Eh, kinda.
As Brazilian I can understand a good portion of Spanish (I had little contact too) but french and Portuguese from Ilha da Madeira I can’t understand shit.
import latin_alphabet
I get the jist of it. With context and congnates and some basic linguistics I can understand what is being said. I feel like I can also read it to a certain degree. If you are a native English speaker and want to feel what’s it’s like look up someone speaking “Scots” is a sister language to English and probably the closest to English without also being English.
For those curious, here’s an excerpt from Welsh’s Acid House story “A Blockage in the System”
Knoxie wis hoverin in the doorway; ehs face set in that kind ay expression thit cries out fir our attention, whin eh kens thit every cunt’ll ignore um until eh speaks. Then will git some bullshit about how eh’d telt Manderson tae stick ehs fuckin joab up ehs erse whin the truth is thit the cunt’s shat ehs fuckin keks again.
— That cunt Manderson, eh wheezed.
— Trouble at mill? ah asked, no lookin up fae ma cairds. This wis a shite hand. Ah turned tae gie ma foreman ma undivided attention, as a conscientious employee. A null n void declaration by Knoxie here wid suit ays doon tae a fuckin tee, the shite ah’m hudin.
— Wuv goat tae jildy. Thir’s fuckin chaos doon at the flats.
— Hud oan the now, Lozy sais nervously. Obviously this wide-o’s goat the maist tae lose.
Pickin up ehs anxiety, Calum flings ehs hand in. Ah follay suit.
Italian and Spanish are somewhat similar. Though not as similar as Spanish and Portuguese. I know Mexican and Brazilian people all over where I live that can communicate with each other in their own language and they’re close enough to understand each other. I’m not sure if that’s the case with Italian, though.
A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot…
Italian, Spanish, and French ARE all romance languages (descended from the language of Rome, Latin), so she’s kinda on to something.
The funny thing is that partially we can. It’s the funniest shit to watch a group of Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian people. Kind of like watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.
Kind of like watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.
Yeah but you can’t really understand them it just sort of sounds like you should be able to and you’re not hearing them properly. You have no idea what they’re actually saying.
The ebb and flow of the languages are almost identical, but the words are completely different.
My thoughts exactly, if I’m hearing someone speak French then my brain says “that’s a different language”, but Dutch sounds similar enough to English that my brain says “that’s gobbledygook, there’s trickery afoot!”
It’s kinda funny on a personal level.
My wife is a damn yankee. Moved from up there in forn parts down here to the real america, where we speak proper english.
Anyway, she’s been down here a little over ten years. She still runs into situations where she has to ask me “what did he say?” when we go to a family getogether. Like, my cousin might say something that means, “yeah, I was in the woods hunting and saw a bear”, but it comes out “I’uz downta the woods ahuntin, and saw a bar”. She hears something more like “izadunta tha woods ahntin n sawabar”. So, she knows he was in the woods, and was doing something and saw something. But she has no idea what he was doing, or what he saw.
Meanwhile, she’s being asked to slow down and relax because everything she says is clipped and a little too fast to keep up with by my more rural family.
Watching her and my great uncle talk is fucking hilarious because there’s just this string of gibberish as far as they’re both concerned, so they just laugh and essentially say they have no idea what was just said, but that’s okay.
Then again, I barely understand my great uncle some days. He’s from here in the Appalachians originally, but moved to Alabama to run the farm his wife’s family has. As an example of how he sounds, when there’s dogs that need to be run off, he has this thing he yells.
It sounds like gehownupouttahyuh. Which is broken down into geh own up outta hyuh, which translates to get on up outta here. But it’s one long fucking word for him. Which is how he always talks. It’s normally just slower than his dog shooing. If he wants you to know he’s going shopping, he says something akin to “ahmagwondownt’thestow” no breaks between words unless it’s where a t is a stop, but it’s draaawwwwled every vowel is stretched like taffy until it sticks to everything
i’m brazilian and i can understand spanish, i just can’t speak it. pretty sure i can actually understand spanish better than european portuguese tbh
don’t know about italian or french though.
This isn’t a dumb question. What she’s asking about is known as Mutual Intelligibility or Linguistic Distance, depending on how you read it.
Languages in the same family tend to score well, such as the three Romance languages she listed. Estimates of French <-> Italian are often in the 80% range. That doesn’t mean you can speak the other language, but in a bind an average Italian may be able to catch about 80% of what a French person is trying to convey.
You laugh but I guarantee Spanish is more similar to Portuguese then Scots English is to Cajun English.
According to a famous quote, a language is a dialect with a navy and an army. Since Murica, UK and Austria each have their own navies amd armies, they are separate languages just like Serbian and Croatian are.
