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Lexical similarity. In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. There are different ways to define the lexical similarity and the results ...
Portuguese is spoken by approximately 200 million people in South America, 30 million in Africa, 15 million in Europe, 5 million in North America and 0.33 million in Asia and Oceania. It is the native language of the vast majority of the people in Portugal, [ 45 ] Brazil [ 46 ] and São Tomé and Príncipe (95%). [ 47 ]
Number of total speakers of each Romance language, as fractions of the total (2024) The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries.
While the majority of lexical differences between Spanish and Portuguese come from the influence of the Arabic language on Spanish vocabulary, [2] [3] most of the similarities and cognate words in the two languages have their origin in Latin, [4] but several of these cognates differ, to a greater or lesser extent, in meaning.
Between the 9th century and up to 1249 [13] when the Arabs were expelled from the Algarve, Portuguese acquired words (between 400 and 600 estimate [14]) from Arabic by influence of Moorish Iberia. Although the native population spoke the Lusitanian- Mozarabic , they kept some Mozarabic-derived words.
For example, in French, J'ai vu or Italian ho visto 'I have seen' vs. Je suis tombé, sono caduto 'I have (lit. am) fallen'. Note, however, the difference between French and Italian in the choice of auxiliary for the verb 'be' itself: Fr. J'ai été 'I have been' with 'have', but Italian sono stato with 'be'. In Southern Italian languages the ...
Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. Intelligibility between varieties can be asymmetric; that is, speakers of one variety may be able to better understand another than vice versa. An example of this is the case between Afrikaans and Dutch.
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages.