Friendly Advice What language would best support learning English? [Archive]

Jon_Dahl

2016-06-07, 02:22 AM

At my university, I'm forced to learn the basics of a language related to Portuguese as part of my Portuguese philology studies. I find this completely idiotic, but I'd like to choose a language that would also improve my understanding on English. I was thinking that Latin would be an obvious choise, but I was surprised to find out that 45% of all English words have a French origin. So would French be the best option? But then again, French is heavily based on Latin, and I think Latin words/terms like etc. and i.e. and many others are more commonly used than French loanwords.

So would French be the best 'support language' for English studies or would Latin be better? Or something else? Whatever it is, it should be related to both English and Portuguese, but I think that's automatic anyway. So haute couture or a toga? I have to say that Latin interests me a bit more, but maybe I will change my mind after reading the comments.

TechnOkami

2016-06-07, 02:36 AM

German might be a good choice. There's a fair amount of audible similarity between the two when it comes to some words and some sentence structure.

Then again, I'm really bad at learning, though I wish I had the will to sit down and study more Japanese.

rakkoon

2016-06-07, 03:32 AM

French and Latin can help you with the vocab but the structure of English is completely different.
Simplest example is "I love you" in English which is "I you love" in French en "You love(I)" in Latin
Other languages with the same structure are German and Dutch but I wouldn't study them to learn English...

Between French and Latin I would choose French because you can actually learn to speak the language and use it in lots of countries. Latin is a dead language and you cannot just read a text in Latin without a dictionary (well I can't after 6 years of Latin :smallsmile:)

RoyVG

2016-06-07, 03:41 AM

I'm just going to link a Wikipedia page explaining the history of English, so here you go (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English).

English seems to have a plethora of influences such as very old Germanic languages brought there from Germanic settlers, all the way to Latin and Ancient Greek due to the Renaissance. French, German, Dutch are all very much related, so take your pick.
German is quite structured and has similar grammer rules to Latin and Ancient greek with Dutch being a more bastardized version with fewer rules and a more chaotic structure and many exceptions that you 'just need to learn by heart' (I'm Dutch btw :smalltongue:). I had to learn English (which I was already decently proficient with), and some German and French in middle school and dabbled in Latin and Ancient Greek for a couple of years because it was mandatory.

Eldariel

2016-06-07, 05:11 AM

French and English have had over a millenium of language contact both in their various forms being lingua francas at various points so a vast shared vocabulary is natural. But French vocabulary mostly derives from Latin and Germanic languages. Honestly, the western Indo-European national languages are sickeningly inbred. Latin would help you with your Portuguese too though, as Portuguese vocabulary and grammar mostly derives off Latin, being just one of the many surviving variants of vulgar Latin, so it's a safe choice. And it covers French too.

And French and English are actually very similar in terms of grammar, which is surprising since they are of different language families. Both feature superficial SVO word order, a similar passive construction, subjunctive (though many people might not notice it in modern English due to English having lost most of its inflections), etc. French is one of the easiest languages for English-speakers to learn and vice versa even though French is Romance and English is Germanic. That said, French suffers of artificial meddling over centuries and its guise is rather far-removed from the natural, artificially made to sound beautiful. Jacob Grimm argued that this is what cost French its claim to universality while English being a melting pot of Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages is precisely what earned it the position (he predicted the universal position of English already in the early 1800's).

But yeah, want to learn roots? Latin offers vocabulary and some of the grammar still survives (most importantly conjunctive/subjunctive). Greek is another vast source of vocabulary. Scottish Gaelic is another source of vocabulary and few structures. German contains a lion's share of the grammar and also a significant portion of the vocabulary (but English has lost most of the Germanic structures). Latin underlies all this and thus I do recommend Latin (or Sanskrit; it's surprisingly widely preserved in the modern Indo-European branches, in places one wouldn't think at first).

All in all, Indo-European languages form just one small sandbox and just Romance and Germanic ones are a minor part of that, so observing any grain is like to help you understand all the rest.

Yora

2016-06-07, 05:26 AM

English seems to have a plethora of influences such as very old Germanic languages brought there from Germanic settlers, all the way to Latin and Ancient Greek due to the Renaissance. French, German, Dutch are all very much related, so take your pick.
German is quite structured and has similar grammer rules to Latin and Ancient greek with Dutch being a more bastardized version with fewer rules and a more chaotic structure and many exceptions that you 'just need to learn by heart' (I'm Dutch btw :smalltongue:).

I think Dutch is probably closest to English. The original English settlers came from Northern Germany, and the Low German dialect of that region is actually pretty similar to English and Dutch. But modern Standard German is based primarily on Middle and High German, which has much fewer similarities with English.

Low German would probably be the most closest relative of English but I very much doubt you'd find language classes for it outside of Northern Germany (and even there it would be difficult). Dutch is probably the next closest thing that is currently spoken and taught. (And I think it's also easier than modern Standard German, which is freakishly complicated. Might be even worse than French.)

Prime32

2016-06-07, 07:24 AM

Is Interlingua (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua) an option?

Grinner

2016-06-07, 07:59 AM

I think Dutch is probably closest to English. The original English settlers came from Northern Germany, and the Low German dialect of that region is actually pretty similar to English and Dutch. But modern Standard German is based primarily on Middle and High German, which has much fewer similarities with English.

You're in a better position to judge, but I've been studying German to get a leg up on my language requirement and have been pleasantly surprised by how similar they are.

There are some parts which have tripped me up, such as switching the verb and the subject when stating a question, but when I think about them, we kind of do the same thing in English. Then there's things like switching the verb and subject when a prepositional phrase is used at the beginning of the sentence, which has no equivalent in English but isn't really so difficult to adjust to.

