by Flemming Funch
Now I'd kind of like to be able to speak Italian, since I think I'll be coming back. And it seems like it actually would be easier than French. You pronounce it like it is written, the conjugations are more simple, and many of the words are familiar. But learning a whole language is kind of a big thing.
Anyway, besides getting some beginning Italian books and a dictionary, I got a book teaching several Romance languages at the same time. Which kind of makes sense. They all come from Latin, they have many similarities, and it all becomes more clear when one is looking at the systematic differences and similarities between them.
I found an excellent book, "Comprendre les Langues Romanes", which teaches Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian to French speakers. And there's a parallel book in each of those 4 languages doing it the other way.
The book, interestingly, turns out to have been organized by some Danish professors in Romance languages, with the collaboration of colleagues in a number of countries. See, there's an idea that maybe is more likely to occur to somebody from a Scandinavian country. The 3 Scandinavian languages, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, are to a large degree inter-comprehensible to people from those countries. Oh, they're different in many ways, almost as different as the Romance languages are. Certainly not just a matter of a different accent. At least a third of the words are different, and pronunciation has very different rules between them, different phonemes (units of sounds), etc. But the Scandinavians learn the basics about the other languages in school, and they consider each other close. So, in principle, one should be able to speak in one's own language, say Danish, and another person speaks Swedish, and we can understand each other. There will be gaps and little things one doesn't quite get, but generally that works. Even if I can't list the rules for Swedish grammar and pronunciation, I mostly understand it when a Swede speaks it, and he'd understand most of what I say in Danish.
So, the idea is that one could have the same inter-comprehensibility between the Romance languages. There's no big reason a French person shouldn't understand a Spanish or Italian speaker, and they should understand him when he speaks French. Mostly that isn't so at all, but it could be if each of them learned the basic differences and similarities, and a bit about how they've evolved.
For examples, in French the word for the English "full" is "plein". In Italian that is "pieno", in Spanish it is "lleno", "cheio" in Portuguese, and "plin" in Romanian. That at first looks very different. But they all come from the Latin "pleno". It is simply that they've converted it according to different rules. Many words that would start with pl- in French would the same way start with pi- in Italian, ll- in Spanish, ch- in Portuguese and pl- in Romanian. Which suddenly makes it easier to recognize what the words are. There are a lot of situations like that, where the differences are quite systematic, and one can see the similarities through it.
Potentially, many people could be capable of having a basic understanding of quite a few languages, if they went straight to learning how they relate to each other, how they've evolved from common roots, and what the essentially differences are between them. Which would be a very good thing for cross-cultural understanding. Less of a Tower of Babel. Maybe you don't master the languages, but you can understand most of them.
But, hey, maybe there's a conspiracy against it. There is a curious coincidence in this book. Its main author is listed as Paul Teyssier, a Danish language professor. But the foreword is by a different Danish language professor, Jørgen Schmitt Jensen, the project's coordinator,who gives a lively introduction to the book, and ends with the sad note that Mr.Teyssier unfortunately has passed away, so therefore, in his place, he would be writing the introduction to Romance languages. And then, under that, there's another note, from somebody else, that unfortunately, because of Mr.Schmitt Jensen's untimely illness and death, the introduction will not be written by him either, but by so-and-so. Who apparently survived through it. But it is a bit like they all get killed off, because they have the audacity to teach more people to understand each other. Nah, they were probably just old, but one never knows.
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