The relationships between the neo-Latin languages

LAA
Find another good forum about anthropology please .
Africa is always forgotten the tallest or seconed tallest nation is the Maasai from Africa.(this depends who is doing the statistics.
This wouldn't be to important if it wasn't the fact that they are strict vegetarians.
Food for thought.

Let's returne to languages, we were talking about catalan

a lot of catalan words could seem between french and spanish :

for exemple "exit" is said "sortida", while "sortie" in french and "salida" in spanish.

Yes, but one thing is really interesting about Catalan: the periphrastic construction to express the equivalent to "passé simple" and "pretérito indefinido" in Fr and Sp, respectively.

je chanta
(yo) canté
(jo) vaig cantar (?)

There is an equivalent to the simple form, but it is nowadays restricted to literary style.
It is confusing if you are not used to it, because in Sp (and in Catalan itself!!), adding the preposition "a" (to), before the infinitive verb, you are expressing a periphrastic future: yo voy a cantar (yo cantaré).
In French I am not sure. What do you mean fab?

As far as I know, this is a unique feature among the Romance languages.

Let's return to languages, we were talking about catalan

a lot of catalan words could seem between french and spanish :

for exemple "exit" is said "sortida", while "sortie" in french and "salida" in spanish.

"je chantai" and not "je chanta". unfortunally the simple past "je chantai" can orally be confused with the imperfect "je chantais".

the perifrastic future in french is just "je vais chanter" (I will sing), it has not to be confused with the catalan "jo vaig cantar" (I sung), but means "jo vaig a cantar" (I will sing)

Hum isn't Portugese supposed to be in that place.

(Let's return to languages, we were talking about catalan

a lot of catalan words could seem between french and spanish :

for exemple "exit" is said "sortida", while "sortie" in french and "salida" in spanish.)

fab, sorry for the misspelling.
I think that it's a pity that passé simple has disapeared from spoken French. The same for the subjunctive past tense and its composed version. The replacements through j'ai chanté, je chante, j'aie chanté don't express an idea so colourfully as the original tenses. At least from my Spanish speaking perspective!!!...

What about the "formes surcompossées"?... what do they exactly express?

Hey Sérgio I like your name it´s a pitty you got her before me.

Sergio, are you a hispano-american or a spaniard.

I know that in L.A people tend to use very much the simple past, while in Spain people tend to use more the passado compuesto as we do in oral french (but still also continue to use the simple past at oral)

It is tru that in french of today, the simple past has become so few used that most people (myself include) would have hesitation to write it, and even to say it spontaneously.
the past subjonctive is almost a "dead" tense. Only people who have made studies of literrature knows it.

I think that Castillian grammar is too ritualized. The whole "vosotros" thing is rather strange. But I suppose it's appropriate, being that in the singular form, you still have "tu" and "usted".

Fab,
Do you usually use "vosotros" conjugation, or do you follow the L.A. fashion?

LAA,

for me "vosotros" is just the plural of "tu".
And "ustedes" is the plural of "usted"

vosotros is very useful if you want to say have a less formal relation with a group of people, as if you said "tu" to each one. Ustedes is formal.

What do you call L.A fashion ? As far I know there are differences on this points : some countries used "vos" instead of "tu", and in other (such as Costa Rica), only "usted" and "ustedes" exist.

The Italian equivalent of vosotros is "vostra". The Romanian equivalent is "voastra". There you go. There's some Romance Language bonding for you.

Well, honestly, I'm only familiar with the Mexican way. We never use vosotros. It would just involve a whole other way of conjugating the verb. When people do use the Castillian form (often taught in professional schools), people here think they speak funny. I have never had any actual schooling, so what I know is from personal study and simply asking questions of my relatives. Here, we just use "ustedes" as plural for both "tu" and "usted".

a.p.a.m. -
That's not exactly correct. The Italian equivalent of "vosotros" is "voi". "vostra" is a possessive adjective used in conjunction with a feminine noun.

Ex "You (all) need to bring your chair from the other room." (En)
"(Voi) Dovete portare la vostra sedia dall'altra stanza" (It)

Roamanian and Italian sound similar but Romanians and Italians will probably not understand eachother very well, since most words are very different.

Spanish and Italian are probably the closest of the latin tounges, because they sound similar (spanish from spain that is, which has a certain tone and accent very similar to italian). The words are also very similar (again, this is true for the spanish spoken in Spain, which still uses some words which aren't used in latin american spanih). Spaniards and Italians will understand eachother about 80% because thwe words are so similar
Casa - Casa
Yo - Io
soy - sono
como - come
estas - stai
Liceo - Liceo
the list is too long for me to write so...

Spanish and portugese sound different since the portugese have a very exagerated accent. But portugese and spanish are both very similar when written. After all, they both flourished from the same peninsula.

French and Italian in my opinion is very different. The words have have more of a germanic root as well as latin.


LAA,
you wrote:
"So Marius, you think Romanian and Spanish are equally close to Italian, only at different ends of the spectrum?"

Romanian sounds a little more similar to Italian than Spanish does. But Romanian words are VERY different, nd so is the sentence structure. In my opinion, CASTILLIAN Spanish (spanish spoken in spain) is the closest to Italian. As I said before, Italians and Spaiards can have conversations without ever having to be bilingual, the words and sentence structure is so similar, that both will understand what eachother says easily.