Telonius

2016-06-07, 08:30 AM

German or Dutch are probably the most similar to English. I'm a native US-English speaker, and learned German in high school and college. When my language skills were at my best, I was able to read Dutch, kind of by triangulation. (I never could understand the spoken language).

The similarities really show up in the irregular verbs. If you know them in one language, you can usually make a good guess in the other. Even when it's not obvious, and the English seems to make no sense at all, there's often a connection. Go/went/gone, for example. "Went" doesn't seem like it would have anything to do with "go," but the English version is actually a combined form of two separate (but related) German verbs, gehen ("to go") and wenden ("to turn around").

Red Fel

2016-06-07, 08:42 AM

It basically boils down, in my mind, to whether you want to support your English vocabulary or grammar.

Grammatically, as others have mentioned, German and Dutch are much closer to English. The grammatical structure, the sentence structure, of modern English is much closer to those languages, and thus, if your goal is to be able to build your sentences and converse with fluidity and fluency, I'd go with German or Dutch. (Leaning towards German, because I see a lot of use for that language.)

In terms of vocabulary, however, the Latin-based languages share more cognates, which are similar words for similar concepts. For many English speakers, studying French, Spanish, or Italian is a bit more intuitive than studying, say, Mandarin, because similar words come from a similar origin, and we can infer meaning based on that similarity (and, of course, context). The opposite is also true - familiarity with one of the Romance languages (that is, languages descended from the Vulgar Latin) can allow a speaker to recognize cognates in English. As a bonus, Portuguese is a Romance language (at least according to Wikipedia (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages)), which means that a language like French will already be somewhat familiar, given its common origin. So for vocabulary-building, I'd go with a language like French.

That said, if you have an easy enough time with vocabulary - and given your posts, you seem to have a good grasp of it - I think grammar is the more valuable tool. So I'd suggest German.

BWR

2016-06-07, 08:49 AM

Honestly, it sounds like your university has the right idea. We had something similar in the language programs at my uni. Learning how other languages work really does help you understand the one you are focusing on.

English is a Germanic language, and learning Romance languages will not help you with much there. The extent of Latin/Romance influence is words and a few set phrases, not grammar (barring modern loan conventions like 'no double negatives' and similar).
Really, how in-depth are you interested in learning about English? Because if you want to get a handle on why lots of the stuff works the way it does, I'd study Old English. I assume this is not an attractive option so I'd go with Dutch.
German will (IIRC) give you a bit more grounding in Germanic cases, which again helps to explain certain features of English.
If those aren't to your taste, Norwegian and Danish (and to a miniscule lesser extent Swedish) have much by the way of similar vocabulary and sentence structure. Danish is a bit closer to English than Norwegian (mostly in terms of certain word choices) but is far harder to learn to pronounce and understand what people are saying.

Since none of these are particularly close to Portuguese, I'd go with Latin because Latin is cool.

Peelee

2016-06-07, 10:53 AM

I was thinking that Latin would be an obvious choise

English is a Germanic language, not a Romantic language. People mistakenly thinking it is Romantic is where we get stupid non-rules such as "you can't end a sentence with a preposition" and "don't split infinitives," which some teachers try to enforce, despite that they are crap rules and those things are totally allowed.

Aedilred

2016-06-07, 11:30 AM

I assume by "related to Portuguese" they mean "from the Italic/Romance family". Persian is related to Portuguese. So is Gujurati, and Irish. But I shouldn't have thought you'd get a lot of cross-linguistic benefit from studying any of them along with it.

So in descending order of closeness to Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian among the major languages, plus Latin. There are smaller, more localised languages, but good luck finding anyone to teach them. Even Catalan is likely to be difficult unless you're in the region.

English is a deceptive language because it takes a huge proportion of its vocabulary from French, thanks to the period during the Middle Ages when French was the language of the English aristocracy, during which time it filtered down. It also takes a lot of vocabulary from Latin, as Latin remained a favoured language of the cognoscenti across Europe for centuries and it was fairly common for literature to be written in it - of course, since French is a Romance language itself, we picked up a lot of Latin-derived terms indirectly via French too. But that's pretty much all at the vocabulary level. Underneath, the nuts and bolts of the language are still Germanic, although Romance influence has led to a much greater degradation of inflection than in, say, German. So learning French or Latin might help you with your English vocabulary (faux amis notwithstanding) but I don't think they'll help you gain a greater appreciation of the language. And to be honest I imagine many of the words that have made their way across to English from those languages are also recognisable in Portuguese too.

Assuming you're dealing with the limited selection of six languages I mentioned above, the only ones I could in good conscience recommend learning for practical purposes are Spanish, French and Latin. The other three are just too narrowly relevant to be worth it unless you're going to spend a lot of time in those countries, although given I'd jump at the chance to learn any of them I must admit I don't fully understand your reluctance.

From a philological perspective, if that's what the course is aiming for, Latin and Spanish are your best bets, I think, probably in that order. I'm also a firm believer that knowing Latin is generally to the good - and it will make learning other Romance languages easier in future should you wish to, moreso than the others will (although the western ones are all fairly handily cross-referential). Spanish has the obvious benefit of being by far the most widely spoken of the Romance languages and is also the closest to Portuguese. I retain a lasting affection for French (one I must admit I did not have while I was studying the language!) but other than gesturing at the corpus of French literature, I'm not sure how much benefit there is from learning it in this day and age as opposed to any other language.

From an "understanding English" perspective, I really don't think there's a lot to choose between them except inasmuch as that the more languages you learn, the better the pool of understanding of language in general you have, which is useful for learning more. And there, Latin is probably the one to go for because its grammar tends to be taught much more thoroughly, giving you a better understanding of clause and sentence structure.

