Ad
related to: romantic phrases in dutch spanish and italian languagego.babbel.com has been visited by 100K+ users in the past month
Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973. In the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional/voluntary language along with Arabic. It is currently spoken by a minority and taught in the school curriculum.
A similar distinction exists in the Germanic languages, which share a language area [citation needed]; German, Dutch, Danish and Icelandic use 'have' and 'be', while English, Norwegian and Swedish use 'have' only (although in modern English, 'be' remains in certain relic phrases: Christ is risen, Joy to the world: the Lord is come).
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
In many Romance languages including Spanish and Portuguese, the main infinitives are -ar, -er, and -ir, with addition of -ôr (Portuguese only) which only exists in the verb pôr, traditionally considered as -er verbs. While in Italian, the infinitives are -are, -ere, -ire.
Today the four most widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish (c. 486 million native speakers, around 125 million second-language speakers), Portuguese (c. 220 million native, another 45 million or so second-language speakers, mainly in Lusophone Africa), French (c. 80 million native speakers, another 70 million or so ...
The Spanish copulas are ser and estar.The latter developed as follows: stare → *estare → estar. The copula ser developed from two Latin verbs. Thus its inflectional paradigm is a combination: most of it derives from svm (to be) but the present subjunctive appears to come from sedeo (to sit) via the Old Spanish verb seer.
Thus, they developed a simple grammatical system inspired by English (a Germanic language) which is not representative of Romance. It lacks, for example, nominal agreement or verbal personal inflection, which is a common trait of the major Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Romanian, etc.).
In the case of transparently cognate languages recognized as distinct such as Spanish and Italian, mutual intelligibility is in principle and in practice not binary (simply yes or no), but occurs in varying degrees, subject to numerous variables specific to individual speakers in the context of the communication.
Ad
related to: romantic phrases in dutch spanish and italian languagego.babbel.com has been visited by 100K+ users in the past month