• MrNesser@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    23 days ago

    Better question why does a country sharing two land borders speak a completely different language to any other country.

    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      23 days ago

      There’s a lot of similarities between Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Most Portuguese speaking people can understand basic Spanish but it’s harder for Spanish speaking people to understand Portuguese.

      At least that’s what my wife tells me as a Spanish native ~150 days into learning Portuguese.

      • wander1236@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        23 days ago

        IMO (formal) American Portuguese and Spanish are pretty close to mutually intelligible, especially in writing. There’s a surprisingly consistent “system” for converting words between them and once you notice it, it’s pretty easy to tell what a sentence should be in the other language, if it’s even spelled differently in the first place. The grammar is also very similar. The biggest difference that gets me is how Portuguese tends to shift past tense conjugations further into the past vs Spanish.

      • 0x0@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        23 days ago

        Because Portuguese has many more vowels than Spanish and there are a lot of false friends between the two.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          23 days ago

          To me, it sounds like Brazilian Portuguese (dunno about European Portuguese) has a ridiculous number of diphthongs.

          • furry toaster@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            22 days ago

            portguese brazillian has a ridiculous number of diphtongs? havr you seen english? it could be my bias as a native speaker but I don’t really see many diphtongs in brazillian portuguese

    • zikzak025@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      23 days ago

      It’s often said that a language is just a dialect with an army.

      Portuguese and Spanish (Castilian) are more closely related than Castilian is to Catalan. Yet Catalan is often classified as a dialect of Spanish than a language in its own right.