Spanish among the Romance languages

Explanation

The Romance languages — Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, French, Occitan, Italian, Sardinian, Romansh, Romanian and several smaller ones — are all continuations of the same spoken Latin, drifting apart as the empire's roads and administration stopped holding them together. There was no single moment of separation: the Iberian Peninsula was a dialect continuum, and Castilian was at first just the speech of a small northern county around Burgos. Spanish's nearest relatives are Galician-Portuguese to the west and Aragonese, Asturleonese and Catalan to the east.

What transfers is mostly vocabulary, and a lot of it: rough lexical-similarity estimates put Spanish and Portuguese around 89%, Spanish and Italian around 82%, Spanish and French around 75%. The correspondences are regular enough to exploit deliberately — Spanish -ción matches French -tion, Italian -zione, Portuguese -ção (nación / nation / nazione / nação); Spanish ue and ie sit where French and Italian keep a simple vowel (puerta / porte / porta, tierra / terre / terra); Spanish h- often faces French and Italian f- (hijo / fils / figlio).

The traps come in two kinds. First, false friends, which are commonest between the closest languages: embarazada means 'pregnant', not 'embarrassed'; salir is 'to go out', not French salir 'to dirty'; largo is 'long', not Italian largo 'wide'; ropa is 'clothes', not French robe. Second, grammar diverges more than vocabulary does — two verbs for 'to be', a living subjunctive, subject pronouns that are normally omitted. Recognition transfers almost for free; production has to be learned.

Examples

Related rules

• Spanish is spoken Latin, not written Latin
• From Latin to Spanish: the sound changes that did the work
• False friends for French speakers
• False friends for English speakers