• MrNesser@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

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

    Edit: Y’all forget the French

    • zikzak025@lemmy.world
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      3 hours 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.

    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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      5 hours 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.

      • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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        2 hours ago

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

      • wander1236@sh.itjust.works
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        4 hours 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.