"Negodki" wrote in message
...
"Ruud Harmsen" "ar-aitch-ay" at rudhar.com wrote:

The fact that I can read quite some Italian, without ever having
learnt it, on the basis of poor French, poor Spanish, and gradually
improving but still leaving much to be desired Portuguese, further
illustrates that point.

There are enough similarities to pick up a few words of -any- Latin-based
language on the basis of having studied other Latin-based languages. It's
also very easy to see obscure "similarities" when a phrase is translated
for
you (as in my earlier examples, in which only one word in the Italian was
actually similar to the Portuguese). That's a far cry from being able to
"read/understand" a language. The reason that "Italians" and "Portuguese"
seem to understand each other at international conferences, is because the
typical educated European (such as would attend such conferences) is
multi-lingual.

Butter is "burro" in Italian, somewhat similar to "beurre" in French. If
you
know that the two have the same meaning, it is easy to see the
"similarity".
If you did not already know this, I doubt you would derive the meaning of
one from the other. "Burro" is quite different than "manteiga" in
Portuguese
(although "manteiga" is somewhat similar to "mantequilla" in Spanish).
It's
always amusing to see an Italian tourist in Spain or Portugal requesting
"burro" in a restaurant.

You are making more of my original suggestion than I intended. It's no use
talking about individual words, but in a certain context they may make
sense. And your last example is about actively using another language, which
is indeed much more difficult. But when I would _read_ "burro" in an Italian
restaurant, I would probably associate it with French "beurre" rather than
Portuguese "burro".

Anyway, my original posting, was meant to say:
"Given the fact that Mario is Italian, that he evidently knows English
reasonably well, is interested in a limited subject domain (i.e. boat trips
on the rivier Douro and Port wine), he might get some useful information
reading web pages on the subject, that are written in another Roman language
(i.e. Portuguese), but specifically meant to be informative (as opposed to,
say, poetical) on the given subject."

OK?

rob van lopik


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