How does Portuguese compare to other Western Romance languages ?

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The Italo-Western Romance group is a subdivision of the Romance branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It includes five major standard written languages (in decreasing order of number of native speakers):

1. Spanish
2. Portuguese
3. French
4. Italian
5. Catalan


Besides the five above-listed languages, the only other major standard Romance language is Romanian, which belongs, however, to the separate Eastern Romance branch and is distinctively different in many ways from the languages in the Italo-Western branch. Accordingly, Romanian is NOT covered in this post.


Grammar


Generally speaking, the grammar of the Italo-Western Romance languages is fairly homogeneous with only small differences between them. It is derived mostly from the grammar of Latin, from which the Romance languages have historically evolved, but with major simplifications and some innovations. More specifically:

⦁ Nouns are morphologically inflected for number (singular and plural), but, unlike in classic Latin, they are not inflected for case (e.g. nominative, accusative, dative and genitive). The neuter gender that existed in Latin has also been lost and, accordingly, Italo-Western Romance nouns have only two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine).

⦁ Articles and adjectives are inflected for gender and number and agree both in gender and number with their head noun; the latter is true for adjectives functioning both as adjuncts and predicatives. Unlike in classic Latin, however, Italo-Western Romance adjectives again are not inflected for case. As in the Germanic languages, there are two classes of articles (definite and indefinite).

⦁ Italian in particular differs from Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and French in the sense that the plural forms of nouns and adjectives are derived from Latin nominative forms , whereas, in the other aforementioned languages, they have evolved from Latin accusative forms. Generally speaking, plural forms are fairly regular and not complicated at all (unlike in German or in the Scandinavian languages for example).

⦁ Personal pronouns take different forms according to person (1st, 2nd and 3rd, with an additional distinction between masculine and feminine forms in the 3rd person); number (singular and plural); and case (the main distinction in the latter being between subject and object forms, with a residual distinction between accusative and dative object forms in the 3rd person). Possessive pronouns, in addition to changing for person, also agree in gender and number with their head noun. Likewise, other determiners in noun phrases (equivalent to words like e.g. 'some', 'many', 'much', 'all', 'every', or 'any' in English) also agree with their head nouns in number and/or gender as applicable.

⦁ Verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect and mood. Italo-Western Romance languages have retained the morphological distinction from Latin between the present, preterite and imperfect tenses, as well as the morphological distinction between indicative and subjunctive mood. All verbs agree with their subject in person and number. Generally speaking, there are six different forms for each verb in each tense (correponding to the three different persons and the two different numbers) although the 1st person singular and the 3rd person singular forms are identical in the imperfect tense (both in the indicative and subjunctive moods), and are also identical in the present tense in the subjunctive mood. Additionally, second person plural verb forms are no longer used in modern spoken European Portuguese or in Latin American Spanish, and second person forms in general (both singular and plural) have disappeared completely in modern spoken Brazilian Portuguese (in all aforementioned cases, they have been replaced by third person verb forms, which are used with a new original set of personal pronouns that did not come from Latin). Furthermore, due to phonological changes, modern spoken French in practice now distinguishes only three or at most four verb forms in each tense (a five-form distinction, e.g. in the present indicative, is retained only by a few verbs with anomalous conjugation patterns such as e,g, 'être' and 'aller').

⦁ Due to the partial loss of person (and/or number) marking in the spoken language, personal pronouns functioning as subjects are never omitted in French sentences and are only rarely omitted in spoken Brazilian Portuguese for example. Conversely, omission of subject pronouns is standard in languages such as European Spanish or Italian, which retain a full six-form person/number distinction in the conjugation of verbs.

⦁ Regular verbs are grouped in conjugation classes (normally three or four depending on the language), but there is a number of irregular verbs with stem vowel changes in the preterite tense and the morphologically associated imperfect subjunctive , and with idiossyncratic conjugation patterns that have to be learned separately. The number of irregular verbs is apparently larger though in French, Italian or Catalan than in Spanish or Portuguese.

⦁ Innovations in the Italo-Western Romance verb system include a new synthetic future tense in the indicative mood and an associated conditional tense (both of which differ from their original Latin counterparts), and the use of analytical periphrastic constructions ( consisting of an inflected auxiliary verb plus the impersonal participle form of the main verb) to mark passive voice or to form the so-called "compound tenses". The participle form of the main verb in compound tenses is normally uninflected (with a few exceptions in French), but, when used as part of a passive voice construction, it functions syntactically as a predicative adjective agreeing with the subject in gender and number.

