Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)

phippsmartin_at_hotmail.com
Date: 03/30/05 

Date: 29 Mar 2005 18:17:46 -0800

António Marques wrote:
> Comm wrote:

> >>> And NO, many Italian speaking people can NOT understand
> >>> Spanish. In fact, the ONLY Italian people I know that
> >>> understand Spanish also speak it because they learned it.
> >>
> >> Standard italian may be close enough to spanish to be mutually
> >> intelligible, given some vocabulary shopping. Yet your other
> >> friends are reputed to understand portuguese, spanish, italian
> >> and french without having learned those!
> >
> > I didn't say that. You did. Learn to read more carefully.
>
> You've repeated that accusation in the past, only to be found out
that
> everyone had it the same as I did. Have you or have you not claimed
to
> have a 'hispanic' friend who understands all kinds of 'hispanic' and
> italian, and an italian friend who understands spanish and french
> without having studied them?

Yes and no, respectively, but she did argue that Romanian WASN'T a
Romance language because his Hispanic friend didn't recognize it. So,
presumably, Spanish is not a Romance language either, by the same
argument, or else Italian people would be able to understand it.

It's all subjective: how a language sounds; whether or not you can
understand it. Forgive her. Comm isn't trained in the scientific
method: she relies too much on intuition. She knows this and she
admits this but she doesn't see it as a problem.

Martin

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