I'm thinking of learning Spanish, but I'm not sure how well that would go given the level of proficiency I have in other languages. I'm an Italian major who has been studying German, too, for years. Roughly how difficult would it be to add an intensive beginning Spanish course? Would it be easy to get it mixed up with Italian? I know I managed to ( Read more... )

I'm almost certain no one has had this problem before, considering one is Romantic and the other Germanic, but here goes...

I'm already a proficient German speaker and now, my freshman year of college, I decided to also take an intensive Italian course because it's the course designed for students who have already studied another language. That's ( Read more... )

Did Romance languages (other than Latin) have noun declension at some stage of their history? (Or, maybe, some of them still retains it now?)

I'm really curious about this recent finding of mine ( Read more... )

Hi all-
does anyone here speak Mirandese or Galician? If so, would you be willing to speak with me or at least recommend resources to learn the language? I speak Spanish, Portuguese and some Ladino, from my grandma, and am really interested in smaller Iberian languages. I've been watching some videos in both languages, particularly this pretty song ( Read more... )

Hi, guys! I was wondering if anyone knew of any good books that went into detail (the more, the better, although overviews would be good too) on languages that are closely related and how they evolved to become separate languages. Books on Romance languages or North Indian languages would probably be best because I'm already somewhat familiar with ( Read more... )

While perousing Radio-Canada, I noticed this headline:

Bill Clinton et Bill Gates appellent la communauté internationale à faire de la lutte contre le sida une priorité

I recognize « sida » from Spanish as the word for AIDS, but it surprised me that the name was not in all caps, like it is in English, and like other acronyms are in French, i.e. ( Read more... )

According to my mom, we used to have family in Argentina. They emigrated there from Sicily probably in the first half of the 20th century, and from a quick search I just did, apparently there's a significant Italian population in Argentina. With the similarities between Italian and Spanish, did any sort of local pidgin or other mishmosh of the two ( Read more... )

so i was reading a book on (ironically) english, and it made the point that english has separate words for the ideas of home and house, whereas french does not. now, i have no idea if this is true or not, but my immediate thought was that it wasn't, because spanish DOES have those two separate words. and that's when i became aware that i am ( Read more... )

So, in Latin we have the frequentative morpheme "-t-." That's how we get habitare from habere and such. Do other (Romance) languages have frequentatives as well? In Spanish, I recall having seen besear, meaning "to cover with kisses" or something - could the added "e" be considered a frequentative ( Read more... )