Quote:
Originally Posted by RogerBW
I had to draw the line somewhere, or this issue could easily have become Pyramid #3/44: Great Big Table of Languages With A Little Bit of Alternate GURPS.
If you want to add more languages, they make for a handy worked example:
- check the group on Ethnologue or Wikipedia - Catalan is Indo-European/Italic for family purposes, and Basque is sui generis, meaning no family bonus in or out.
- make a decision about similarities - nothing for Basque, I would guess Catalan is something like -3 to Spanish and Italian.
- check writing system - both use Latin.
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I know. I'm a native Catalan/Valencian speaker, who also speaks French and Spanish at Native. Catalan is a rather special language. It has a lot of grammar and vocabulary in common with French (and probably Italian, though I don't know, as I don't speak it.), much more than with Spanish (where it picked some loanwords during the 20th century, when it's use was politically suppressed), but the phonetics are much closer to Spanish than to French. This makes a Catalan text much more readable for a French speaker than to a Spanish speaker, but much more understandable in spoken form for a Spanish speaker than for a French speaker. I haven't checked your article (only given it a quick look), to see if something like this is can work under your
rules.
The thing is, it's strange for me to see that Galician was included, but Catalan/Valencian was not. I thought that Catalan had more speakers than Galician!
EDIT: The Wikipedia gives it 11.5 million speakers, 3 times more than Galician, classes it under Gallo-romance instead of Ibero-romance (confirming what I said above) and has a ratehr good summary if it
here.