Your Questions about Lexical Similarities Answered.

I love being Anon.   Wed Feb 27, 2008 4:51 am GMT
Tonight I was talking with several polyglots/multilinguals at the table and the Spanish/Italian/ French similarity question came up. Then I came to Antimoon and hey! the same topic!

Here's what Wiki says:
Spanish has 75% similarity with French.
Spanish has 82% similarity with Italian.
Spanish has 89% similarity with Portuguese.


Italian and French have 89% similarity.

Check out the other languages. German and French have only 29% similarity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity
Guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 4:53 am GMT
Here's another insight from the Polyglot table. Speakers of Romance languages don't mind being called "polyglot"-of course not! But English speakers prefer multilingual. I agree.
Rolando   Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:08 am GMT
Why doesnt Portuguese & Italian have any Lexical Similarities...?
Guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:21 am GMT
English and French are only 27% similar. French isn't much closer to English than Russian (24%)!
I love being Anon.   Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:22 am GMT
I noticed the same things about Russian and French, but this is only lexical similarity. I'm not sure why there is no data for Portuguese and Italian. However, it's easy to see many similarities even if we only use simple examples. Consider these:

Port: por favor (also in Spanish);Boa noite; Como se chama
Ita: per favore;Buona notte;Come si chiama
I love being Anon   Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:52 am GMT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility

Long article.

Some Brazilian Portuguese speakers can understand Standard Italian.
Guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:30 pm GMT
This thread should answer some of the recent common questions here.

Romance languages are so close, really. Learn two and the rest practically fall into place. Romanian is very interesting, but a little odd.
The placement of articles surprised me.

Learn French and Spanish.
French will help you with Italian and so will Spanish.
Spanish will help you with Portuguese and Catalan.
French and Spanish with help you with Occitan.
If you learn Italian after F and S, then Italian will help you with Romanian.

I'm not going to discuss Corsican, Sardinian, etc. People who argue about French and Spanish aren't likely to pursue these languages in short order.
Gues   Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:34 pm GMT
I don't think that Spanish and Portuguese share the same lexical similarity than French and Italian. I can understand almost everything writen in Portuguese. I think that the lexical similarity is well above 90%. Could an Italian say the same about writen French? I doubt it.
Guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:47 pm GMT
I thought 89 was high for Italian and French. I personally think it is lower, maybe 79%, but I'm not doing the research.

Italian and French are pretty close. I'm not unbiased because I have both French and Spanish and I'd have to go word by word, phrase by phrase to tell you why Italian is so darn easy after these languages, but it's almost like putting on a coat that only needs a few adjustments to fit well.

That said, I don't mean to imply that WITHOUT a previous romance language that Italian will be learned in thirty days. I don't know about any of those claims. I suppose I should ask off for a month to do linguistic research. LOL.
guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:59 pm GMT
I don't know why topics like "Lexical Similarities between Romance Language X and Romance Language Y" garner so much d@mn attention and interest.

They're all practically the SAME D@MN LANGUAGE. I would even think about them as dialects of the same language (although today I know that technically they are considered seperate, yet EXTREMELY CLOSELY RELATED languages)

It's all to me as if everyone were posting "Lexcial Similarities Between American and Australian English", or "Which is closer to British English: South African English or New Zealand English?" HOW ABSURD.

Maybe it's the classification of Romance languages as "languages" that sparks this astonishment. Perhaps calling them 'languages' initially lowers people's expectation of similarity, and then they are dumbfounded (and I do mean 'DUMBFOUNDED') to "discover" that they are all practically the same speech.

I'm sorry, but how boring.
Guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:59 pm GMT
I need a second opinion to believe this study which is the only one I've seen about lexical similarity among Romance languages so far. I think that many words in French are so distorted with respect to their Italian counterparts that the lexical similarity despite it is there does not translate into mutual intelligibility. For example, would an Italian understand that epée means spada despite both words derive from Latin spatha so technically it's a lexical similarity?
guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:10 pm GMT
<<For example, would an Italian understand that epée means spada despite both words derive from Latin spatha so technically it's a lexical similarity? >>

Correct. I believe that's what is meant by lexical similarity.
It doesn't mean how many cognates there are, it means how close one word is to another.

And if I'm not mistaken, the words--if similar in form--don't necessarily have to be related or cognate to qualify, like English "other" and SPanish "otro". I think this would count as a LS despite the two words are not related.
Guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:18 pm GMT
Does that study explain the methodology used to decide if two words are a lexical similarity? If being cognates is not enough, that the lexical similarity between French and Italian would drop a lot.
Guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:49 pm GMT
Spada. It depends on how clever you are. If you know to add an "s" to the French word you can see the word more easily, but it's not transparent.
guest   Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:49 pm GMT
<<Does that study explain the methodology used to decide if two words are a lexical similarity? If being cognates is not enough, that the lexical similarity between French and Italian would drop a lot. >>

hmmm, not sure.

I would imagine that words that show patterned sound-correspondences, like épée and spada would still count, because one just has to know the basic rules of how French treats old 'sp-' and medial '-d-' and final '-a' to arrive at 'épée', although I'm making an assumption here. I can see this being used or not being used ...either way.