In Italian, the word for ‘cat’ is ‘gatto’, whereas in Latin, or rather, ancient Italian, the word for ‘cat’ was ‘cattus’. This means that the English language word for ‘cat’ is closer to Latin than the modern Italian word ‘gatto’.
Curious what you come across whilst researching the differences between civil and common law legal principles, isn’t it?
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As you may be aware, the generally tumultus world of Italian politics is in turmoil. The Berlusconi government is teetering on the brink of collapse, but what is really surprising, is that this collapse was sparked from the inside.
From spat to full-blown split. Silvio Berlusconi’s marriage of political convenience to Gianfranco Fini has ended in tears. Scorned lover Berlusconi even rejected Fini’s last minute attempts to kiss and make up and remain part of Berlusconi’s party of love. End of love in. Period.
Alex – when you consider that the French is “chat”, and the English word comes from the French word, which in turn is a corruption of the Latin word, then it’s not all that surprising.
English is not directly descended from Latin the way French and Italian are, but English has the distinction of having 60% of its vocabulary based on Latin, mostly through French.
So all these similarities are not that surprising. Nevertheless, they are interesting.
Not that any of this has helped me speak Italian better, I might add.
I actually find that my knowledge of French (learned in elementary school) and Spanish (learned in high school and college), hinders my attempts to improve my conversational Italian.
By contrast, my cousin, a native Italian speaker, now speaks Spanish fluently, having spent a only few months living in Spain.
So my guess is that if one is an adult and already speaks a Romance language (or two) as a second language, learning yet another one can be difficult, precisely because of the similarities between the languages.
Whereas if one is an adult native speaker of one of these languages, then adding a second or a third is much easier.
I have not yet tried to study Italian, but I have a strong knowledge of Spanish, and I just began some Portuguese studies. While a lot of the vocabulary is similar, the pronunciation and intonation differences between Spanish and Portuguese is significant enough to make learning Portuguese as a third language quite difficult. Nonetheless, I am confident that I will overcome these obstacles and begin studying Italian some time soon!
Hi Jeff,
From what I have understood, knowing Spanish will help you learn Italian, even if it may lead to some confusing. The languages have similar origins, but are not as similar as you might think.
While many Italians can understand quite a lot of spoken Spanish, they can find actually learning the language quite difficult, although I do know a number of Italians who speak Spanish.
As for Portuguese, well, I understand that it is not all that easy, and can be tricky to learn.
However, as Joe pointed out above, once you know two or three languages, adding others becomes easier, if only because your brain becomes more able to manage different languages. Think of your brain as being a hard disk, and the languages as being operating systems stored on separate partitions, if you like.
Certainly, and I well know, learning languages is an interesting process. As to how we manage it, well, I don’t really know. Exposure and large doses of motivation help though.
Thanks to you and to Joe for commenting,
Best,
Alex
Yes, the Italians are so curious about the sometimes “different” use of Latin-based words. When I am discussing our language with them, words like “sympathetic” versus “simpatico” come up in conversation as not only false friends, but interesting looks into root words. “Sympathetic” should be translated into Italian as more like “comprensivo” while “simpatico” should become the English word “nice”, most of the time. Which one is closer to the Latin original or is Greek the only origin of these words?
Hi Irene,
“Which one is closer to the Latin original or is Greek the only origin of these words?” – I’ll have a hunt round, and see.
Not sure how the meaning of these words evolved so far from their original meanings.
Another curiosity is ‘to furnish’ which sometimes resembles the Italian ‘fornire’ – but not generally….!
Best,
Alex