Romance language lexical similarity?

Question

I've noticed a lot of people who are native speakers of one of the major Romance languages (i.e., French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc) say that due to being able to speak one of these languages they can clearly understand any of the others. Example: someone I know that is a native speaker of Spanish told me that she can understand Portuguese, Romanian, French, Italian, Latin, Catalan, Galician, and an Inca language. I don't know what to think about that. Is that really even believable?
In any case, I was just curious: how much of another Romance language can you understand?

Answer 1

There is a /high/ level of lexical similarity between the Romance languages. Some are closer to each other than others (Italian is more easily understood - with 89% lex. sim - to a Francophone than to a Spaniard; Portuguese is more easily understood to a Catalan than to a Romansh speaker, and so on), but they are still /very/ close in terms of grammar and of vocabulary.

An example sentence:
English: I sell my books on the beach (a stupid sentence, I know, but the first that comes to my head!)
Catalan: Embeno els meus llibres en la platja
French: Je vends mes livres sur la plage
Italian: Vendo i miei libri sulla spiaggia
Portuguese: Eu vendo meus livros na praia
Spanish: Vendo mis libros en la playa

As you can see, every word comes from the same Latin roots. The only major difference is the use of prepositions: French and Italian use 'sur', upon, whereas the others use 'en'..

Anyhow, it means that an educated speaker of a Romance language can understand most other Romance languages and Romance-based creoles. The only thing that gets in the way are differences of grammar and non-Latin borrowings (Spanish takes a /lot/ from Arabic and from Native American languages; French takes some words from regional languages like Gascon and from ancient languages, like that of the Gauls.) They are always better understood written than spoken (I, for instance, can understand Portuguese in written form, but with much more difficulty when it is spoken!) With some work, one can speak them as well. This is the case with other languages that take largely from the same roots: German, Frisian and Dutch speakers can oft understand each others, and speakers of Scandinavian languages (other than the Finno-Ugric Finnish language) can understand each other too:

English: a glass of red wine
Danish: et glas rødvin
Swedish: ett glas röd vin
Norwegian: et glass rødvin

Had English not taken so much Latinate words into its vocabulary and gone through a huge sound change, it's likely that Anglophones would have had a similar ability to find mutual understanding with other Germanic languages too.

I hope that this was of some help!

Best wishes,

Cs.

Answer 2

No, this is not true. As a portuguese speaker, I understand well what I read and hear in spanish. These two languages are actually very similar. But I cannot speak or write. Galician and portuguese are almost the same language. Catalan is also similar to portuguese, even more than spanish. I can understand a little italian. And french is even more different. Rumanian is even more different. But its is really easier for us to learn all these languages, compared to the anglo-saxonic languages. But inca language doesn't have anything to do with the romance languages.

Answer 3

First of all... Inca language was mainly Quechua and that has absolutely nothing to do with Latin. That was a native language of the Inca empire before the Spaniards came to colonize it.
Being a spanish speaker and knowing a lil bit of French i can tell u that even thou they are both considered "dirty latin" they are only similar in sentence structure and not very much in specific words.
Speaking spanish helps me understand italian better than all the other romance languages and then i can understand a lil bit of portuguese but after that that would be about it.

Answer 4

Lexical Similarity

Answer 5

Just because two languages are closely related to each other does not mean that they are mutually intelligible. In fact, most of the time they are not. I don't know why people on this site keep buying into answers which say that Spanish and Portuguese or Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible. With all due respect, I hope you're not one of them.

On a related note, most English speakers cannot even fully understand the Scots English of Robert Burns without having to consult a dictionary and Yahoo News had an article a couple of years ago about the problems Greek high school students have learning Ancient Greek. .

A few Spanish speakers have told me too that they can basically understand Portuguese, Italian and Romanian but I always take these comments with a pinch of salt. They could either be lying or, at best, just trying to say that they recognize some strong similarities between Spanish and these languages.

Answer 6

It is possible for a spanish person to understand italian... somehow. But not entirely. All these romance languages have some words in common, but they're hardly alike. I speak romanian, french and italian, but also I have a lotta spanish friends, and sometimes I understand somewhat they're talking, when they speak spanish. The final answer: No, you can't understand too much of other romance language.

Answer 7

I think that you also need a background in Latin to do it properly. If you saw the panic on Y/A French page when it comes to translating things into Latin, you would accept that knowing French does not make you understand Latin and I think that that goes for the other Romance languages. Moreover, it is one thing to understand the other languages when they are written down and quite another to understand the spoken form. Having said that, I would submit that if you know Spanish you can understand written Portuguese, and vice versa, and if you know Latin and another Romance language you can understand written Italian and that if you know any one Romance language you can probably get your meaning across in another by using words from your own language plainly and clearly and waving your arms expressively. Maybe that is what your friend means. She'll catch the odd word or even phrase, but I doubt whether she will understand a complex sentence in a language which she has not come across before.

Answer 8

Italian