Latin America: Portuguese or Spanish?

Mike   Tue Mar 16, 2010 1:35 pm GMT
Differences between spoken Brazilian and European Portuguese are IINM more extensive than English or Spanish and important involve morphological and syntactic changes.

This is partly hidden by the diglossic situation where a lot of the important changes in spoken Brazilian aren't reflected in the writing.

I was recently reading a Portuguese grammar and it seemed to me that on purely linguistic grounds, it would be easy to re-shape written Brazilian to make it more in line with speech and the result could easily be called a separate language. It would be extremely difficult for non-linguistic reasons of course.
lolling Joao   Tue Mar 16, 2010 10:18 pm GMT
"Differences between spoken Brazilian and European Portuguese are IINM more extensive than English or Spanish and important involve morphological and syntactic changes."

No way. It's the same as between different kinds of Spanish or English.

Learn Portuguese better (both versions), travel to Portugal and Brazil and you'll come to a different conclusion.