ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS
by Sam Linney and Giulia Ciaramita
The majority of you reading this will have at least a passing familiarity with Italian. Maybe you study or speak Italian and something else? Maybe another Romance language? Is this a good combination? What are the pros and cons in studying Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian?
All these Romance languages (as well as numerous less common ones, such as Romanian, Catalan and Occitan) originated from the same ‘Vulgar Latin’ spoken during the Roman Empire. Surely, then, all of these languages should be very similar, given that they share the same roots? In many cases, they are, but this is not always true. As the different parts of the Roman Empire began to split, so the Latin vocabulary began to change and develop - as is widely appreciated, language is continually evolving - and by 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire had effectively split into many different regions, including the Byzantium Empire, which began to communicate in what today we recognise as the foundations of the different Romance languages. Interestingly, the fact that these languages have the same roots is the very reason why they’re linked, why we can easily study more than one of them, and why we can analyse them.
So, if you like the SVO (subject, verb, object) system; full of preposition and free from the declension system of other languages, then Romance languages should be right for you. However, you have to be aware of the negative aspect of this choice, that is to say the worst enemy of all language students; false friends. Unfortunately, being a Romance language student, you have to deal with the confusion these words make. We have therefore created a table highlighting what we consider the most conspicuous cases.
Luckily though, in addition to these false friends there are also true friends: there are plenty of words and expressions that are similar in both meaning and spelling across the Romance languages. So if you have learnt it in Italian, for example, it should be much easier to remember or learn afresh in Spanish, French or Portuguese. Hence, we have made another table detailing some of these.
Furthermore, as already mentioned, the most important benefit of studying the Romance Languages - whether we realise it or not - is the lack of a declension system. Luckily for us, the Vulgar Latin evolved and lost the distinction of case and the related free and confusing order of words in the text. Portuguese, Spanish, French and obviously Italian learners thus must ‘only’ have to put the words in the SVO order and then add the correct prepositions in order to form a correct sentence. Believe me, it is much easier than studying the declension languages - Latin and German students can sympathise.
In this article, we have detailed the negative and positive aspects alike of the relationships between the various romance languages. All we can do now is to wish you buona fortuna, bonne chance, boa sorte, and buena suerte with your Italian, French, Portuguese or Spanish.
Hold on, learning languages is wonderful!