similar languages

curious   Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:02 pm GMT
Which languages are more similar: Spanish/Portuguese or Swedish/Norwegian/Danish)
Guest   Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:07 pm GMT
What about Dutch-Geman?
Slavic   Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:22 pm GMT
What about Polish/Czech or Bulgarian/Macedonian
Italian   Thu Aug 20, 2009 12:57 am GMT
Italian-Spanish
SJF   Thu Aug 20, 2009 3:02 am GMT
spanish-portuguese
guest   Thu Aug 20, 2009 3:20 am GMT
Italian/Spanish/Portuguese
blanche   Thu Aug 20, 2009 10:04 am GMT
Portuguese/Spanish are much more similar than Italian. If you know well the three languages there are differences in terms of syntax, vocabulary and verb tenses. Grammaticaly Italian is more similar to French than to Spanish. Besides Italian is in between Romanian and Western Romance language (Portuguese, Spanish, French).
vos   Thu Aug 20, 2009 10:09 am GMT
Croatian/Serbian are the same language with just a few defferences.

Serbo/Croatian/Slovene
Portuguese/Spanish
Northern Italian dialects/FRench
Catalan/Spanish
Galician/Portuguese/Spanish
German/Dutch
Swedish/Norwegian/Danish
Czech/Polish/Slovak
Bulgarian/Macedonian
Southern Italian dialects /Romanian
Guest   Thu Aug 20, 2009 11:26 am GMT
<<Besides Italian is in between Romanian and Western Romance language (Portuguese, Spanish, French).

>>
Not true, Italian may have some things in common with Romanian that are not shared with the rest of Western Romance languages, but still Italian is a Western Romance language and Romanian isn't. Italian has more lexical similarity with Spanish (and hence with Portuguese) than with Romanian.
different theories   Thu Aug 20, 2009 1:18 pm GMT
Not true, Italian may have some things in common with Romanian that are not shared with the rest of Western Romance languages, but still Italian is a Western Romance language and Romanian isn't. Italian has more lexical similarity with Spanish (and hence with Portuguese) than with Romanian.

It's much more complicated and dibated amongst romanists than your simplified statement.

Another common classification begins by splitting the Romance languages into two main branches, East and West. The East group includes Romanian, the languages of Corsica and Sardinia, and all languages of Italy South of a line through the cities of Rimini and La Spezia. (see La Spezia-Rimini Line.) Languages in this group are said to be more conservative, i.e. they retained more features of the original Latin.

The latter then split into a Gallo-Romance group, which became the Oïl languages (including French), Gallo-Italian, Occitan, Francoprovençal and Romansh, and an Iberian Romance group which became Spanish and Portuguese. Catalan is considered by many specialists[who?] as a transition language between the Gallic group and the Iberian group, since it shares characteristics from both groups; for example, "fear" is medo/pavor/temor in Portuguese, miedo/pavor/temor in Spanish, (from metus, pavore and timor) but por in Catalan — compare with peur in French and paura in Italian.


Though it is quite clear which languages can be classified as Romance, on the basis primarily of lexical (vocabulary) and morphological (structural) similarities, the subgrouping of the languages within the family is less straightforward. Most classifications are, overtly or covertly, historico-geographic—so that Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan are Ibero-Romance; French, Occitan, and Franco-Provençal are Gallo-Romance; and so on. Shared features in each subgroup that are not seen in other such groups are assumed to be ultimately traceable to languages spoken before Romanization. The first subdivision of the Romance area is usually into West and East Romance, with a dividing line drawn across Italy between La Spezia and Rimini. On the basis of a few heterogeneous phonetic features, one theory maintains that separation into dialects began early, with the Eastern dialect areas (including central and south Italy) developing popular features and the school-influenced Western speech areas maintaining more literary standards. Beyond this, the substrata (indigenous languages eventually displaced by Latin) and superstrata (languages later superimposed on Latin by conquerors) are held to have occasioned further subdivisions. Within such a schema there remain problem cases. Is Catalan, for instance, Ibero-Romance or Gallo-Romance, given that its medieval literary language was close to Provençal? Do the Rhaetian dialects group together, even though the dialects found in Italy are closer to Italian and the Swiss ones closer to French? Sardinian is generally regarded as linguistically separate, its isolation from the rest of the Roman Empire by incorporation into the Vandal kingdom in the mid-5th century providing historical support for the thesis. The exact position of Dalmatian in any classification is open to dispute.
Guest   Thu Aug 20, 2009 1:26 pm GMT
Italian is much closer to Spanish than to Romanian. It's not a simplistic statement, it's just the truth. Does Italian have noun cases? Does italian place the article after the noun? And so on... Italian shares 82% of vocabulary with Spanish and 77% with Romanian .
blanche   Thu Aug 20, 2009 1:27 pm GMT
As for the classification of Romance language take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spezia-Rimini_Line
blanche   Thu Aug 20, 2009 1:34 pm GMT
Italian is much closer to Spanish than to Romanian. It's not a simplistic statement, it's just the truth. Does Italian have noun cases? Does italian place the article after the noun? And so on... Italian shares 82% of vocabulary with Spanish and 77% with Romanian

Not completely true!

Plurals are much more similar in Italian/Romanian than the other romance languages. As for the articles they are very similar in Italian and Romanian dispite their position in the word and so on. CAses are not all in languages. Besides, Romanian just retains a very simplified system of cases.
Guest   Thu Aug 20, 2009 1:42 pm GMT
<<Generally speaking the western Romance languages show common innovations that the eastern Romance languages tend to lack. Another isogloss that falls on the La Spezia-Rimini line deals with the voicing of certain consonants that occur between vowels. Thus, Latin focus/focum (meaning "fire") becomes fuoco in Italian and foc in Romanian, but fogo in Portuguese and Northern Italian languages and fuego in Spanish.>>

So how come in Catalan and Valencian it's foc and not fog? Is Catalan more related to Romanian too? As your own source says:


<<Indeed, the significance of the La Spezia-Rimini line is often challenged by specialists in within both Italian dialectology and Romance dialectology.>>
jojo   Thu Aug 20, 2009 2:10 pm GMT
Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian, to a lesser extent. Ex. uovo-uova, braccio/a, osso/ossa, centinaio/centinaia and so on, with the ancient latin plural ending A.