The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: ChuckJ on May 27, 2011, 08:18:46 PM
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Although I took a couple of years of Spanish in school, I can't carry on a conversation in Spanish. I can read a very small amount, and I can pick up some words here and there in conversation. With that in mind, I was reading while the wife was watching a movie. Some of the actors were speaking what was supposed to be Portuguese, but I recognized some of the words in the conversations from my time in Spanish class. I assume they both originate from a Latin base, but how similar are the two languages? Are they similar enough that a Portuguese speaker and a Spanish speaker could converse at least at a basic level?
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From ny limited experience, they're about as close together as the Scandinavian Peninsula Germanic languages are with the Continental Germanic languages, so probably yes at a truly basic level. A lot of the vocabulary is recognizably similar but the spelling is totally different.
ETA - the way the two languages are spoken is pretty different. Every Portuguese speaker I've ever heard was on maximum volume but with a very flat inflection, Spanish speakers (Like English speakers) convey an awful lot of the subtleties of their sentences by tone and inflection rather than just the words themselves.
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Thanks DAT. I had never given it much thought until the movie.