I saw many articles claiming that French and Italian are (relatively) mutually intelligible in their WRITTEN forms. The main two arguments are that they both have almost identical grammatical structure and that they share a lot of vocabulary (usually sources give the number 89%). I'm curious if it's true, for me it seems that the closest language to Italian would be Spanish, while French is rather isolated, but maybe it's only my superficial impression caused by the similarity between Italian and Spanish phonetics.
French and Italian
Connor Murphy
Other urls found in this thread:
fr.wikipedia.org
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youtube.com
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fr.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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Eli Morgan
It's a really weird issue.
Imagine your own language.
Now swap all words that have a more obscure, seldom used synonym with that synonim.
Now apply a bunch of weird phonetic rules that come from God-knows-where.
Write using the new phonetic rules, but for some of them, write them the same way, and pronounce them according to the new rules.
For the other half, write them down according to the new rules, so that they sound the same.
What do you get?
Now some words are only recognisable when you read them out loud.
Others are only recognisable when you see them written.
...And they are all seldom-used version of words that kind of make sense in that order in your language.
Also some basic words like "also" and "so" are very different, while nouns and verbs still either sound or look similar.
I had a look at the French general on this board and I can understand 100% of what they are saying, but I need to think for a while to do so.
Jeremiah Walker
Aha, grazie, so it's even more complicated.
Kevin Brooks
>I had a look at the French general on this board and I can understand 100% of what they are saying, but I need to think for a while to do so.
Well i can't understand anything you guys say in /ita/, i guess that makes you the Portuguese to our Spanish.
Ayden Turner
>i guess that makes you the Portuguese to our Spanish
I think that their asymmetrical mutual intelligibility works only in spoken form (I mean that Spaniards cannot understand SPOKEN Portuguese), but when they write they can communicte "symmetrically".
Hunter Ross
>Well i can't understand anything you guys say in /ita/
that's because those underage retards can't speak proper italian
Cooper Richardson
il bumpo
Brody Butler
The phrase construction and the amount of french words with latin roots makes guessing the meaning of the sentence really easy. Yes, you may not know what a word means, but you can guess it if you consider the bigger picture.
Easier than Spanish, in my experience.
Angel Green
Thanks
Connor Mitchell
you probably stumbled upon romanian posts
Lucas James
I just took a look at the filo italo and basically I can only get roughly 60% of what they are saying.
I actually speak pretty fluent spanish but it doesn't help much more than my french I guess.
To me it would make sense that it's be far easier to and italian to read french than the reverse because, they already know a shitload of french words through english while the reverse can't be said.
Tyler Flores
Oliver Campbell
>To me it would make sense that it's be far easier to and italian to read french than the reverse because, they already know a shitload of french words through english while the reverse can't be said.
Oh, that's very interesting, especially that "English" theory seems quite probable.
Nathaniel Edwards
Most of the French words in English are derived from Latin so it doesn't help much. As OP said, most of our languages words have a similar root anyway, so that's not the problem. What makes it harder is how the Latin words evolved phonetically and graphically in French. For instance, if I take , I wouldn't probably have understood it if it wasn't for "blond", because "cheveux" isn't that similiar to Italian "capelli" (Latin "capilli").
Lincoln Turner
Same for me, except i do not understand everything you say on /ita/
Kayden Hughes
During the Renaissance we've got a fuckton of Italian words and we began to italianize everything that they thought that the french language would become an Italian dialect
Tyler Butler
>fr.wikipedia.org
half those words are used in english too and most of the rest are pretty specialised terms like the music vocabulary.
I probably wouldn't have guess "capilli" but the adjectif of hair is "capilaire" in French.
Luke Walker
Kek, we had amost the same thing, especially after one king married a woman from the Sforza family, except we started using Latin instead of Italian, but I guess it's still much more ridiculous than italianized French, just imagine all books full of some strange Latin-Slavic mixture, see for example:
>Te animal czy re vera jest na świecie, niemała jest między uczonemi kontrowersyja. Pismo sw. pięć razy unicomem expresse wspomina, a tym samym zda się stabilire zdanie trzymających exis ten tiam jednorożca.
