cool stuff about Spanish from Wikipedia
On a whim, I decided to see what Wikipedia had to say about the Spanish language.
I've learned all kinds of cool things:
Spanish has an 89% lexical similarity with Portuguese (words that are similar in both languages and that have similar meaning)
Spanish has an 82% lexical similarity with Italian, but it's easier to understand Italian for Spanish-speakers because the pronunciation is more similar
It has 75% similarity with French
For comparison: English has 60% similarity with German and 27% with French
"Usted", the formal "you", comes from "vuestra merced" which means "your grace"
Wikipedia has separate pages for all these things: lexical similarity, voseo, loísmo
Wiki thinks that Spanish has 28 or 29 letters ('w' only maybe counts because it's only used on foreign words), whereas I was taught that it had 30 (including both 'w' and 'rr' (as distinct from 'r')
I think that I will read about French and Portuguese, too. :).
I've learned all kinds of cool things:
Spanish has an 89% lexical similarity with Portuguese (words that are similar in both languages and that have similar meaning)
Spanish has an 82% lexical similarity with Italian, but it's easier to understand Italian for Spanish-speakers because the pronunciation is more similar
It has 75% similarity with French
For comparison: English has 60% similarity with German and 27% with French
"Usted", the formal "you", comes from "vuestra merced" which means "your grace"
Wikipedia has separate pages for all these things: lexical similarity, voseo, loísmo
Wiki thinks that Spanish has 28 or 29 letters ('w' only maybe counts because it's only used on foreign words), whereas I was taught that it had 30 (including both 'w' and 'rr' (as distinct from 'r')
I think that I will read about French and Portuguese, too. :).