Re: The relationship betwen Spanish, Galician and Portuguese

Piotr, In your reply to David James, you failed to explain why he could
(with knowledge of Spanish) understand Galician but could not understand
Portuguese. Is there an easy answer to his question, or is the answer
very difficult?

I like the way you expressed the network effect of dialects rather than
a branching tree. But then you used the branching tree analogy when you
traced the Romance dialects back to Latin. It seems to me that way back
1.5 millenniums ago, the folks who spoke "Latin" didn't ALL speak the
same language; there were still regional variations which some folks
might have called dialects.

I think we need to somehow attain a simultaneous fusion and separation
of languages but at present I don't have any concrete suggestions.
Might you have a few ideas to offer?
Gerry