Kayden Stewart
>On estime que la langue française comptait 698 mots provenant de l'italien, à la date de 1997.
Also ~700 isn't that much, especially if it's restricted to those special fields you mentioned. I guess all European languages took their musical terminology from Italian, just like all ballet terminology comes from French.
James Jenkins
does it happen to you that the latinate English words English speakers consider snobby are actually easier to you?
recently I saw a finn here criticize as snobby an Argentine for writing calefaction instead of heating, when it actually meant the opposite, calefaction is far easier for him because it is so similar to calefacción.
the same for stuff like implore instead of begging.
Robert Jenkins
Actually we can understand each other speaking if both speak slowly.
Charles Myers
>recently I saw a finn here criticize as snobby an Argentine
This is strange, why would a non-native speaker criticize anything like that?
Dominic Jones
I think many scandinavians have achieved pretty much native level english. + 4 chan and autism
Bentley Lopez
Still spoken Portuguese is objectively harder, for example I'm among those rare specimens who learn Portuguese, not Spanish, but still it's much easier for me to understand TVE than Rede Globo, there is some "sing-songiness" that really makes your lnguage harder to understand.
Juan Anderson
There are lots of accents here. I'm from the south and we dont "sing" while speaking. But I know exactly what you are talking about. I mean, if we meet someone from spanish speaking countries we will speak slowly and use words that are similar in spanish, so we can understand each other more easily.
Blake Walker
>I'm from the south and we dont "sing" while speaking.
OK, it wasn't very precise, but there are also many instances when Spanish has a much "clearer" sequence of sounds, eg. "la persona", while in Portuguese it's "squeezed" and you have "a pessoa", so for someone who is hearing your spoken language it's more "compressed", without that "clear" sequence of consonants and vowels. Of course, you don't have this problem as a native speaker.
Matthew Allen
On vous aime, cousins
Benjamin King
Rob Dougan
youtube.com
Nolan Bell
>mfw italians are the only romance people who can understand every other romance language (except romanian)
truly the heirs of the Empire
Kayden Moore
French has a fucked up phonetics, but written French is quite understandble. Spanish is also understandble when spoken. Portuguese is the same of French. Romanian is a bit more complicated because they have a lot of slavic words and also somehow weird sounds too.
Mason Walker
Blame latin for the weird spelling.
Though at least reading word and pronouncing it is consistent.
Lucas Morales
in venetian capelli=cavei which is more similar too the french version
Jaxon Johnson
it's not about the spelling, it's about the pronounce, you guys speak with the nose
Ian Williams
Spanish is somehow more understandable because of its orthographic and pronunciation rules that are still close to the original latin ones, but french is easier once you have acquired the very basics. I remember reading that most of the latin words in Italian and French came from the latin spoken by the plebs, while in Iberia latin was learnt in a formal manner (See fromage/formaggio vs queso, manger/mangiare vs comer). You also have to consider the fact that France and Italy have been arguably the closest latin countries in terms of culture exchange after the fall of the roman empire, we sometimes have french loanwords even when there is an identical italian word (amicale vs amichevole).
Also as you said the grammatical structure is literally identicle, in most of the cases at least, while spanish has some different structures and uses the tenses differently. Plus, Northern italian dialects are actually part of the gallo-latin group or whatever it is called.
It must be said, however, that for southern italians spanish is probably easier, southern dialects have acquired a lot of structures from spanish due to the historical spanish domination.
Nolan Thompson
We adopted the pronunciation of the royalty which had northern influence.
I feel like when speaking french Im speaking from the lung, it feel like breathing while I have to work extra-hard with the mouth to pronounce spanish or english because the consonnants are stressed while in French the relevant sound are more the vowels.
Apparently this shit is so hard for japanese that you need annoying music and piggy face to make people get it topkek:
youtube.com
Luis Myers
I think he meant papa-portuguese in that context, Juninho.
Justin Parker
cavejj, not cavei, though.
Tyler Watson
I don't know if you also do this but in French we use a lot of classical latin, like a priori, a fortiori, ex nihilo, ex ante..., and basically you can use any latin expression you wish.
