About mutual intelligibility between Spanish, Italian and Fr

Yesterday I was arguing with one of the guests about the degree of mutual intelligibility between French, Italian and Spanish. Despite as a native Spanish speaker, thorugh my experiences, I knew that Italian and Spanish are mutually intelligible to a greater extent than French and Italian are, I could not find any sources. But after some reading in Italian Wikipedia I found the following:


- Portoghese , spagnolo, italiano sono reciprocamente comprensibili ad un buon livello ma lo spagnolo e l'italiano lo sono in maniera maggiore nella loro forma parlata, poiché le differenze di pronouncia fra il portoghese e gli altri due sono maggiori. Nelle loro forme scritte, tuttavia, tutte e tre le lingue sono generalmente altamente intercomprensibili.

In English: Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to a great extent but Spanish and Italian are to a greater degree when spoken since there are many phonetic differences between Portuguese and the other two. Still, in written form they three are m.i. to a great extent.

-L'italiano e il francese sono intelligibili a un livello medio nella loro forma scritta ma gli italianofoni sembrano comprendere meglio il francese scritto piuttosto che il contrario.

Italian and French are m.i. to a middle degree when written but Italian Speakers understand written French better than viceversa.


-Lingue non mutuamente intelligibili [modifica]

Lingue romanze:
Il francese non è mutuamente intelligibile con l'italiano, lo spagnolo, il portoghese o il Rumeno.

Languages not m.i.
Romance Languages:
French is not m.i. to Italian, Spanish , Portuguese and Romanian


Do you think this information I found in Italian Wikipedia is accurate? It fits with my own experiences anyway.

It makes sense. Thanks for the information.

wikipedia is a wikishit
is it possible people collect information only from that idiot site? What is it? Is it becoming the Bible of information? Every idiocy writtten there is reported

Why that information is wrong?

Hi Adolf, have you cooled down a bit? You were quite angry yesterday. Anyways, like I said, when it comes to written language, French and Italian ARE more mutually intelligible than Spanish and Italian.

I found some sources which say the contrary.Both in written and spoken forms , Italian and Spanish are more similar according to them. Furthermore, look at this map:

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immagine:Europe_Continuum.gif

French appears as not so related to the rest. Portuguese, spanish , italian, catalan and occitan are on the other hand a well defined dialect continuum

Because of the fact that French and Italian have 89% lexical similarity, it is only natural that it is a little bit easier for an Italian to read French rather than Spanish, and vice versa. Adolf is right, however, that spoken Spanish and Italian are easier to understand because they are much more phonetically similar.

The lexical similarity is only one of the elements that affect to the written mutual intelligibility. Like I said, according to Italian wikipedia both Spanish and Italian share a greater degree of written mutual intelligibility.

Phonetics has no bearing on written mutual intelligibility. Adolf just can't accept the fact that French is more similar to Italian than Spanish in at least one area.

I'm only saying what is told by Italian Wikipedia . I find it a more accurate source than what an american could say. Phonetics don't count, but syntax and morphology do, and also the high similarities between spoken Italian and Spanish make the greater average mutual intellegibility fall on the side of Italian-Spanish, no matter Spanish is 7% less m.i. than French when compared to Italian, assuming this number relies only on lexical similarity.

My friend's girlfriend was the first of her family born in America... Both her older sisters and the rest of her family were born in Mexico... Anyway, their landlady is from Romania and she said that they couldn't understand much, but they could understand a lot of what she said in Romanian, and she could understand even more of them speaking Spanish.

Well, I am just the messenger, I am just repeating what I have learned, and have been citing LEGITIMATE sources. And like I said before, when it comes to things like syntax and morphology, French, Italian, and Spanish are ALL very similar to each other as sister Romance languages.

no, I'm the messenger of Wikipedia's articles. Some people say that this is not a valid source, ok. What are yours? I want to see them.

"Do you think this information I found in Italian Wikipedia is accurate? It fits with my own experiences anyway."-A.


K. T.: Yes. It fits with my experiences with all of these languages as well.

K.T., what is your native language?