9
votes
Accepted
Which language is the closest lexically to Spanish?
The map you have doesn't pass the sniff test for me. I don't imagine anyone realistically saying Catalonian being closer to Spanish than Galician. I can't speak for other Romance groups, but for ...
- 944
7
votes
Accepted
Where did the nasal sound in the Portuguese word "sim" come from?
In the late sixteenth century, there was a sporadic sound change in Portuguese which caused some stressed, word-final /i/s to become nasalised.
Examples: sim, marfim, assim, metim, morim.
An older ...
- 895
6
votes
Accepted
History and Reason of Portuguese accentuation marks
It is true that the earliest fragments of Galician-Portuguese have no stress marking, although they already make use of other diacritics such as the tilde and the cedilla. The first Portuguese grammar,...
- 7,281
6
votes
Accepted
Portuguese — Why use definite articles in front of possessive nouns? Why the extensive use of proposition contraction?
It is not so uncommon for langueges to put articles in front of personal names, it happens, for instance, in the South Tyrol dialect of German, so it is just a thing that happened and it is one of the ...
- 1,426
5
votes
Accepted
Do all colonized countries use formal second pronouns person in daily life?
Québec, which originated as a French colony in North America, offers a very clear counterexample: it is well-known that speakers of Québécois French use tu in many more situations and much more ...
- 166
5
votes
Use of the definite article in European vs. Brazilian Portuguese
The rule is different. It only applies when the possessive pronoun is substantive:
Este é meu livro, o seu é o outro. (This is my book, yours is the other one.)
In most other contexts, the use of ...
- 1,763
4
votes
Accepted
Why do I hear the p, t, k in Portuguese as aspirated plosives?
There are two aspects to this:
the greater aspiration of /p, t, k/ in Portuguese than in Spanish.
the greater lenition of /b, d, g/ in Spanish than in Portuguese.
From one 2008 study of 35 South and ...
- 7,281
4
votes
Use of the definite article in European vs. Brazilian Portuguese
Not a complete answer, but to the question on variations in different standards and dialects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese#Definite_article_before_possessive
The Portuguese ...
- 7,531
3
votes
Why do I speak more accurately in English rather than my native language?
There are fast and slow languages, measured in syllables per second. I don't know about Portuguese, but Spanish is a fast language while English is a slow language. There is a correlation between the ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
Did the Portuguese influence how days of the week are named in Vietnamese and Chinese?
This is a summary of the information on CJV Lang, which has a much more detailed view on the naming of the 7-day week across many languages.
But in essence:
Neither dynastic China nor Vietnam had a ...
- 7,281
2
votes
What is closer to 16th century Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese or Portuguese from Portugal?
As you have mentioned sound, let us restrict the discussion to Portuguese phonology, and simply go through some features by area. Most of this gleaned from bits and pieces across several sources, so I ...
- 7,281
2
votes
Conjugation stem changes in Portuguese
In Spanish, it is very usual that we find that we have to change e ⟶ i, o ⟶ ue, etc. When we conjugate, however, Portuguese does not have it, except in some cases. Why is that?
Ergative Man has ...
- 64k
2
votes
Accepted
Conjugation stem changes in Portuguese
In short, it depends on the different phonological processes each language had in its history and the regularizations that may or may not have happened in their words and paradigms.
The past tense of ...
- 1,426
2
votes
Portuguese: Inconsistencies in use of second person pronouns and conjugation
I think it may be not a definitive answer for your question, but I hope it will clarify and explain a few things.
Well, until the XV century, tu (from latin TV) and vós (from latin VOS) were ...
- 1,426
2
votes
Accepted
How did "li" come to mean "here" in Cape Verdean Creole?
I'm not familiar with these languages, so I can't give a complete answer to your question.
I just wanted to point out that "opposites" is a pretty strong term for two words with such similar meanings ...
- 17.8k
2
votes
Accepted
Why does the Portuguese language sound similar to French language to me?
The nasal vowels, like the other replies said, are probably why. The pronouns are also similar. Je, Tu, Il/Elle/On, Nous, Vous, Ils/Elles for French and Eu, Tu, Ele/Ela, Nós, Eles,Elas.
- 71
2
votes
History and Reason of Portuguese accentuation marks
The accentuation system in the orthography of Portuguese was created to be logic, so that every word shows where the stressed syllable is in the most economic way, making only a relatively small ...
- 1,426
2
votes
Why does "s" in Portuguese sound like /z/ between vowels?
This is very common among languages, voiceless sounds (such as [s]) tend to become voiced between other voiced sounds such as voiced consonants and vowels. And that is it what happened historically in ...
- 1,426
1
vote
Accepted
Why does "s" in Portuguese sound like /z/ between vowels?
In trying to understand the connection between letters and pronunciation, one should always look at the history of the language, which means "looking" at the pre-modern form of the various ...
- 82k
1
vote
What sound change(s) underlie [iʒ-] in São Vicente?
Without historical data on the dialect, I'd think that the second hypothesis (Or might this be best explained as dropping the [u] by syncope and adding a [i] by prothesis?) sounds natural and ...
- 29.8k
1
vote
Why the grammatical difference between "eu gosto" in Portuguese and "me gusta" in Spanish. What's the historical evolution of this expression?
Superficially subject and object markings do not always correlate with semantic "subject" and "object".
For example in English:
I won the election.
It's clearly everybody else (unless you too went ...
- 638
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