"david james" <
davi-@...> wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=682
> Hi Everybody!
> Sorry if this enquiry is slightly off topic but as an English speaker
with a knowledge of Spanish it surprised me how much Galician I could
understand during a recent trip tp north west Spain, whereas I can
hardly understand any Portuguese at all. Am i correct in thinking that
the grammar and vocabulary of Galician is almost identical to that of
Portuguese and that many linguists regard Galician as dialect of
Portuguese? Can Galicians generally understand the Portguese language?
I have heard conflicting evidence regarding this point. Interestingly I
have heard that the local Potuguese dialect of the Minho region of
northern Portugal is called Galego although to my untrained ear it
sounds completely different to the *Gallego* of Galicia.
> One final question; if Galician and Potuguese share a common history
at what point did they start to diverge and, hypothetically, if we were
to travel back in time, say 500 years, to Portugal would the language
sound more like Galician than conteporary Portuguese?
> Thank you in advance
> David (an interseted amateur).
Thre dialects of Spanish and Portugal form a continuous dialect network
rather than a neat family tree, hence the problems we encounter trying
to label them on a linguistic basis. They've never separated for good,
so to speak. If we say that Galician is a separate language, it is out
of respect to the Galicians' sense of linguistic identity, not because
any linguistic criteria force us to do so. ALL the Romance languages go
back to provincial dialects of Latin, so if you travelled back half a
millennium you'd cover one-third of the distance to the common source.
Quite certainly the mutual comprehensibility of the "languages" and
"dialects" of the area was far greater then.
Piotr