this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Linguistics Humor

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

It’s really weird for me as a spanish speaker. I can nearly read french since a lot of the words are cognates but when i hear it spoken i might understand one word in twenty. Their pronunciations are fucked.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Haha, I have the same problem but with spanish as a french speaker. I find italian much easier to understand.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Honestly same for me with italian.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Can I ask what you think of portuguese pronunciation? I can read it but its not possible for me to understand it when spoken... In comparison I learned spanish at school and it was the easiest langage to learn thanks to my french.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'm not a speaker of any Romance language, but Portuguese does sound kinda Slavic to me for some reason. That part of the Eastern European Portugal meme checks out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

LangFocus has a video about that effect. It's called something like "Why does Portuguese sound like Russian". There are quite some phonetic and phonotactic similarities

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Link: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Pik2R46xobA

There's actually a lot of totally separate parallels here, I guess they just hit a certain critical mass when combined.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Written portuguese is fairly easy to read for me. Every now and then I'll respond to brazilians in spanish when they have a funny meme and they'll write back in portuguese. Yay mutual intelligibility.

Spoken portuguese is damn near impossible for me to understand. I know a few phrases and words because my buddy is fluent and says them every now and then but the language sounds like spanish while holding marbles in your mouth. I will say that spanish also sounded unintelligible to me before i learned to speak it so maybe I just need to go live in Rio de Janeiro.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

The woes of a rather conservative orthography and an aggressively evolved phonology.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

French phonology was heavily influenced by Germanic languages, unlike Spanish and Italian.

For better or for worse, the orthography (writing system) did not really keep up with the changes.

So instead of French being half way between Italian and Spanish, like you might expect, it's really it's own thing when it comes to pronunciation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I don't know how big this effect really is but French changed their orthography during the renaissance to make it more Latin like