Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

You are right. Related romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) speakers can understand most of the words.

As a Romanian I understand best Italian, then Spanish, then French and lastly Portuguese which is little odd for me.




I don't think it goes both ways, though. Romanian is rather obscure to me. Possibly because of slavic influence?


In "The Grammar of Romanian"[1] book, Romanian language contains the following: 20 percent inherited Latin, 11.5 percent Slavic, 3.6 percent Turkish, 2.17 percent Hungarian, 43 percent Romance borrowings (mainly French - 38.4 percent).

The lexical similarity of Romanian with Italian has been estimated at 77%, followed by French at 75%, Sardinian 83%, Catalan 73%, Portuguese and Rhaeto-Romance 72%, Spanish 71%. In modern times Romanian vocabulary has been strongly influenced by French, Italian and other languages.

More on wikipedia if you are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language

BTW, are you Spanish?

[1] http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199644926.do


Very interesting, I'll try to read up more.

>BTW, are you Spanish?

Nope, Italian.


Written Romanian looks a little intimidating because of the amount of diacritics, but what I've heard sounds surprisingly similar to Italian.


Phonemes are similar, but spoken Romanian is complete gibberish to me.

Things get better in writing, but there's still no comparison to Spanish.

After all there was a longer interaction with the latter: for historical reasons words and verbal constructs in southern dialects can give insights with regard to it or French.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: