Relation To Other Languages
Further information: Comparison of Spanish and PortugueseSpanish is closely related to the other Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Aragonese, Catalan, Galician, Ladino, Leonese, Mirandese and Portuguese. Spanish language has many borrowings from others Iberian Romance languages and Italian and French languages have contributed in vocabulary too.
It should be noted that although Portuguese and Spanish are very closely related, particularly in vocabulary (89% lexically similar according to the Ethnologue of Languages), syntax and grammar, there are also some differences that don't exist between Catalan and Portuguese. Although Spanish and Portuguese are widely considered to be mutually intelligible, it has been noted that while most Portuguese speakers can understand spoken Spanish with little difficulty, Spanish speakers face more difficulty in understanding spoken Portuguese. The written forms are considered to be equally intelligible, however.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Language
Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation and/or languages:
“Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)