There are a few French and Latin phrases which have found their way into English without translation, and so having a passing understanding of those languages is not unhelpful when those come up. But they're not so common that it's a dealbreaker, I think. If you're reading (English) academic literature of a certain vintage, there can be a tendency to quote Latin or French (and sometimes Greek) passages in full without translation, on the assumption that anyone interested in reading it will also know those languages well enough not to need it translated. But that's probably not that significant to you either.

2D8HP

2016-06-07, 01:29 PM

For what it's worth most words in English were stolen incorporated from Latin and other "Romance" languages, but the most used words are from Germanic roots. The English language is kind of a "pidgin" language that melded and simplified the languages of Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians (the "Danelaw"), and the Norman French.
Hey if you want to learn languages close to the language spoken by most of the ancestors of the people of England learn Breton or Welsh!
Or since if you learn a closely related language first it's hard not to slip into a different language than the one your trying to speak, be real cool and learn Basque instead, which is supposed to be closely related to nothing! :smallwink:

Winter_Wolf

2016-06-07, 05:19 PM

I'd think if you're going for Portuguese, you'd want to study something that helped that, like French. But hey, from my experience languages that are too close to each other can be problematic because they inspire laziness/looking for "the shortcut". I never did do well with German, despite being US born and English being a Germanic language. I crushed Japanese and Chinese, on the other hand.

BWR

2016-06-07, 05:37 PM

For what it's worth most words in English were stolen incorporated from Latin and other "Romance" languages, but the most used words are from Germanic roots.

True. You can speak and write using nothing but English words. It may become hard to find the right words and end up being weird.

TuggyNE

2016-06-07, 08:17 PM

True. You can speak and write using nothing but English words. It may become hard to find the right words and end up being weird.

For example (http://www.proedit.com/uncleftish-beholding/).

Eldariel

2016-06-07, 08:31 PM

True. You can speak and write using nothing but English words. It may become hard to find the right words and end up being weird.

It can also be used as a rhetorical tool. E.g. the peroration of Churchill's second major speech after his ascension (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_shall_fight_on_the_beaches) is famous for the passages about the endless will to fight, where the word surrender is the only word without old English roots.

Bobblit

2016-06-08, 05:05 AM

I can confirm that knowing German as a second language did help me a lot when learning English. Still, I wouldn't recommend to anyone trying to learn German just to improve their English. That'd be kinda insane.

Spanish (my mother tongue) is really similar to Portuguese, so depending on what your university wants to achieve by making you study a related language, it could be a good or a bad choice. But I don't think it'll be very useful for improving your understanding of English, apart from perhaps marginally helping you with vocabulary (although Portuguese will do this all the same, so not a lot gained there).

Yora

2016-06-08, 05:32 AM

I never did do well with German, despite being US born and English being a Germanic language.

The diplomatic branch of the UN has different categories of language courses for it's employees. The easiest courses with the shortest training period for English speakers are class 1 and consist of all the Germanic languages. Class 2 is considered harder and has longer training and consists only of German. :smallamused:

Palanan

2016-06-08, 10:09 AM

Originally Posted by Jon_Dahl
I have to say that Latin interests me a bit more, but maybe I will change my mind after reading the comments.

I would definitely go with Latin, because I deeply wish I'd studied it when I had the chance.

As it happens, Portuguese is both my ancestral family language and one of my working professional languages--but my family has been in the U.S. long enough that I had to learn Portuguese from scratch.

Unfortunately, my high school only offered the basics, and I had a choice between Spanish and Latin. I chose Spanish, because I naively assumed that learning Spanish would help me transfer over to Portuguese. Sadly, Spanish ended up complicating things quite a bit, so when I learned Portuguese in Brazil I ended up speaking a mishmash of "Portunhol" early on.

So I've deeply regretted not learning Latin, since that would have given me a far broader understanding of the Romance languages, as well as access to some remarkable classics from the ancient world. And learning Latin would have given me real-world benefits as well, especially while working in remote villages in the Amazon. If you're interested in Latin, I would definitely recommend it.

Peelee

2016-06-08, 10:47 AM

I would definitely go with Latin, because I deeply wish I'd studied it when I had the chance.

Man, learning Latin's weird. By the fourth year, we were translating Julius Caesar's memoirs on his Gallic campaign, but I couldn't translate "the tree is green."

Though reading Cicero's diatribe against his ex in a Catholic high school setting was pretty awesome, to say the least.

SaintRidley

2016-06-08, 11:42 AM

At my university, I'm forced to learn the basics of a language related to Portuguese as part of my Portuguese philology studies. I find this completely idiotic

Considering you're studying philology, it should be obvious why this is the case. If you're studying Portuguese philology, Spanish and Latin would be the top two languages to look at, but if you want to support a greater understanding of English, French or Latin could work (they're mostly good for vocabulary, though, as their grammars are not the same as English).

Also, to the tangent about which language is closest to English, it's not Dutch. West Frisian is.

danzibr

2016-06-08, 02:02 PM

Aedilred

2016-06-08, 03:06 PM

Considering you're studying philology, it should be obvious why this is the case. If you're studying Portuguese philology, Spanish and Latin would be the top two languages to look at, but if you want to support a greater understanding of English, French or Latin could work (they're mostly good for vocabulary, though, as their grammars are not the same as English).

Also, to the tangent about which language is closest to English, it's not Dutch. West Frisian is.

Well, really, English's closest relative is Scots. Beyond that, Frisian, yes (which is, I believe, more closely related to English than it is to Dutch).

