On the 5 most prominent living Romance Languages (French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish)?

Question

My linguistics professor said once that although Romanian is the most unique among the five main Romance Languages regarding history and language family, she also said that French may be the black sheep of the five in their spoken form. I really do not understand why, because I am not a native speaker of any of these languages. I mainly speak English and Filipino, with some knowledge of Dutch, Indonesian and Malaysian, but I have minimal to no knowledge of Romance Languages, though Filipino has large traces of Spanish. I thank in advance those kind enough to help me with my homework. I'm pretty much stumped here, since I studied Germanic and Austronesian Languages more than Romance. Thanks so much for those will help me without any ridicule :D

Hopefully someone from a Romance speaking country would be able to help me out :D

Answer 1

Hi, gangsta



@Scrat made a very good point.



Also, your teacher's take on this is important (for your mark), so you should ask "what exactly did you mean by that"? If you have a chance to do it, I'd suggest you don't shy away.



The pronunciation is the most obvious reason (you may not know, but there are quite a few rules of pronunciation in French - I have a one-month course on this topic alone).



- Romanian is the closest living language to ancient latin, pronounced as it is spelled (only a couple of rules, like ce, ci, ge, gi, ghe, ghi).

- Italian is also pronounced as it is spelled, but was standardized by Dante Alighieri (there too you have a few rules, like z/zz, ce, ci, ge, gi, gli, h).

- Spanish has a few more rules of pronunciation.

- Portuguese has even more rules, but not as many as French.



__

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

French has a completely different sound. I think it has more prolonged and nasal vowels which also some German dialects such as Austobavarian have. (I don't think any of the other Romance languages has nasal noises, but I might be wrong)

Spanish and Italian have rather short than prolonged sounds and they don't sound nasal, which I believe is also the case with Romanian (which people told me before it sounds somewhat similar to Italian) and Portuguese (which I think sounds like a severely distorted Spanish, yet fascinating in its own way)



Romanian probably has some Slavic influences due to its location within Slavic Europe and maybe Hungarian as well.

Answer 3

I speak romanian and french, but I'm not a linguist.

Maybe this link could help you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language



...the differentiation degree of languages in comparison to their inheritance language (in the case of Romance languages to Latin comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation) revealed the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin):[58]



Sardinian: 8%;

Italian: 12%;

Spanish: 20%;

Romanian: 23.5%;

Occitan: 25%;

Portuguese: 31%;

French: 44%.



The lexical similarity of Romanian with Italian has been estimated at 77%, followed by French at 75%, Sardinian 74%, Catalan 73%, Spanish 71%, Portuguese, and Rhaeto-Romance at 72%.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language

See: Grammar and vocabulary

French grammar shares several notable features with most other Romance languages, including:



the loss of Latin's declensions

only two grammatical genders

the development of grammatical articles from Latin demonstratives

new tenses formed from auxiliaries

Answer 4

Romanian language is a waste of time and not worth studying...study rather Italian French and Spanish...I speak some Romanian and I hear Romanians cursing and swearing to each other in their "beautiful" language!!!

Answer 5

My two cents: I'm italian and learnt a little bit of french when I was in school (10-13 years old). I can see your teacher's point when he says that French is a "black sheep" among romance languages (french sounds a little bit "weird" to us) BUT I can tell you one personal thing: I can undestand spoken french way better than spanish, not to mention portuguese or romanian. I am not stating that french is "more similar" to italian, I'm just guessing that it all comes down to ear training.

Answer 6

Hi!



Your prof might have been referring to the fact that the spelling of French words is sometimes very far away (as it is in English) from their actual pronunciation, which is afaik not true of the other Romance languages you named. For instance "beautiful" is "beau" in French, but it's pronounced "boh".



Other than that, I haven't a clue what she might have meant by "black sheep" here.

You ought to have asked her on the spot, teachers don't mind you asking questions as it shows you're interested.

Answer 7

I listened to a set of lectures by a Linquist and he said Romanian. I think each has their own opinions and prejudices on this and that is why he said it. Or maybe because of the Germanic influence. It is less fluid than Italian and Spanish, I think.