Portuguese - French: Spoken Intelligibility

David   Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:29 am GMT
It seems to me that the MAIN factor inhibiting Spanish-French mutual intelligibility is the pronunciation. Since Portuguese and French are similar in vocabulary and pronunciation, shouldn't they be more mutually intelligible than Spanish and French? Is there a good deal of spoekn intelligibility between the two languages?
Guest   Wed Jan 30, 2008 3:20 am GMT
Spanish and French grammars are quite different as well, and also the shared vocabulary is not very high (75%). Not only dfferent pronunciation prevents a higher degree of mutual intelligibility.
Guest   Wed Jan 30, 2008 3:58 am GMT
What would you consider "high" then? Just curious.
David   Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:31 am GMT
Yeah, 75% seems pretty high to me. BTW, I am talking about Portuguese and French, not Spanish and French.
Guest   Wed Jan 30, 2008 11:39 am GMT
Catalán is mutually intelligible with Spanish. Is it Gallo or Ibero?
Guest   Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:42 pm GMT
Catalan is a dialect of Oc.
Guest   Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:58 pm GMT
I'm not agree with Brennus, Ladino is surprisingly quite intelligible for a Spanish speaker, I met a Ladino speaker in Paris and I understood what he told me easily. Portuguese on the other hand is much harder for a Spanish speaker because of phonetics. About the French-Portuguese comparison : despite the Portuguese have a very different pronuncation with respect to Spanish, it does not mean that it's similar to French, they are still very different. The only language the Portuguese understand reasonably well is Spanish.
Guest   Wed Jan 30, 2008 6:31 pm GMT
Brennus,

There was a Ladino file link offered here last summer, I think. Granted, it was only a small sample, but I found it very easy to understand.
Guest   Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:54 am GMT
<< Catalán is mutually intelligible with Spanish. Is it Gallo or Ibero?
Catalan is a dialect of Oc. >>

This is something I've never really understood. If Catalan is mutually intelligible with Spanish, and Occitan is mutually intelligible with French, then, THEORETICALLY, shouldn't Spanish and French be mutually intelligible?
David   Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:56 am GMT
That was me. Forgot to put my name.
Guest   Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:59 am GMT
No, transitivity does not exist in a linguistic continuum. If A and B are mutually intelligible, and B and C are as well, it does not mean that A and C are mutually intelligible always.
David   Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:00 am GMT
http://www.sephardicstudies.org/quickladino.html

There's some short Ladino clips there. I could pick out a lot of the words although my Spanish is poor.
Guest   Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:05 am GMT
Indeed I understand Ladino better than some Spanish dialects like Cuban.
Guest   Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:20 am GMT
Ladino is perfectly understandable for me.
Guest   Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:58 am GMT
If you learn both French and Spanish, the following languages will open up for you very easily:

Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese, and Ladino.

I didn't include Romanian. That's the only big romance language that I haven't found to be easy to understand with little or no study.

Romanian is extremely interesting to me as it seems like the odd language out (some think French is, but I'm not in that camp.)

I don't mean that one will be able to speak them all "properly", but it will be possible to read and often understand these with a minimum of effort.

I could probably add in Gallego.

This is only my opinion.