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A comment on This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan. Parent comment

Re:This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and... by ekianjo on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @01:27AM (#6759607)
As a French I can tell you we can understand most of casual Italian / Spanish conversation just fine (and I believe Spaniards and Italians can understand a good portion of French too). The roots are very similar for most words that you catch it up very quickly.
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Re:This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and... by liviu on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @02:30AM (#6759762)
You are right. Related romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) speakers can understand most of the words.

As a Romanian I understand best Italian, then Spanish, then French and lastly Portuguese which is little odd for me.

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Re:This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and... by mariuolo on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @07:53AM (#6760790)
I don't think it goes both ways, though. Romanian is rather obscure to me. Possibly because of slavic influence?
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Re:This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and... by liviu on Saturday November 23, 2013 @06:58PM (#6787991)
In "The Grammar of Romanian"[1] book, Romanian language contains the following: 20 percent inherited Latin, 11.5 percent Slavic, 3.6 percent Turkish, 2.17 percent Hungarian, 43 percent Romance borrowings (mainly French - 38.4 percent).

The lexical similarity of Romanian with Italian has been estimated at 77%, followed by French at 75%, Sardinian 83%, Catalan 73%, Portuguese and Rhaeto-Romance 72%, Spanish 71%. In modern times Romanian vocabulary has been strongly influenced by French, Italian and other languages.

More on wikipedia if you are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language

BTW, are you Spanish?

[1] http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199644926.do

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Re:This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and... by mariuolo on Sunday November 24, 2013 @02:59PM (#6790853)
Very interesting, I'll try to read up more.

>BTW, are you Spanish?

Nope, Italian.

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Re:This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and... by gordaco on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @02:52PM (#6770659)
Written Romanian looks a little intimidating because of the amount of diacritics, but what I've heard sounds surprisingly similar to Italian.
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Re:This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and... by mariuolo on Thursday November 21, 2013 @01:41AM (#6773401)
Phonemes are similar, but spoken Romanian is complete gibberish to me.

Things get better in writing, but there's still no comparison to Spanish.

After all there was a longer interaction with the latter: for historical reasons words and verbal constructs in southern dialects can give insights with regard to it or French.

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