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Argirios Argiriou:
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Argirios Argiriou:
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Argirios Argiriou:
Quora
Cult of Linguists
Answered by
Marco Trevisan
Updated 8mo
Why are Spanish and Portuguese phonetics so different despite being two so closely related languages?
As a Spaniard (also half-Italian) married to a Portuguese in a murtilingual family, I think I can add an important (for me the most important) aspect in phonetics I didn't see in other answers.
Have a look at this interesting map:
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Languages can be classified according to the rhythm. There are two important groups: syllable-timed (green) and stress-timed languages (red).
Syllable-timed languages tend to distribute almost equally the time dedicated to each syllable, while stress-timed languages tend to give much more weight to the stressed syllable, so that sometimes the non-stressed syllables are just hinted.
English for example is a stress-timed language: take the word «because», for instance. Some people even say something similar to «cos» when speaking. If we consider that originally the word had three syllables, the last is gone completely, and the first one is so short than it's often omitted. Same happens with «about» (some say «’bout»), «Britain» (some say «Bri’n», with a glottal stop before the n), «London» (becoming «Lond’n»), and it's even accepted that «cannot» is as correct as «can't».
A good example of syllable-timed language is Italian. For speakers of stress-timed languages it can be confusing listening to Italian (or English with a strong Italian accent for the matter) in the beginning because every syllable is so prominent that in their deeply ingrained language neural connections they think every syllable has distinct information and can't keep up with the quick pace at which this information is coming. They can't put the «finger» on the important part of the sentence until they get used to what is the key information and what can be discarded (or used for clarity in a noisy environment where you randomly miss some of the syllables).
In this context, Spanish evolved to become a syllable-timed language while Portuguese, especially the Centre and South, evolved as a stress-timed language. This is a consequence of historical substrates: Spanish has had a huge influence from a pre-Roman substrate of Basque and Proto-Basque languages (which some classify as mora-timed, an even more extreme case of homogeneous distribution of time through word parts) (Notice that Basque is a completely different language, not even Indo-European, but we are speaking about the phonetics here, not about grammar or vocabulary). Portuguese, despite being also a Romance language, had a different substrate (Celt? Or different pre-Roman cultures?). During the Middle Ages, the Iberian peninsula was a mosaic of languages, each of them probably with different rhythms. However, and especially since Portugal recovered its independence (from Spain) in 1640, both countries evolved independently. Inside its borders, each of them homogenised linguistically, and even if Spain has several different languages, most of them kept a similar rhythm.
As a consequence, for Portuguese people it's much easier to understand English, because despite being much more different than Spanish, the Portuguese at least get to «hear» the fast, non-stressed vowels that are in-between with little training (Portuguese say that also influences the fact their television don't dub foreign programs, and that Portuguese doesn't have the same weight as Spanish, but I think that, even though these are nontrivial things to consider, they aren't the main reason why the Portuguese understand better English on average). For Italians, Spaniards and French, understanding English or Portuguese is quite challenging. For example myself, before meeting my wife and learning Portuguese, I could hear a sentence almost identical to the Spanish equivalent without getting anything. For example «vamos para casa, que estou cansado» (English: «let's go home, because I'm tired», Spanish: «vamos para casa, que estoy cansado»), for me this sentence in the beginning was like «vaaams prkzqshtooo knsaaad». If it had been Russian, I wouldn't have noticed any difference (in fact, Russian is another stress-timed language with many sh-sounds).
This is for me the main difference. Then other differences have been observed in other answers: 1) Portuguese has more vowel diversity, and many closed vowels, while Spanish has only five (the same as Basque!), 2) Portuguese accepts that there is not always a match between spelling and pronunciation (not as much as English, but definitely more than Spanish), 3) Portuguese keeps the «sh», «j» and «z» sounds (not as Spanish in the last centuries), 4) Spanish merged «b» and «v» into «b» (Basque in the background again?), 5) Portuguese kept the Latin «f» in the beginning of words (like «ferro», «fazer», «farinha»), while Spanish transitioned some of them to an aspired «h» and then a mute «h» (like «hierro», «hacer», «harina»). You can probably find more if you make a research, but none of these were the main reason why I could not understand (in the beginning) a language that was so similar to my own, and from which I understood 95% in written form.
In fact, all these non-rhythm related differences are also found between Italian and Spanish (excluding (2)): 1) Italian has seven vowels: a, é (closed e), è (open e), i, ó (closed o), ò (open o) and u, 3) Italian keeps the «sh», «j» and «z» sounds, 4) Italian keeps separated «b» and «v», 5) Italian keeps the «f» («ferro», «fare», «farina»). However, I guess most Spaniards with no previous experience with Italian, understand better Italian than Portuguese.
Update: to avoid deviating myself from the main question, I didn't go deeply into what are syllable-timed and stress-timed languages. To get some more details about it, you can check below in the comment section my answer to Harry Dewulf.
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