⦁ In all Italo-Western Romance languages, the compound pluperfect, equivalent to the past perfect tense in English, has effectively replaced the older synthetic pluperfect inherited from Latin, although the synthetic forms are still used in formal written Portuguese. Similarly, the compound "perfect preterite" has in practice replaced the Latin-based synthetic preterite in modern spoken French and Italian , although the synthetic forms are again retained in writing. In Spanish, on the other hand, the compound perfect is used pretty much like the present perfect tense in English whereas the synthetic preterite or the imperfect are used in situations where the so-called simple past tense would be used in English. However, in Portuguese, the compound perfect is only rarely used and is NOT functionally equivalent either to the simple past as in French or, in most cases, to the present perfect in English. Please note that the synthetic future indicative tense mentioned before may be (and often is) also replaced by analytical periphrastic constructions in most Romance languages, especially in spoken Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and French.

⦁ Other innovations in the verb system of Portuguese in particular include a new "future subjunctive" tense, which also exists in formal (mostly archaic) written Spanish, and an associated "inflected infinitive", which is unique to Portuguese (and its sister language Galician) within the Italo-Western Romance group.

⦁ With the notable exception of French, all other Italo-Western Romance languages also express progressive aspect (e.g. "I am studying") by a periphrastic construction that uses an inflected auxiliary verb plus the impersonal gerund form of the main verb. Traditional school grammars in Romance-speaking countries, however, do not refer to those constructions as separate verb "tenses", unlike English grammars for example.

⦁ Generally speaking, all Italo-Western Romance languages follow a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order, although word order tends to be more flexible in Spanish and Portuguese and, conversely, strictly rigid in French. As a general rule, attributive adjectives functioning as adjuncts are postponed to their head nouns (unlike in the Germanic languages for example), but they can precede the head noun in some special cases, sometimes with semantic implications. Object pronouns normally precede the verb, but they may be postponed to the verb in certain situations in European Portuguese and in formal written Brazilian Portuguese.


Vocabulary


In terms of vocabulary, all Italo-Western Romance languages share a common core of cognate words that have evolved from Latin, leading to a fairly high lexical overlap between any two languages in the group. However, due to phonetic changes in the evolution from Latin to Romance, an untrained observer may not be able to identify certain words as cognates in different languages, e.g. Portuguese 'cheio' , Spanish "lleno', and French 'plein' come from the same Latin root word ('plenus') , but that is not trivial to tell without prior knowledge of etymology.

More broadly speaking, it is customary to group Spanish and Portuguese in a separate class from French, Italian and Catalan in terms of the use of "older" classic Latin root words which, in the latter languages, have been replaced by non-cognate late Latin words, e.g. Spanish 'hablar' and Portuguese 'falar' versus French 'parler', Catalan 'parlar' , or Italian 'parlare'; or Spanish/Portuguese 'querer' versus French 'vouloir', Catalan 'voler', or Italian 'volere'. Hence, according to Ethnologue, whereas there is an approximate 89 % lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese or between Italian and French, the lexical similarity between French and Portuguese for example is only 75 % (which is still very high though !).

Besides the core Latin vocabulary, the dictionary of the Italo-Western Romance languages also includes a smaller number of words with roots in different language groups and, more recently, several imported foreign words. Portuguese and Spanish in particular borrowed a sizeable number of Arabic words during the Arab occupation of the Iberian peninsula in the European Middle Age. French on the other hand has a larger inventory of Germanic words than other Romance language due to Frankish influence, and both Spanish and French also include a small number of Celtic loanwords. More recently, most adapted foreign words that have entered the Romance vocabulary seem to have come from English.

Pronunciation

Phonologically, Romance languages tend to be simpler than Germanic languages, mostly due to the loss of phonemic distinction between long and short vowels in the evolution from Latin to Romance (which BTW is one of the main difficulties of native Romance speakers when learning Germanic languages such as English, German, Danish, Swedish, or Dutch).

Generally speaking, Spanish is normally considered the "simplest" Italo-Western Romance language in terms of pronunciation, with only five vowel phonemes from the original Latin inventory. Italian and Catalan have a broader seven-vowel system (distinguishing in some cases between 'open' and 'closed' vowels) , which is, however, also a simplification compared to the Latin system. Portuguese and French, on the other hand, are normally considered phonologically "harder" to learn and feature several innovations , including new original nasal vowels and, in the case of French specifically, also new front rounded vowels. Furthermore, Portuguese, in addition to having at least 7 oral vowels and 5 nasal vowels, and in additon to raising oral vowels in unstressed syllables, is also known for having a large number of diphtongs due to the loss of intervocalic consonants in its evolution from Latin.

