Galician is the constitutive dialect of
galaicoportuguese, I mean galaicoportuguese spread like the other (alive)
hispanic romance languages from north to south, so one must think that it's
not a substratum matter. In consecutive dialects the important thing is
adstratum.
From this point of view, I think the real
differenciation between galician and portuguese (beyond normal dialectal
differences) has come with modern states, in this case the Spanish state,
which placed modern boundary lines (it means REAL boundary lines, not like
those we used to have until the becoming of modern states) between several
linguistic communities. In my opinion, the main difference between galician and
portuguese is the strong influence that spanish has had and still has upon
galician. You must notice that Galicia (Galiza) has been a poor country, with
very bad communications and with a very important migrative phenomenon, so
Galician has always (in modern times) been regarded as an "inferior" language
(it's very usual in Spain and France). Actually, if you hear someone speaking
"galician" in tv you can easily understand everything he says (if you speak
spanish), while if you hear a Portuguese native, you can't. The same happens
with real galician spoken in isolated towns by old people. There you notice that
linguistic galaicoportuguese unity is a fact because you can't get a bit of what
they speak.
In my opinion, then, if Portuguese sounds so
different is 1. because we are not used to hear REAL galician 2. because of
political reasons that have driven strong spanization of galician, so what you
are likely to hear as galician is a "light version" coexisting with a very
minorized true galician free of spanization, which is not so different of
portuguese, also free of that adstratum influence (ok, there must also be some
arabic adstratum normal difference between the constitutive and the consecutive
dialects, like in every (alive) hispanic romance language, but it doesn't
explain those -apparent, as I say- big differences)
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 8:00
AM
Subject: Re: Apollo (was Re: [tied]
Nostradamus and Dumezil)
<Galician is so closely related to Portuguese that some
linguists prefer to
regard the <two as dialects of a single language --
yet Galician sounds
more like Spanish than it <does like
Portuguese.
All right then, what makes Portuguese sound so distinctive?
Is it a
Lusitanian or other Iberian substrate, or some Punic or
Moorish
phonological influence, or is the Celtic element stronger, which
the
comparison to Galician might suggest, or did the Suevi get in there?
None,
other, or any combination of the
above?
Max
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