# To what extent are the Latin languages mutually comprehensible?



## Graham Butler

I was recently listening to a Spanish speaker talking in Italian and was impressed by how fluent and and natural he sounded, the patterns and rhythms of the languages being so similar.
I wonder to what degree can a Spaniard understand Portuguese or Italian, and vice versa?  I find a lot of similarities and overlap in grammar and vocabulary, but Portuguese pronunciation is very difficult for me to understand, though Brazilian Portuguese is perhaps a little easier.
I imagine that French would be less comprehensible for other 'Latins' (?).


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## Jellby

Typically, for a Spaniard, understanding Italian is quite easy. Understanding French and Portuguese is a bit harder, mainly because the pronunciation is not so similar, but once you get used to it it becomes much easier. I cannot tell about Romanian.


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## Outsider

You may find these earlier discussions interesting:

A similar language vs. a different language
2 questions about languages


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## nanel

Well, it depends of where you are, if I meet an Italian in Germany (I don't speak a word of German) it would be really easy to understand him, if I were in Italy trying to understand an Italian (and I've been), it's impossible. French is easier if you speak Catalan, which I don't, but I speak a little of French and I understand better Catalan because of that. No idea about Portuguese.


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## Graham Butler

Thanks, Outsider.  I see that this question has already been chewed over pretty thoroughly in the second of those two interesting threads.  I think we English speakers find German a little easier to learn, at least to a basic level, because of the similarities in pronunciation and concrete vocabulary - though our abstract vocabulary mainly comes from French.


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## Outsider

It's a bit off-topic, but here's another interesting old thread: English, a Germanic language?


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## lazarus1907

Graham Butler said:
			
		

> Thanks, Outsider.  I see that this question has already been chewed over pretty thoroughly in the second of those two interesting threads.  I think we English speakers find German a little easier to learn, at least to a basic level, because of the similarities in pronunciation and concrete vocabulary - though our abstract vocabulary mainly comes from French.



Similarities in the pronounciation????

All these symbols are used to represent vocalic sounds in English. None of them occur in German.

ɒ æ ʌ ɚ ɝ aɪ ai aʊ au e ei i ɔɪ ɔi o oʊ

These other symbols represent some sounds used for German, which don't occur in English

a e i o u 

Guess what other language do those sounds occur in. 

More sounds that don't occur in English:

y ʏ ai au ɔy

It took me years to learn how to pronounce English (still trying), and only minutes to learn how to pronounce German. Don't know what to say.


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## la reine victoria

From an English native's viewpoint, having studied Latin at school, then many years later teaching it to my ten year old son, I don't have much difficulty in understanding written Spanish but I have never spoken that language.  My efforts are risible.  

Italian I find much easier to read and understand than Spanish.  Many years ago I started to teach myself some spoken Italian and was able to communicate at a reasonable level.  My grammar, however, was sadly lacking.  


LRV


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## Graham Butler

I have read somewhere, i can't remember where, that as late as the 13th century, people in Tuscany still thought of themselves as speakers of Latin.  Presumably the other languages were even closer together at that time.  
Do we have any Romanche speakers in the forum, by the way?  I've often wondered if they can understand any Italian.


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## Outsider

Graham Butler said:
			
		

> I have read somewhere, i can't remember where, that as late as the 13th century, people in Tuscany still thought of themselves as speakers of Latin.


If I'm not mistaken, the names of most Romance languages were made up round about that time, or perhaps even later. Until then, they were simply described as the local "vulgar Romance", or something similar.

P.S. By the way, you'll find two interesting links regarding this issue here.


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## emma1968

Here my thought,
I guess that for a native spanish it's easier learn italian than for an italian speaker learn spanish, because of the remote past daily using in the  spanish language , in the italian one get more the present perfect used 
another curiosity is,
the italian and spanish have some words complitely different, 
 some words very similar, the last ones usually in the spanish language are similar at the most used italian  words's synonyms.
To better understand  here an example :
the spanish word "entender or comprender "  is similar  to  our   "intendere e comprendere "  but  we daily use  "capire", the others are synonyms less used .
Ciao Emma.


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## BasedowLives

Outsider said:
			
		

> It's a bit off-topic, but here's another interesting old thread: English, a Germanic language?


english is a germanic language.  it has latin influences though too.

you can tell it's germanic just by

kan - can, vil = will, etc...


anyways, this topic is pretty interesting.  In my class we were told that mutual intelligbility does exist to a certain extent, and there are societal influences that contribute to that.  The example they used was with Sweden and Norway, saying that because of Swedens stronger presence in the media and the fact that Norwegians have more exposure to the swedish language and tend to listen to Swedish programs more than Swedes do Norwegian, that generally Norwegians understand Swedish better than Swedes understand Norwegian.