There is an element of pedantry to such things, though. When talking in general terms, most languages never even get a mention. People may refer casually to "the six" Romance languages (assuming they're even aware Catalan is a language and not a dialect of Spanish) but in terms of plurality that's barely the tip of the iceberg. There are, I think, seventeen Romance languages in Italy alone. The question of, for instance, whether Valencian and Mallorquin are languages in their own right or dialects of Catalan can be fairly politically controversial.

All of which is to say that, when someone says that English's closest relative is Dutch, I can understand where they're coming from, even if it's not strictly speaking correct.

BannedInSchool

2016-06-08, 05:47 PM

I've only studied Japanese (8 semesters in college), and while the two are completely unrelated except for loan words, I can say studying a foreign foreign language (as opposed to... a not-so-foreign language) really helped me understand how English works.

I was also going to say that studying something like Lojban (https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban), which is based on predicate logic but also has other features, gets one thinking about language in a different way. Having a place structure instead of cases, for example, clarifies how to use cases in English by comparison. (It's "whom"!!!) But the only language other than English and Lojban I've studied was German, so I can't compare Lojban to those really foreign natural languages. :smallsmile:

Eldariel

2016-06-08, 06:12 PM

Well, really, English's closest relative is Scots. Beyond that, Frisian, yes (which is, I believe, more closely related to English than it is to Dutch).

There is an element of pedantry to such things, though. When talking in general terms, most languages never even get a mention. People may refer casually to "the six" Romance languages (assuming they're even aware Catalan is a language and not a dialect of Spanish) but in terms of plurality that's barely the tip of the iceberg. There are, I think, seventeen Romance languages in Italy alone. The question of, for instance, whether Valencian and Mallorquin are languages in their own right or dialects of Catalan can be fairly politically controversial.

All of which is to say that, when someone says that English's closest relative is Dutch, I can understand where they're coming from, even if it's not strictly speaking correct.

The difference between "dialect" and "language" is not really a thing either. It's all mostly a byproduct of certain ideological movements from the 19th century. The closest thing to "high standard English" would be any of the various local dialects that hardly differ in the grand scheme of things. That said, actually studying one is rarely an option (even here in Finland, I know of no official teaching of e.g. Savonian even though the whole way of thinking and technique of expression behind it is very different from literary Finnish and the western dialects).

But yeah, Europe is linguistically the poorest inhabited continent by a significant margin due to obvious reasons, and we still have ~300-400 living languages in this area depending on the exact definition of "a language" and the tally itself. Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/region/Europe) recognises 287 living languages here while Glottolog (http://glottolog.org/glottolog/language) lists 1820 in Eurasia of which about 400 are within the traditional European longitudes and latitudes. It's something one might not immediately realise but about 5% of the world's languages are spoken by about 95% of the world's population - thus the smaller ones easily fall through the fingers. In spite of Europe's relative linguistic poverty, there's still vast amounts of variation available, and a number of really interesting cases to study (did you know that they actually revived Cornish and it's being spoken in certain language nests in Cornwall now?).

lio45

2016-06-08, 10:31 PM

It seems that only Aedilred and myself bothered to read the OP -- the choice is limited to Romance languages, which is why Jon_Dahl considers the two most "related to English" choices of the bunch are French or Latin.

If I were him, I'd be choosing between Spanish and French. If you want to improve your English vocabulary, go for French (it's even better than Latin for that -- "fancy" words in English are often lifted from French, and an interesting side-effect of that is that Francophones with a beginner's level of English will usually have their very basic sentences peppered with higher-level English words)

Bobblit

2016-06-09, 03:10 AM

Knaight

2016-06-09, 04:39 AM

5a Violista

2016-06-09, 05:22 AM

I don't really know what Spanish has to do with Brazil, though...

To the OP question: I would pick French over Latin. For English: Learning Latin will help you with roots, prefixes, suffixes, medical terms, scientific names of organisms, and the names of fallacies. For English: Learning French will help you with cuisine, fashion, spelling of many complex words, and all the words that the English upper class "borrowed" from French. Cons of Latin: Being a dead language, it will be harder to speak it with other people, which will hamper your ability to learn it. Cons of French: Because so many words have come from French to English, the slight differences in spelling and the false cognates will throw you off.

Edit:
Decided to add pros and cons of Spanish and Romanian.
Romanian Pro: You can finally sing the Numa Numa song. Con: Not that similar to English.
Spanish pros: Helps you appreciate the Mexican-American culture more, and will help with the words American English has borrowed (without any promises of returning) from Spanish. Con: Spanish will try to convince you that there are only five vowel sounds in existence.

Peelee

2016-06-09, 07:18 AM

I'd probably go with Spanish. Yes, French and Latin are both marginally more useful for learning English, but it's not that big a gap, and given your plans regarding Brazil, it's also going to be vastly more useful. Just look at the languages spoken in South America as a whole - there's a definite trend towards Spanish.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a Portuguese person learning Spanish to go to Brazil be kind of like an Englishman learning French to go to QuebecCanada? Sure, there's a chance it'll come in handy, but the native language stays the same.

lio45

2016-06-09, 08:30 AM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a Portuguese person learning Spanish to go to Brazil be kind of like an Englishman learning French to go to Quebec? Sure, there's a chance it'll come in handy, but the native language stays the same.

Wait, what? The analogy doesn't work at all -- in one case, he learns the wrong language for where he's going, in the other case, he learns the correct language for where he's going.