The consonant system in the Italo-Western Romance languages, on the other hand, is broadly as in Latin with the difference, however, that several new palatal consonants emerged in the course of evolution from Latin to Romance.



Orthography



The writing systems of Italo-Western Romance languages use the standard English alphabet augmented by diacritic marks such as:

⦁ Acute: ´ (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Italian)
⦁ Grave: ` (Portuguese, French, Catalan, Italian)
⦁ Circumflex: ^ (Portuguese, French)
⦁ Diaeresis: ¨ (Spanish, French, Catalan)
⦁ Tilde: ~ (Spanish, Portuguese)

All above-referenced diacritic marks are used exclusively over vowel letters (i.e. 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', or 'u'), with the exception of the tilde mark in Spanish, which is used over the letter 'n' (i.e. 'ñ') to denote the phoneme /N/.

Depending on the language, diacritics may be used to indicate vowel quality (e.g. in French) , syllable stress (e.g. in Spanish), or both (e.g. in Catalan, Italian and Portuguese). They may be also used to mark an hiatus , or to indicate the historical deletion of an adjacent letter or a merger of two letters, or to distinguish homophones or a silent letter from a voiced one. In addition, French, Catalan and Portuguese also use the cedille mark under the letter 'c' (i.e. 'ç' ) to indicate that it is pronounced /s/ rather than /k/ when followed by the letters 'a', 'o', or 'u'.

Several digraphs (i.e. a combination of two letters that are pronounced as a single phoneme) are used with different phonemic values in different Romance languages , e.g. 'll', 'lh', 'gl', 'gn', 'nh', 'ch', 'sh', 'ss', 'rr', 'qu', 'gu', etc. , and French spelling in particular also uses typographic ligatures of vowel letters (e.g. 'o' and 'e') to denote particular phonemes (in the latter specific example, a particular rounded vowel, equivalent to ' ö ' in Swedish or German for example).

Generally speaking, the modern orthography of the Italo-Western Romance languages is based on a combination of both phonemic and historical (i.e etymological) principles. With the exception of French, phonemic spelling is dominant with a relatively consistent mapping between graphemes and phonemes so that the pronunciation of a given word can be fairly accurately inferred from its spelling and vice-versa, but with a few exceptions. Compared to Italian and Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan in particular show a marginally higher number of cases where a phoneme may be represented by more than one grapheme. For example, /s/ in Portuguese may be represented by 's', 'ss', 'xc', or 'ç'; /z/ may be represented by 'z', 's', or 'x'; /S/ may be represented by 'x' or 'ch', and /Z/ can be spelled as 'g' or 'j', with the distinction in spelling being basically etymological in nature.

Compared to the spelling of its sister languages, modern French orthography on the other hand tends to give greater weight to etymological principles over strictly phonemic spelling and, accordingly, is characterized by:

⦁ A more complex correspondence between letters and sounds (especially for combinations of vowel letters);

⦁ An abundance of silent letters (especially silent consonant letters, which nonetheless may be voiced when they liaison with an adjacent vowel) ;

⦁ And a large number of words with different spellings that are nonetheless homophones (i.e. have the same pronunciaton).

In comparison, silent letters for example are almost inexistent in other Romance languages with few exceptions such as e.g. the etymological 'h' in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan , which also appears in French by the way .

Roughly speaking then, among the Italo-Western Romance languages, Italian and Spanish are normally considered to have the "easiest" spelling (due to its highly phonemic nature and fairly high consistency), whereas French spelling is considered "difficult", and Portuguese and Catalan lie somewhere in between, pending however more to phonemic than etymological spelling (and, hence, more to the "easy" than the "difficult" side).


Conclusions


For a native speaker of Germanic languages, which generally have a fairly low lexical similarity with any Romance language, it is probably equally difficult to learn any of them (conversely, it should be fairly difficult for a Romance speaker to learn Germanic languages). Nevertheless, French and Portuguese may be comparatively more difficult in terms of pronunciation compared to, let's say, Italian , Catalan or especially Spanish, and French is definitely much harder than other Romance languages in terms of spelling.

As far as grammar is concerned, since Italo-Western Romance grammar is , as I wrote, fairly homogeneous across different languages, there isn't really that much difference, but Italian, French and Catalan may be marginally more difficult IMHO followed, in that order, by European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, and then, respectively European Portuguese and (spoken) Brazilian Portuguese, which is probably the easiest (morphologically speaking) despite a broader range of verb tenses in current use than in other languages actually. Syntactically though, Portuguese and Spanish may be actually harder than Italian or French.