This could also be a reason for why portuguese speakers understand spanish much better than spanish speakers understand portuguese.


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## tvdxer

As somebody who took three years of Spanish in high school, I will say I can understand Italian to a limited extent, especially if it is in formal speech.  Brazilian Portuguese is somewhat comprehensible, but not very much so, and French is a complete miss.  Well, I can understand "Bonjour", "ce soir", and "France".

Last year (my final year of high school, and also of Spanish) there was a foreign exchange student from Brazil, who of course natively spoke Brazilian (Portuguese).  I would compare her Spanish speaking skills to mine, or say they were even slightly above.  I asked her how she learned Spanish, if in school, and if I remember correctly she said she never took a class, but learned it "in course" (perhaps she was trying to say "em corso"?).


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## SpiceMan

I'm native in both Spanish and Portuguese. Reading Italian, Catalan and French is somewhat easy. Spoken is another issue altogether since I know zero about their pronunciation. I have no problem at all understanding galician be it spoken or written.

You might be interested in these tables of comparative linguistics among romance languages:
http://www.orbilat.com/Linguistics_Comparative/Phonetics/index.html
http://www.orbilat.com/Linguistics_Comparative/Function_Words/index.html

Also this article has a table of lexical similarities in %:
http://www.orbilat.com/General_Survey/Romance_Languages.html


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## jinti

Once I had to phone the home of a Deaf Brazilian guy to invite him to meet me at a certain time and location for a signed theater performance.  I speak no Portuguese; the uncle who answered the phone spoke no English or Spanish; the Deaf guy had no TTY or email.  Great.   Well, we got by with my Spanish and the uncle's Portuguese, and the guy did indeed turn up in the right place at the right time.  So there's some mutual intelligibilty.


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## Graham Butler

Thanks for some very interesting comments from all of you.  SpiceMan, I shall enjoy looking at the comparative lingusitics tables and thanks, Outsider, for your link which looks interesting - I have some reading to get on with now.  Lazarus, your symbols have not worked on my computer unfortunately, but I understand that you are saying that German and English don't have identical sounds.  That's true, but I think that the similarities, at a basic level give an illusion that German is going to be easy, e.g. Bär – bear
Haus – house
Braun – brown
Butter - butter
These are not identical vowel sounds, but near enough for English speakers not to be deterred from learning the language.  Whereas if you consider the problems for an English speaker starting to learn French, nasal vowels, silent letters, many ways of spelling the same sound, open and closed e, etc., you can see why we have problems getting our heads and tongues around it.  At a higher level, I think German becomes harder than French for us.
I wonder if people learning English find the American accent easier or harder to understand than BBC English?  Some UK accents, of course, are tricky even for a native English speaker: I was in Glasgow recently and had real problems of comprehension.


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## Cnaeius

SpiceMan said:
			
		

> I'm native in both Spanish and Portuguese. Reading Italian, Catalan and French is somewhat easy. Spoken is another issue altogether since I know zero about their pronunciation. I have no problem at all understanding galician be it spoken or written.
> 
> You might be interested in these tables of comparative linguistics among romance languages:
> http://www.orbilat.com/Linguistics_Comparative/Phonetics/index.html
> http://www.orbilat.com/Linguistics_Comparative/Function_Words/index.html
> 
> Also this article has a table of lexical similarities in %:
> http://www.orbilat.com/General_Survey/Romance_Languages.html


 
Pay attention to columns concerning italian in the tables!
I found something incorrect, and strong lack of words in Italian columns in Function Words link 
Ciao!


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## Billiamian

I'm an American living in Sardinia. 
After 4 years here, I'm at times surprized by my ability to understand 
- sometimes very well - 
French & Spanish, though primarily _writing only_. 

We have a local language here which is also descended from Latin "Sardinian". 
It has multiple dialects with different degrees of influence 
from Spainsh, Catalan, French & Italian, 
but I can understand almost nothing  
Spanish & Italian do seem to share many commonalities, 
as I've seen/heard many conversations between speakers 
of these 2 languages & they communicate quite effectively. 
Hablo tambien de vez en cuando

BTW - 
Anglo, Saxon & Jute
Angle-ish
Anglish
Land of the Angles
Angle-land
England - Seems rather Germanic to me,
though some modern day britons might disagree


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## lazarus1907

By the way, I never answered your question:

Here in England I speak to my Potuguese friends in Spanish, and they speak to me in Portuguese, even though we all speak fluent English. I make efforts to pronounce standard and clear Spanish, and they do the same (otherwise our understanding drops a lot). Brasilian Portuguese seems easier to understand to me.