P.S. I've just given it a couple seconds of thought and I am pretty sure I know how to fix your analogy now and I'm confident this it what you meant to say... it'd be like an Englishman learning French to move to Ontario (or Alberta, etc.) Not needed immediately, and might not ever be needed if you stay where you are, but you might get to use it next door.

lio45

2016-06-09, 08:32 AM

But is it? Frankly, I understood "related to Portuguese" as "Indo-European languages" :smallconfused:

Really?!? At that point the language family is so large that it kinda defeats the purpose of the administration insisting on a related language in the context of uni-level studies.

Peelee

2016-06-09, 12:29 PM

Wait, what? The analogy doesn't work at all -- in one case, he learns the wrong language for where he's going, in the other case, he learns the correct language for where he's going.

P.S. I've just given it a couple seconds of thought and I am pretty sure I know how to fix your analogy now and I'm confident this it what you meant to say... it'd be like an Englishman learning French to move to Ontario (or Alberta, etc.) Not needed immediately, and might not ever be needed if you stay where you are, but you might get to use it next door.

I realize the analogy wasn't great, but it was good enough to get the gist of what I'm talking about, I believe. Canada has two official languages, French and English, but English is almost exclusively spoken outside of French Canada, and many don't know how to speak French at all (at least, this is the impression I get from most Canadians who have spoken on the subject). Similarly, while Brazil's official language is Portuguese, much of the rest of South America is predominantly Spanish speaking.

So the Brit learning French and go to Canada would still speak English, but occasionally hear French, so too would the Portuguese learning Spanish go to Brazil and still speak Portuguese, but occasionally hear Spanish. Not a perfect analogy, but I don't think any fixing was necessary.

EDIT: oooohhhh, i see what you mean. I meant to say Canada, not Quebec, in the original analogy. My bad.

Jon_Dahl

2016-06-09, 02:34 PM

Red Fel

2016-06-09, 03:34 PM

Any superstrate language of Portuguese language.
Any substrate language of Portuguese language.
Any Ibero-Romance language.
What these languages actually are... I'm not sure yet.

Are these the restrictions indicating what language you may take, or what language you may not take?

Knaight

2016-06-09, 04:00 PM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a Portuguese person learning Spanish to go to Brazil be kind of like an Englishman learning French to go to QuebecCanada? Sure, there's a chance it'll come in handy, but the native language stays the same.

It's not about going to Brazil, it's about going to other nearby countries while in Brazil. If you end up crossing into almost any of the other nearby countries, Spanish is the national language. If you're particularly near almost any border, Spanish is suddenly still useful. It's like an Australian learning Spanish to go to the southern U.S. Yeah, the national language is still English, but Spanish is pretty useful there nonetheless, and if you go to Mexico (which you probably will at some point), it gets even more useful.

Peelee

2016-06-09, 08:24 PM

It's not about going to Brazil, it's about going to other nearby countries while in Brazil. If you end up crossing into almost any of the other nearby countries, Spanish is the national language. If you're particularly near almost any border, Spanish is suddenly still useful. It's like an Australian learning Spanish to go to the southern U.S. Yeah, the national language is still English, but Spanish is pretty useful there nonetheless, and if you go to Mexico (which you probably will at some point), it gets even more useful.
I believe you mean southwest U.S., not southern. And even there, i never had any issues not knowing any spanish whatsoever.

Also, i thought OP's plans involved Brazil, not various neighboring nations.

Aedilred

2016-06-09, 08:42 PM

I just wanted to say that the conversation so far has been great, keep it up. Furthermore, I think I may have given you wrong information in the OP but that makes no difference at all. I have really enjoyed reading the posts, no harm done. The actual restrictions on the languages I can choose from can be found behind the spoiler tags.

Any superstrate language of Portuguese language.
Any substrate language of Portuguese language.
Any Ibero-Romance language.
What these languages actually are... I'm not sure yet.

That's... a pretty narrow list. I guess depending on how broadly defined superstrate and substrate are, that could make a difference, but all the same. It looks to me like Spanish (and the small regional languages of Spain, none of which, except the Astur-Leonese group taken collectively, have more than 100,000 speakers); if they're feeling generous, then Catalan, Provencal and Gascon would be counted as Ibero-Romance rather than Gallo-Romance, but of those only Catalan has more than a million speakers; Ladino; Galician, which is so close to Portuguese as to be counted by many official bodies as the same language... and that's about it. An argument could be made for Latin, French or English (and Spanish, again) as superstrate but that wouldn't be uncontroversial.

I guess having said that that there could conceivably be a lot of substrate languages if defined fairly generally, indeed, possibly a very large number if all native languages of Brazil and Indonesia are included (although I don't think Portugal ever had significant presence on Papua New Guinea, which would push the figures to "colossal".) But I don't know enough about those languages and their influence on Portuguese to comment.

Even so, depending on the superstrate definitions, as far as widely spoken languages - and languages I can imagine teaching resources actually existing for - go, it's pretty much down to Spanish, Catalan and, if being generous with substrates, maybe Swahili, Cantonese or whichever Indian language is spoken in Goa, unless I'm missing something huge.

Jon_Dahl

2016-06-10, 12:57 AM

Are these the restrictions indicating what language you may take, or what language you may not take?

That I may take. To be precise, the list which I must choose from.

SaintRidley

2016-06-10, 01:24 AM

Based on the additional info, I'm going to come down on Spanish. For one thing, if you do decide to travel outside Brazil, very useful. For another, Spanish is most orthographically similar to Latin out of the Romance languages I've studied, so it can help with your English indirectly.

Well, really, English's closest relative is Scots. Beyond that, Frisian, yes (which is, I believe, more closely related to English than it is to Dutch).

I was debating introducing Scots into the equation, but considering people fight about whether it's another language at all, it seemed best to avoid that tangle.

