite articles, loss of noun declension for case, two genders (masculine and feminine), and an elaborate system of perfect and progressive tenses for the verb. As in French (see...), the compound tenses are constructed with the verb 'to be' (essere) for the intransitive (as morire to die, nascere to be born, partire to depart, venire to come etc.) and pronominal verbs (as lavarsi to wash myself etc.) or with the verb 'to have' (avere) for the transitive verbs. Similar to French, Italian has a partitive article and uses pronominal adverbs.
The most notable difference between Italian and French or Spanish is that it does not use -s or -es to form the plural of nouns but instead uses -e for most feminine words and -i for masculine words (and some feminine words). There is a theory that Italian formed in its earliest times the plural mainly with -s as other Romance languages, but a palatalisation phenomenon caused the passages:*-as => -e; *-es => -i.
Vocabulary
The Italian vocabulary is derived mainly from Latin. The basic words are inherited from Vulgar Latin and often are marked by some slang bias as compared with Classical Latin, cf.:
It. testa head <= L testa earthenware jar.
It. donna woman <= L domina mistress.
There was a permanent tendency not only to borrow new words from Classical Latin, but also to remake the words of the spoken language on Latin pattern:
Old Italian *stoggio study became studio, both from the Latin studium.
French contributed largely to the Italian vocabulary (the first steps of Italian literature were to imitate the French ballades): accetta hatchet (F hachette), cavaliere knight (F chevalier), corvetta corvette (F corvette), dardo dart (F dard), sciampagna champagne (F champaign), ventaglio fan (F éventail) etc. The suffix -aggio in viaggio voyage etc. is borrowed from French -age.
There are numerous German (see Germanic languages) borowings from the late Antiquity and Middle ages (a lot of them were adopted via French): gaio gay, garantire to guarantee, guadagnare to gain, guerra war, especially the world directions (nord, sud, est, ovest). The Arabic words (see Arabic languages) (like arancia orange) reached Italian mainly via Spanish and French.
The Greek words were inherited from Latin (ballare to dance, governare to govern, parola word), but their mass introduction was connected with the development of the scientific literature in Italian during the Renaissance.
You forced me to tell that I am a Valencian, not a person from Albacete or Seville.They might not understand what Italians mean.But I do.There are many differences between the languages Valencians and the people of other parts of Spain speak.One of them is that we, Valencians pronunciate "z and c" like "th" in English (like "thief") while others don't.So.The Spanish language spoken in Valencia is somewhat different.Also the other facteur is that I lived in Rome for 4 years, not in the south of Italy or in the north of Italy.You know that the dialects spoken in Italy are too different for one southern to understand one northern, aren't they, my lovely?So you cannot claim that I'm the same of other Valencians or other Italians or other Spaniards, can you? I CAN UNDERSTAND BOTH SPANISH AS IT'S MY MOTHER TONGUE AND ROME ITALIAN AS I LIVED THERE FOR 4 YEARS.I'M NOT THE SAME OF OTHER SPANIARDS.Please...
keywords being:
Orthography
"Italian orthography is rather simple as it follows a phonetic (like Spanish) and not an etymologcal pattern (like French and English)."
Grammar
"Italian grammar is like that of the other Western Romance languages, especially similar to the modern French grammar. It shows agreement of adjectives and nouns, the use of definite and indefinite articles, loss of noun declension for case, two genders (masculine and feminine), and an elaborate system of perfect and progressive tenses for the verb. As in French (see...), the compound tenses are constructed with the verb 'to be' (essere) for the intransitive (as morire to die, nascere to be born, partire to depart, venire to come etc.) and pronominal verbs (as lavarsi to wash myself etc.) or with the verb 'to have' (avere) for the transitive verbs. Similar to French, Italian has a partitive article and uses pronominal adverbs."
"The most notable difference between Italian and French or Spanish is that it does not use -s or -es to form the plural of nouns but instead uses -e for most feminine words and -i for masculine words (and some feminine words). There is a theory that Italian formed in its earliest times the plural mainly with -s as other Romance languages, but a palatalisation phenomenon caused the passages:*-as => -e; *-es => -i."
Phonology
"The sound system of Italian did not evolve further than that of Vulgar Latin. The vocal system consists of 7 vowels and is considered triangular (as that of Classical Latin and modern Spanish)"
"The consonant system is characterized by the palatalization of c, g, t, d in front of e and i (cf. CL hodie => It. oggi=>hoy, hoy dia) and the intervocal gemination."
(cf. CL legere => It. leggere=> leer);
the palatalization of Latin c to [t] is similar to that in the Balkano-Romance languages. The consonantic i [=j] became [d] (written g) (cf. CL justus => It. giusto=> justo).
The clusters cl, fl, pl were transformed to chi [ki], fi, pi (cf. CL clamâre => It. chiamare=>clamar,
CL flama => It. fiamma=>llama/flama, CL plangere => It. piangere=> llorar, (latin plorare) . A lot of assimilations occurred to alleviate the pronunciation
(cf. CL administratione(m) => It. amministrazione=>adminstracion,
CL sexus => It. sesso=> sexo).
The intervocal voiceless consonants tended to become voiced
(cf. CL apothêca => It. bottega=> bodega)."
In the long run, Spanish and Italian are alike, but with differences. Though at times they sound exactly alike in syntax & grammer; there's also times when they sound totally diferentiated. French and Italian are somewhat closely alike in grammer as mentioned above^
But, Classical latin,Italian & Spanish all possess some samness between themselves; respectively.
Hi, I'm Italian and I must say a couple of things:
1. yes, Dr Costa (and Alfredo) is right: almost everybody here in Italy would say Italian and Spanish are very similar, while French and Italian are not.
Generally speaking,people here feel much closer to the Spanish than to the French. It's quite easy to understand Spanish even if you've never studied it, if you know Italian. This doesn't happen with French, despite all the studies made by the experts.
2. Dr. Costa is not Italian -There are too many mistakes in his VERY FEW Italian sentences.
And, if he really was Italian, it's even worse: an Italian Doctor, in Italian Literature, making all these mistakes? Come on...
Ok, giusto per provare che io sono italiano per davvero scrivo qualcosa nella mia lingua. Mmmhhhh... vediamo un po'... , io sono di Bologna.
E' una città piuttosto sottovalutata, ma vale veramente la pena di essere vista. A proposito, qualcuno di voi c'è mai stato?
Ciao!
The computer SPEAKERS are called PARLANTES in Spanish... :D
Computer Speakers:
parlantes in Spanish
altoparlanti in Italian
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