Romance Languages Mutual Intelligibilty

Guest   Wed Apr 16, 2008 9:44 pm GMT
In Italy I came across an amazing number of bartenders or restaurant owners who were fluent in German. They had started as waiters in Switzerland or Germany, saving the money to buy their own business at home.

"Maybe you visited Friul where there is a Germanophone community."
Italy's German speaking community is in South-Tyrol.
Prometheus   Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:17 pm GMT
does italian have germanic influence like french??
Guest   Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:22 pm GMT
Yes.
Guest   Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:28 pm GMT
more then french? how many germanic elements has the italian ?
Guest   Wed Apr 16, 2008 11:37 pm GMT
French sounds absolutely nothing like any of the Romance languages. It is beautiful and unique.


French doesn't sound beautiful at all just because it does not sound like a Romance language.
German is the worst of German languages, it is more than horrible.
English is not beautiful nor refined but it is latinized enough to sound acceptable.
Guest   Wed Apr 16, 2008 11:52 pm GMT
As the name implies Romance languages are for romance, the more latinized the language is the better, English is somewhat latinized that's why it is acceptable, however it is and will always be germanic.
Guest   Wed Apr 16, 2008 11:55 pm GMT
The name says it all:

Romance languages. Romance, love, sensuality
Germanic languages. Germs, disease-ridden, infectuous
Slavic languages: languages of Slaves
Sinitic languages; languages of sinners
Colette d'Allemagne   Wed Apr 16, 2008 11:57 pm GMT
<<French doesn't sound beautiful at all just because it does not sound like a Romance language.
German is the worst of German languages, it is more than horrible.
English is not beautiful nor refined but it is latinized enough to sound acceptable.>>

Ugh -- Latin trollery, foam-laced, hate-tinged, and all...
Guest   Thu Apr 17, 2008 6:43 am GMT
"
In Italy I came across an amazing number of bartenders or restaurant owners who were fluent in German. They had started as waiters in Switzerland or Germany, saving the money to buy their own business at home.

"Maybe you visited Friul where there is a Germanophone community."
Italy's German speaking community is in South-Tyrol.
"

Italy and Germany have always had close relations and an intense population exchange (Germanic Goths and Lombards in Northern Italy, Italian foreign worker in Germany). As the Renaissance Italian like intellectuals said. the Italian language itself is some kind of barbarised Latin.
Guest   Thu Apr 17, 2008 8:54 am GMT
Italian Humanist Pietro Bembo, living in the early 16th century, knew very well that the Romanic languages (here Italian) came Goths, Lombards and Franks:

Aa a mediatior appeared humanist Pietro Bembo - he belonged at the time with his treatise "volgar della lingua Prose" (1525) to the defenders against critics of the two Italin-writing poets of the Trecento, Dante (+1321) and Francesco Petrarca (+1374); .... Bembos dialogue argument is also worth considering because of its historical perspective. He stated in the year 1525:
"While the origin of the Tuscan language was barbaric, donĀ“t you believe that it has become, in the period of four or five hundred years, a true Italian citizen? Sure! Otherwise, even the Romans were barbarians , who, expelled by the Phrygies, settled in Italy. The Roman people, its customs and its language, would be barbaric."
Pietro Bembo stated further: "It would of course be better to speak Latin, but it would be even better if the barbarians never conquered Italy and had destroyed, and if the Roman Empire until eternity had passed. But things are different ... Shall we (therefore) remain silent and not speak to Cicero and Virgil reborn? "
http://www.phil-hum-ren.uni-muenchen.de/GermLat/Acta/Boehm.htm#_ftn47
PARISIEN   Thu Apr 17, 2008 9:20 am GMT
<< how many germanic elements has the italian ? >>
-- There are much less Germanic words than in French, but Italian has absorbed and latinized some German terms that aren't found in ither Romance languages.
An interesting instance is Ger. 'Balk' (= wooden beam), from which Italian derived both 'palco' (= platform) and 'balcone'.
Ironically, 'balcone' has been re-exported even to Germanic cultures, hence 'Balkon', 'balcony', 'balcon', 'balkong' etc.

<< English is not beautiful nor refined but it is latinized enough to sound acceptable.>>
-- Bullshit. English phonetics is quite special but as Germanic as it gets, and has a beautiful musicality of its own.

<< Ugh -- Latin trollery, foam-laced, hate-tinged, and all... >>
-- Yep.
And in Madrid, the word 'Latinos' has become extremely derogatory. It means 'Mexican hoodlums', 'Columbian pickpockets', 'Ecuadorian shoplifters' etc.
Yes, in Madrid, Spain!
Guest   Thu Apr 17, 2008 9:43 am GMT
If French and Italian are germanized, is Spanish the closest language to Latin? What is the closest language to latin so those who speak it can claim that they are the true descendants of the glorious Roman Empire?
Guest   Thu Apr 17, 2008 9:52 am GMT
I agree with Gest, German sounds horrible. It's horribleness made a language. It sounds like dogs barking. It has nothing to do with the softness and sophistication of Romance languages. Only Arabic sounds worse than German.
PARISIEN   Thu Apr 17, 2008 10:17 am GMT
<< If French and Italian are germanized, is Spanish the closest language to Latin? >>
-- Another nonsensical comparison.
Most Germanic words in Italian are also found in Spanish (Norte, Sur, guerra etc.) and Spanish has a lot more Arabic words.
Furthermore, Spanish phonetic peculiarities (the 'j' and 'z' sounds, and the blurred distinction between 'b' and 'v' are a lot more distant from what Latin sounded like. Standard Italian is certainly much closer.
Guest   Thu Apr 17, 2008 10:29 am GMT
Spanish was influenced by Arabic at the same level Italian and French were influenced by Germanic.....


by the way does anybody has a study about the percent of germanic (or other elements) within the vocabulary of the italian, french, spanish etc?

thx