Bobblit

2016-06-10, 03:24 AM

Really?!? At that point the language family is so large that it kinda defeats the purpose of the administration insisting on a related language in the context of uni-level studies.

Well, but it'll still take out most languages in the world. And I could understand if the university didn't want you to learn, uhm, Yoruba in the context of a Portuguese course, but (as someone above said) most of the Indo-European languages are pretty inbred, and share similar aspects. So, why not?

Any superstrate language of Portuguese language.
Any substrate language of Portuguese language.
Any Ibero-Romance language.
What these languages actually are... I'm not sure yet.

That settles it, though. That is a really restrictive list. (I think it strikes out even French, actually.) In that case, I'd take either Spanish for usefulness, or Latin for a better understanding of Portuguese's evolution. And between those two, Latin is the one that'll help you most with English, so... Latin it is?

An argument could be made for Latin, French or English (and Spanish, again) as superstrate but that wouldn't be uncontroversial.

Yes, I... kind of doubt that Portuguese people would like the suggestion of French, English or Spanish being their language's superstrate :smalltongue:

Jon_Dahl

2016-06-10, 11:52 AM

That settles it, though. That is a really restrictive list. (I think it strikes out even French, actually.) In that case, I'd take either Spanish for usefulness, or Latin for a better understanding of Portuguese's evolution. And between those two, Latin is the one that'll help you most with English, so... Latin it is?

Yeah, but it still doesn't have to mean that this great conversation should die. So don't mind the OP that much anymore, just carry on :D

Palanan

2016-06-10, 12:30 PM

Originally Posted by Knaight
Just look at the languages spoken in South America as a whole - there's a definite trend towards Spanish.

I'm curious how much time you've spent working in South America, and whether you speak Spanish and/or Portuguese yourself.

I've lived, worked and traveled in a number of South American countries, and I've worked professionally in both Spanish and Portuguese for years. By population of native speakers, Spanish and Portuguese are just about neck-and-neck in South America, and they have been for the past two centuries at least. Brazil has roughly half the continent's total land area and half its total population, and I wouldn't expect that to change anytime soon.

2D8HP

2016-06-10, 06:08 PM

Well, really, English's closest relative is Scots. Beyond that, Frisian, yes (which is, I believe, more closely related to English than it is to Dutch).
I once read than English and Scots are actually more distinct than Portuguese and Spanish, and it only because there in different sovereign nations that there (unlike England and Scotland which are both in the U.K.) classified as different languages instead of dialects.
True?

Aedilred

2016-06-10, 08:50 PM

I once read than English and Scots are actually more distinct than Portuguese and Spanish, and it only because there in different sovereign nations that there (unlike England and Scotland which are both in the U.K.) classified as different languages instead of dialects.
True?

The "what counts as a language?" question is always a thorny one, especially depending on who you ask. The "popular" and indeed "political" definitions of languages tend to be much less inclusive than linguistic ones, and often the existence of a political border can lead to lines being drawn across what is otherwise a dialect/language continuum. Hence why, as I alluded to earlier, you sometimes hear people referring casually to "the five/six" Romance languages when in fact in linguistic terms there are probably closer to forty (extant), and indeed there are more than six that have over a million speakers. If you don't have a government it's always a struggle to get people to remember your language exists (and especially hard to get them to remember it's a language and not just a dialect of the official state language - as with Catalan).

Portuguese and Spanish are certainly the most closely related of the major Romance languages (unless you include Galician, which arguably one should, in which case that sits closer to Portuguese), but I don't think any reputable linguist would consider them the same language per se. The acid test of such is usually mutual intelligibility and as far as I'm aware - I must admit my knowledge of Portuguese is very poor - that's not the case for Portuguese and Spanish; probably less so indeed than between Scots and English, where many of the differences are in vocabulary and spelling - an English-speaker can read Scots (https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) without too much difficulty. Particularly considering there are other recognised languages within each of Portuguese and Spanish's sub-groups (Ladino, Fala and Galician) and indeed other branches within the western Iberian branch not including either, I think it's hard to make the argument that they're both the same language. It might have been that if Portugal and Castile had come to be unified (permanently) at the same time as Castile and Aragon (rather than later, and temporarily) that the languages would eventually have essentially homogenised, or that Spanish would have pushed "true" Portuguese into a small minority, but that's speculative - and it didn't really happen with Galician.

Bobblit

2016-06-11, 04:24 AM

In my experience, Spanish and Portuguese speakers can understand each other fine if they talk slowly and carefully enough, but of course I still wouldn't think that the two are the same language. (That's for Iberian Spanish and Portuguese, though - I don't know about their South American variants.) The same goes for Catalan or Galician (especially the Galician that you hear on TV, that is so influenced by Spanish that sometimes it doesn't even sound like Galician at all). Although the discussion about languages in Spain is not always very rational, as it often resembles a power play more than anything else; but I guess this is the norm for multilingual countries, and since linguists also tend to get caught in that play, it's probably very difficult to set any fixed, detached rules about what should be considered a language.

Yet, the whole thing can get strange. For example, where I'm living now (Germany) I hear dialects that I would consider proper languages by my Spanish standards, and yet here they're all supposed to be just dialects, and don't seem to be protected in any way.

5a Violista

2016-06-11, 06:01 AM

I (That's for Iberian Spanish and Portuguese, though - I don't know about their South American variants.)
(I have experience with this! It's pretty much the same situation.)
Speaking Portuguese, I have had several conversations (in airports, mostly, but also random places around everywhere) where I was speaking Brazilian Portuguese and my conversation partner was speaking <insert South or Central American> Spanish with people from nearly every one of the countries there. I had no problem holding a conversation. Some sentences we had to repeat or rephrase but there was pretty much no difficulty in understanding.
On the other hand, I have friends (some Spanish speakers and some Portuguese speakers) who, for the life of them, could not understand the other speaker. (Most of these people were monolingual, anyway, or just learning Spanish-or-Portuguese). I suppose bilingual people are better at understanding different languages? In my experience, though, I've noticed that more Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish than vice versa. That's a funny quirk, right? May be because I know more Portuguese speakers than Spanish speakers.

