Comment by phee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phee | Hacker News Reader

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> Can you rather easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are proficient in Sardo).

I guess the statement about "closeness" comes from the study (Pei, Mario 1949) referenced in the Wikipedia page about Sardinian language that somehow developed a metric and tested several languages against their parent one. Apparently Sardo has the lowest distance from Latin among Romance languages.

On a more practical side, I speak Sardo and studied Latin in high school. I cannot easily read Latin texts without a dictionary at hand and a little grammar review. I guess their similarity arises when you compare the written languages but most of us experience Sardo as a spoken-only language and many find it difficult to follow in written form. On the contrary we experience Latin as a written only language. Who knows, probably it would be a lot easier for us to understand spoken Latin.

This raises a good point. Even when languages are "close" it usually doesn't mean "mutually intelligible" unless they are really close. I grew up in the US but I have Italian parents who came over somewhat recently in immigration terms - the 1970's. My first language is/was Standard Italian, as my grandmother really pushed my parents not to teach me their dialects. My mom is from Genova and my father from a small town in Abruzzo called Alfedena - since you are Italian, you probably know, very different dialects. Zeneize is considered its own language. Anyhow, to my point, Standard Italian is extremely close to the spoken dialects in my family, probably closer than Sardo to Latin, but I still have trouble understanding either side of the family in dialect. Part of that, of course, is that I was raised outside of Italy, but not entirely as I don't have trouble with the Florentine dialect since I speak pretty close to what they do.

And don't get me started on written versus spoken! Then again, my dad's dialect might look like Welsh if anyone thought to write it down. But on my mom's side, Zeneize does have a sort-of official written form, and if I read carefully I sometimes have an idea of what's going on :)

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