Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence

Rick Mc Callister rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu
Sun Nov 12 17:39:11 UTC 2000


	In themselves, Spanish and Portuguese are pretty much mutually
comprehensible --say like American English and Scots, or American and
Caribbean English. Educated speakers usually don't have any problems
understanding one another but some class and regional dialects can be
impenetrable. Some Portuguese dialects, or so I've been told, are more
difficult for standard Portuguese speakers than Spanish is. It takes a few
minutes to sort out the handful of common false cognates but even children
of one language understand speakers of the other --as mine did at the
University of  Texas when they played with Brazilian kids. Brazilian movies
are usually pretty easy to understand without subtitles.
	Although both languages, of course, have different standardized
forms, forms in one language are often common non-standard forms in the
other; e.g. Spanish & Portuguese non-standard entonces, ninguie/n--ninguem,
mismo  vs. Portuguese enta~o, nadie, mesmo; Portuguese & Spanish
non-standard onde, agora, mesmo vs Spanish donde, ahora, mismo. Some forms
are non standard in both languages, e.g. asina/assina.
	The Gau/cho dialect from southern Brazil, however, is close to
Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish. Standardized spelling masks some shared
pronunciations; e.g. hallar vs. achar  /as^ar/ "to find, to have an opinion"
	People that I've met from Rio Grande du Sul sound almost as if they
were Argentines or Uruguayans pronouncing Spanish as if it were Portuguese.
It shares a local culture and regional vocabulary with Uruguayan &
Argentine Spanish. It does have an overlay of modern Brazilian slang but
much of this is known to Spanish speakers across the border.
	Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish also share a Tupi-Guarani adstrate
with Brazilian Portuguese, so much of the local flora, fauna and
agricultural produce share the same names.
	Early settlers speaking both languages settled on both sides of the
offical linguistic frontier and there has been massive immigration from
Spanish-speaking countries to southern Brazil.
	Native speakers of one language who are familiar with the sound
shifts and the handful of grammatical differences of the other language
often pass as native speakers of the other language with no formal study.

	Interestingly enough, I was told in grad school that Portuguese and
Spanish were much father apart in the Middle Ages but that the tremendous
load of latinisms from the Renaissance, the use of Galician as a prestige
language for poetry in Spain during the latter Middle Ages and Renaissance,
the use of Salmantine (from Salamanca in western Spain, with some
Portuguese-like features) in Spanish Renaissance drama and Spain's cultural
dominance of the Iberian peninsula after 1500 brought the two languages
closer.
	My intuitive reaction is that Spanish and Portuguese are much
closer than say northern & southern Italian "dialects" or French & Occitan

>        It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw
>areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my
>opinion) to reconverge, was unique.  However it has recently come to my
>attention that a similar situation developed between Spanish and Portugese
>in northern Uruguay, which is to say on the border with Brazil.  Is there
>anyone out there who can tell me what the results of this were, without
>demanding that I read Spanish?  (I suppose I could, but being lazy would
>rather not.)

>                                                    Dr. David L. White

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701



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