T-Mick

2016-06-11, 06:42 AM

Latin. There is no other language.

The reason you should pick it over French is this: at the end of the day, some fifty-sixty percent of words in English ultimately derive from Latin. Now, the vast majority of the words in that group which are in actual use came indirectly, through French. This, however, does not recommend French over Latin. You will still be able to see that "clerk" is related to "clericus," because you know that "clerk," "cleric," and "clergy" go together. In fact, you'll suddenly realize that plenty of words you take for granted are French/Latin derivatives.

That doesn't recommend Latin yet, does it? The point is that, for English, you'll get the same vocabulary benefits from either. Now go study Latin, so you get into the world of English. When you begin reading Virgil, Cicero, Horace and their ilk, you are engaging with the beginnings of the mindset that is implicit in most English speakers' (especially Americans') thought and culture. And if you ever plan to read Literature, Latin should be no question.

"But Latin is a dead language, I can't speak it!"

Latin is a zombie language. Don't you want to speak zombie? There are fluent speakers where you'd least expect them. The best speaker I ever met was an accountant from Georgia. Now, speaking in French is nice and all, and you can go to Belgium and get along with the locals, but it can't ever compare to the purest joy of speaking a semi-dead language with an accountant from Georgia!

How long will you study French in university? Four semesters? Eight? When you leave, you'll very likely lose it all. In other words, 9-10 years from now, you probably won't be able to speak French. Learn Latin. In five years, you'll learn enough to read. Technically, that's all you need. After that, well, we say "gutta cavat lapidem."

You aren't convinced. Let me give you another reason. MONEY. Money, my friend. You have to be smart about it. Focus your later reading on medieval writers. Why? Two reasons, both related. First: the vast majority of untranslated works worthy of study are medieval writings. Second: the vast majority of medievalists cannot read Latin well enough to translate, and cannot afford to hire Classicists.

How do you play in? You go to the faculty with your skills. You go on Academic business trips. Kalamazoo and the like. You put yourself out there, and you charge two dollars a word. Particles aren't words. Per word. Average medieval Latin text being studied (in my experience) is about 700-1200 words. Read it, translate it, give them your bill. Who can object to that? This is how I had so much spending money in College. The more your portfolio grows, the richer you get.

So, to recap:

You will get the same benefits of learning French from Learning Latin.
You will get additional benefit by engaging the latin tradition of thought, which shaped the civilizations that speak English.
You will be that much richer.

Lingua Latina non est mortua sed viva. I, tolle, lege! Placet mihi te videre, discentem Latine.

Peelee

2016-06-11, 07:12 AM

Non placet mihi te videre, discentem Latine. Eheu!

BWR

2016-06-11, 07:55 AM

( I suppose bilingual people are better at understanding different languages?

In short, yes. The more languages you know, the better you are at hearing sound differences, seeing similarities and puzzling out phrasing. Especially if you know more than one related language.

On the subject of Scots - it won't be a language until Scotland is independent. :smallwink:

Hoosigander

2016-06-11, 06:04 PM

Focus your later reading on medieval writers. Why? Two reasons, both related. First: the vast majority of untranslated works worthy of study are medieval writings. Second: the vast majority of medievalists cannot read Latin well enough to translate, and cannot afford to hire Classicists.

Peccator rusticissimus sum, et indoctissimus, sed quaero: quantos discipulōs mediorum aevorum legere linguas latinam non posse?

I'm curious about this, and I hope you'll indulge your curiosity since it seems you have experience. Since most medievalists I've encountered all read Latin fairly well, and its an important language for the period. Is it a discipline thing (Say German literature scholars don't need it that often and can get by with hiring a translator for the occasional text their interested in) or something else?

Eldariel

2016-06-11, 06:35 PM

On the other hand, I have friends (some Spanish speakers and some Portuguese speakers) who, for the life of them, could not understand the other speaker. (Most of these people were monolingual, anyway, or just learning Spanish-or-Portuguese). I suppose bilingual people are better at understanding different languages?

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Bilingualism is associated with improved neural plasticity providing direct benefits in general problem solving and information acquisition tasks, as well as enhanced executive functions (working memory, attention, etc.). Learning a foreign language also has some direct benefits from learning specifically that language, such as being able to think more rationally and objectively in a language acquired later (emotions affect the first language more), as well as simply providing a different way to view the world. This can also be utilised in problemsolving, as thinking about a problem in another language enables one to view it in a different way. It also tends to enable one to learn languages in general on a deeper level and begin to add deeper etymological information to and produce more expansive lexical fields for words. A study did link bilingualism with decreased metacognitive capabilities however, though this result is yet to be replicated.

Of course, there are also the practical benefits such as being able to approach works written in target language in their original guise (complete with all the expressional tools such as linguistic acrobatics that can scarcely be translated), gaining a better understanding of the intricacies of target culture and everything surrounding it, gaining a wider understanding of humanity and world's cultures in general, being able to notice more things as you now have names for them, and countless other factors.

And yeah, the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn new languages, partly because it always becomes easier to find and comprehend the kinds of structural pieces you need to find to properly grok a language. Of course, your brain is also simply more attuned for learning languages and makes such connections much quicker on each subsequent process. All the language-relatedness is just the cherry on the top.

