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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

> Spanish and Greek speakers, on the other hand, tend to think of time in terms of volume

I've noticed that a surprising amount of idioms are the same between Spanish and Greek, to the point where I will translate a Greek idiom to Spanish and it will usually be intelligible to a Spanish speaker.

The same doesn't happen with English, where most things are different.

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Unrelated to semantics, but whenever I hear people talking and my Spanish alarm goes off (I’m a native Spanish speaker), but I realize I don’t understand the words, it’s Greek most of the time.

Italian and Spanish also share lots of idioms, too.

Yes, the accents are almost identical, to the point where I sound native when I speak Spanish. I also had a Spanish friend pronounce Greek words, and he was spot on.

By the way, a Greek "full day" isn't the same as the English "long day". "Long day" implies tiredness, whereas "full day" doesn't have a positive or a negative connection. It's simply a day in which lots of things happened.

We have an expression in English for a day in which lots of things happened as well! We call it a "full day".

Yep, exactly, I don't know what the article is on about.

It's the same in Spanish. As a native Spanish speaker (and a Swedish speaker too!), this really annoyed me about the first two paragraphs of the article. The authors clearly didn't speak the languages they were commenting on, as the expressions they compared are not analogous to each other!

Spanish is derived from Latin that was heavily influenced by Greek and a lot of what was "good literature" was written in Greek (like the bible) so as these works were translated into Latin and Spanish they would re-create the idioms there.

So is every other Romance language, yet I don't know that Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, French, etc share the same idioms.

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