I can speak to Italian people for hours with little problem, provided that the other person can speak correct Italian and avoid idioms and slang.

I can't understand a word in French (except insults), unless they write it down for me.

I can understand only some words of Romanian here and there, but I haven't heard it many times anyway.


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## la reine victoria

> Billiamian. I'm an American living in Sardinia.


Lucky you, Billiamian. One of my favourite places.



> We have a local language here which is also descended from Latin "Sardinian".
> It has multiple dialects with different degrees of influence
> from Spainsh, Catalan, French & Italian,
> but I can understand almost nothing .


I first heard this language spoken in the mountain village of Seui. With only a small knowledge of Ialian, but having studied Latin, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I was able to understand. I wasn't able to reply though!

LRV


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## nichec

My ex-boyfriend's mother language is Spanish (from Mexico) , it took him years to learn French after he moved and lived in Paris, and 25 years later, he still has accent in his French. Yet when we went to Italy for vocation, he could communicate with Italians with no problem at all!!!(he sweared that he'd never learned any Italian in his whole life )

And my sister-in-law whose mother language is also Spanish told me that she can read and understand Italian without having to learn it in the first place, but she too took French for years in school (and still can't speak it well)


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## Dr. Quizá

I'm a Spaniard and I live next to the Portuguese border. These are the Romance languages I know and understand written, from better to worse understandings:

- Portuguese.
- Galician.
- Catalan.
- Italian.
- French.

I've been reading the Portuguese forum and I still haven't found a word I couldn't understand. I think that Catalan is grammatically more similar to Italian than to Spanish.

This is the same kind of list, but for spoken languages:
- Catalan.
- Iberian Portuguese.
- Italian.
- Galician.
- Brazilian Portuguese.
- French.

French pronunciation is very different to the Spanish one. The Galician one is a more similar than the Portuguese one, but I'm used to Portuguese (I have working experience in "Portuñol"  ) and Galicians usually have a very strong accent. Anyway, I think Catalan is the easiest Romance language to understand for most Spaniards.




			
				SpiceMan said:
			
		

> You might be interested in these tables of comparative linguistics among romance languages:
> http://www.orbilat.com/Linguistics_Comparative/Phonetics/index.html
> http://www.orbilat.com/Linguistics_Comparative/Function_Words/index.html
> 
> Also this article has a table of lexical similarities in %:
> http://www.orbilat.com/General_Survey/Romance_Languages.html



Interesting links, SpiceMan


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## Tino_no

lazarus1907 said:
			
		

> It took me years to learn how to pronounce English (still trying), and only minutes to learn how to pronounce German. Don't know what to say.


The same with me!  It took me years to learn how to pronounce English (specially vowels), because spanish have very few vowels. And it took me only a week to learn how to pronounce German, although I still have problems with ö and ü.


And for me, Italian is the easiest romance language to learn if you know spanish, and french is the most difficult.


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## cuchuflete

Please note the thread topic:

*Re: To what extent are the Latin languages mutually comprehensible?
*

Comments about ease and difficulty of English and German may deserve their own conversation, outside of this thread.


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## Ayazid

Dr. Quizá said:


> I'm a Spaniard and I live next to the Portuguese border. These are the Romance languages I know and understand written, from better to worse understandings:
> 
> - Portuguese.
> - Galician.
> - Catalan.
> - Italian.
> - French.
> 
> I've been reading the Portuguese forum and I still haven't found a word I couldn't understand. I think that Catalan is grammatically more similar to Italian than to Spanish.
> 
> This is the same kind of list, but for spoken languages:
> - Catalan.
> - Iberian Portuguese.
> - Italian.
> - Galician.
> - Brazilian Portuguese.
> - French.
> 
> French pronunciation is very different to the Spanish one. The Galician one is a more similar than the Portuguese one, but I'm used to Portuguese (I have working experience in "Portuñol"  ) and Galicians usually have a very strong accent. Anyway, I think Catalan is the easiest Romance language to understand for most Spaniards.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Interesting links, SpiceMan


 
So, you understand Iberian Portuguese better than Brazilian one? I get it because you live close to Portuguese borders and are used to it, but most Spanish speaking people usually consider Brazilian Portuguese to be easier to understand.


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