2D8HP

2016-06-11, 07:45 PM

In my experience, Spanish and Portuguese speakers can understand each other fine if they talk slowly and carefully enough, but of course I still wouldn't think that the two are the same language.
-
Yet, the whole thing can get strange. For example, where I'm living now (Germany) I hear dialects that I would consider proper languages by my Spanish standards, and yet here they're all supposed to be just dialects, and don't seem to be protected in any way.
I was born and have lives all my life, except for a few days in California. I have and continue to work with many immigrants, sometimes there is a language barrier but,this reminds me of two welding teachers I had. One emigrated from Romania and despite his thick foreign accent, I could understand him pretty well, another teacher grew up in Georgia (the southern State in the U.S.A. not the former Soviet Republic,).
On the first day of class the U.S.A. born teacher said, "Fellas, and by fellas I also mean you ladies.....", and those were the last words he spoke that I could understand.
Really.

Bobblit

2016-06-13, 05:16 AM

(I have experience with this! It's pretty much the same situation.)
Speaking Portuguese, I have had several conversations (in airports, mostly, but also random places around everywhere) where I was speaking Brazilian Portuguese and my conversation partner was speaking <insert South or Central American> Spanish with people from nearly every one of the countries there. I had no problem holding a conversation. Some sentences we had to repeat or rephrase but there was pretty much no difficulty in understanding.
On the other hand, I have friends (some Spanish speakers and some Portuguese speakers) who, for the life of them, could not understand the other speaker. (Most of these people were monolingual, anyway, or just learning Spanish-or-Portuguese). I suppose bilingual people are better at understanding different languages? In my experience, though, I've noticed that more Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish than vice versa. That's a funny quirk, right? May be because I know more Portuguese speakers than Spanish speakers.
That's good to know! I hadn't noticed about bilingual people being better at understanding other languages in this situation, but it may be because most of the Spanish or Portuguese speakers I've seen trying to communicate weren't bilingual anyways. It is true, though, that whenever I went to Portugal people there tended to know more Spanish than we Spaniards knew Portuguese, although I had always attributed this to the relative size of both countries. (And we all ended up speaking Portuñol anyways xD.) But if it's the same with Brazilian Portuguese, it must be a more general thing?

I was born and have lives all my life, except for a few days in California. I have and continue to work with many immigrants, sometimes there is a language barrier but,this reminds me of two welding teachers I had. One emigrated from Romania and despite his thick foreign accent, I could understand him pretty well, another teacher grew up in Georgia (the southern State in the U.S.A. not the former Soviet Republic,).
On the first day of class the U.S.A. born teacher said, "Fellas, and by fellas I also mean you ladies.....", and those were the last words he spoke that I could understand.
Really.
Yes, exactly xD. Something like this usually happened to me when I tried to communicate with some of my more distant German relatives, who spoke with such a thick regional accent that I couldn't tell for the life of me what they were saying.

That said, I was under the impression (but I'm no expert so I may be wrong) that many German dialects also had distinct grammatical features, not only a different pronunciation, which was why I would consider them languages rather than dialects. (I mean, if accent alone turned a dialect into a language... each rural village in southern Spain would probably speak a different language xD.)

lio45

2016-06-13, 01:13 PM

... probably less so indeed than between Scots and English, where many of the differences are in vocabulary and spelling - an English-speaker can read Scots (https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) without too much difficulty.

I couldn't believe my eyes -- this isn't a joke? Isn't it simply English but written by someone who doesn't know how to spell most words?

I lived in Glasgow for an entire summer. I can vouch for the fact that the locals speak English nowadays, not anything else (some Gaelic language or otherwise). Never saw anything written like that either...

Eldariel

2016-06-13, 01:37 PM

I couldn't believe my eyes -- this isn't a joke? Isn't it simply English but written by someone who doesn't know how to spell most words?

English written and spoken language are linguistically considered two separate languages, which accounts for some relative difficulty children initially have with picking up written English. Scots is indeed rather close to standard English and even closer to the other English languages spoken in the nearby areas (languages often produce these kinds of continua and the same phenomenon can indeed be observed practically anywhere). You could call it a dialect but as that term is more or less vacuous in a scientific discourse, that doesn't really account for much - and in any case, various historical considerations lead to it often being considered a language (Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic spoken mostly in the Highlands). The language actually features long written history and indeed, i.a. the song Auld Lang Syne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auld_Lang_Syne) is written in Scots.

2D8HP

2016-06-13, 01:44 PM

I couldn't believe my eyes -- this isn't a joke? Isn't it simply English but written by someone who doesn't know how to spell most words?

I lived in Glasgow for an entire summer. I can vouch for the fact that the locals speak English nowadays, not anything else (some Gaelic language or otherwise). Never saw anything written like that either...
The majority of people in Scotland now speak Standard English not Braid Scots, or Lallans (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) nor does the majority speak Gaelic (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic)
I'm reminded of the status of the
Gullah or Geechee (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language) language spoken in the southeastern United States.

Hoosigander

2016-06-13, 03:53 PM

As 2DHP notes Scots is not the majority language so you're unlikely to hear it spoken just walking around, although there is a continuum from Standard English Spoken in a regional Scottish accent to English spoken with both a Scottish accent and occasional words derived from Scots thrown in to full blown Scots Leid. As a result its hard to decide what counts as "Scots" and what counts as "English with Scots influence," but generally around a million people are reckoned to speak it out of a total population of 5 Million. (Much better than Scots Gaelic with its 57,000 speakers.)

Here is a particularly thick example of Scots Speech from the 20's or 30's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw__okd7pSw

This one is more modern and more comprehensible (at least to this American) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSK8qzqDAew