 | Portuguese language: Encyclopedia II - Portuguese language - Classification and related languages
Portuguese language - Classification and related languages
Portuguese is a member of the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. Its closest relatives are Galician, Ladino, and Spanish, in that order.
Portuguese language - Galician
Galician orthography follows the Spanish model, but the spoken language is said to be closer to Portuguese, especially to its Medieval form. Indeed, the question of whether Portuguese and Galician are separate languages, or dialects of the same language, has been hotly debated for decades, and is loaded with political and cultural implications.
Portuguese language - Spanish
Portuguese differs somewhat from Spanish in orthography, and even more in phonology, grammar and vocabulary:
Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. (Portuguese)
Ella cierra siempre la ventana antes de cenar. (Spanish)
"She always closes the window before having dinner."
Actually, many of the most obvious discrepancies in the lexicon are only due to different usage preferences. For example, Portuguese has in fact both cear (rare) and jantar (common), whereas Spanish has both cenar (common) and yantar (rare), all meaning "to dine".
Portuguese language - Ladino
Portuguese is closer to Ladino than to Spanish, because the Ladino-speaking community has roots in Portugal as well as in Spain. Compare for example Ladino ainda ("still") with Portuguese ainda and to Spanish aún. Ladino, like Portuguese, also conserved many of the initial [f] sounds that mutated to [h] in Spanish. So, for example, Ladino fija ("daughter") and favlar ("to speak") match Portuguese filha and falar, whereas Spanish has hija and hablar.
Portuguese language - Mutual intelligibility
Portuguese, Galician, and Spanish speakers generally claim that the languages are mutually intelligible to some extent. However, that may be in part a consequence of the the extensive cultural ties between the Iberian countries, which inevitably lead to unconscious learning. Indeed, bilingualism is quite common in some regions. It is certainly true that a speaker of any of the three languages can learn to read any of the other two just by practicing, without formal study of their grammar.
It is also claimed that a Portuguese speaker can understand Spanish better than the other way around. This alleged asymmetry could due to to the general reduction of unstressed vowels in Portuguese, compared to Spanish; or to asymmetries in language exposure.
Portuguese language - Other romance languages
On the other hand, even though Portuguese has obvious lexical and grammatical similarities with Catalan, Italian, French, and the other Romance languages, it is not intelligible with them to any practical extent. Portuguese speakers will usually need some formal study of basic grammar and vocabulary, before being able to understand even the simplest sentences in those languages (and vice-versa):
Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. (Portuguese)
Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de diner. (French)
Lei chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. (Italian)
On the other hand, European Portuguese is phonetically closer to French and Catalan than to Spanish in some respects; such as the occurrence of nasalization, palatalization, diphthongization of low-mid stressed vowels, aspiration of /f/, devoicing of sibilants, and change of intervocalic [ʎ] to [ʒ] — all features that are not shared by Spanish. The same can be said of the basic vocabularies: compare e.g. Portuguese bom ("good") with French or Catalan bon and Spanish bueno; or Portuguese filha with French fille, Catalan filla, and Spanish hija.
The resemblances between Portuguese and French may have been reinforced by the Napoleonic dominion over Portugal in 1807-1812, and the great influence that France had in Portuguese culture since then.
Portuguese language - Distinctive features
A distinguishing feature of Portuguese among Romance languages is the occurrence of mesoclisis, the placement of weak pronouns between the verb stem and future or conditional verb ending:
comprá-lo-ei = comprarei + o ("I will buy it").
dar-lho-ia = daria + lhe + o ("I would give it to him").
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