Evan Morgan
It's really noticeable in the word "excellent".
English: EX-elent
Spanish: Ex-Ce-Len-Te
French; Ex-ce-lan
Italian: E-che-len-te
Portuguese: shlent
Opened vowels are overrated anyway.
Alexander Butler
We do, but thhat's common to all the latin countries i think.
Wyatt Ramirez
Yes, we sometimes use also latin proverbs or sayings, like lupus in fabula or de gustibus non disputandum etc etc
Luke Morris
>while in Iberia latin was learnt in a formal manner
It was still vulgar latin mixed in with local celtiberian words.
I know that Galaico-Portuguese in particular had a lot of ecclesiastic latin influence, though. We don't use the roman names for the days of the week, we just count them until Saturday starting with Monday (we call it second fair).
Luke Hernandez
>but written French is quite understandble
Can you understand the text on the left ?
Brody Green
kek
Logan Watson
Blame the franks
Andrew Allen
there's actually a list of those we consider de facto part of french.
Ayden James
Le texte de gauche c'est moi quand je suis bourré
Samuel Green
Oil French languages (and consequentely standard french) started to use their strange guttural ''r'' only in the early '800 for some strange pseudo-aristocratical motivation; before this, the language would have sounded almost like occitan and occitan-related languages (piemonteis, catalan, etc).
I heard some stories about french peasants (in the historical Oil regions) in the early '50s who where still used to speak without the guttural ''r''.
Hunter Davis
i was always impressed of the great number of latin-derived words in polish compared to other slavic languages. Maybe this was also because of the strong power of the Catholic Church in the past centuries?
Adam Flores
Of course Catholicism is very important in this case, but there is also another reason. Basically our noblemen role-played as Romans (also as Iranian Sarmatians, but this is not the case here) and since we had the highest percentage of nobility in the world, therefore their lifestyle became quite common:
>The countries with the highest proportion of nobles were Castile (probably 10%), Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (15% of an 18th-century population of 800,000), Spain (722,000 in 1768 which was 7–8% of the entire population) and other countries with lower percentages, such as Russia in 1760 with 500,000–600,000 nobles (2–3% of the entire population), and pre-revolutionary France where there were no more than 300,000 prior to 1789, which was 1% of the population (although some scholars believe this figure is an overestimate). In 1718 Sweden had between 10,000 and 15,000 nobles, which was 0.5% of the population. In Germany 0.01%.
en.wikipedia.org
William Ramirez
Knowing italian ,some latin and english basically let you understand the written form of french
Lincoln Sullivan
The relationships between Romance languages seems similiar to the relationships between Slavic languages. Germanic ones on the other hand... Germans understand less Swiss than you do Spanish and English is totally unlike anything.
Juan Price
This is a meme tho.
Charles Campbell
Why?
Adam Sanders
Spoken french is hard as fuck to follow
Jaxson Murphy
OK, thanks for all answers, I will give Italian a try and I will check by myself.
Kevin Long
Your nation is mentioned in our anthem and vice versa (''il sangue polacco bevve col Cosacco'')
Joseph Foster
When the text is simple, I can understand it, yes.
Alexander Baker
Yes, I know. Of course our relationship wasn't symmetrical since Italy was the main cultural cente of Europe, actually there are all cities here designed and built by Italians, like pic related:
>Ideal town was a Renaissance concept developed by Italian polymath Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), author of ten books of treatises on modern architecture titled De Re Aedificatoria written about 1450 with additions made until the time of his death in 1472. Alberti's architectural theories concerned the planning and building of an entire town as opposed to individual edifices for private patrons or ecclesiastical purposes.
>Alberti insisted on choosing the location of the town first, followed by careful setting up of the size and direction of streets, then location of bridges and gates, and finally a building pattern ruled by perfect symmetry.[1] One of the more prominent examples of a town modelled on this theory was Zamość founded in the 16th century by the chancellor Jan Zamoyski. At present, it is a World Heritage Site in Poland.[2]
en.wikipedia.org