Hey! So this post is the frist one that I’ll write to talk a little bit more about portuguese. It’s my mother language and I really love the language and wanted to introduce you more and more about it.
( So if I wrote a mistake please let me know so I can edit)
Well, we study a lot of vocabulary and grammar when we’re learning a new language. If you pay a language course it normally teaches you about how the language “was born” and how it modified itself over time. So, let’s talk first about how portuguese was “created” so we can understand a little more easy how its grammar works.
So portuguese is one of the langagues that comes from vulgar latim. If you don’t remember your history classes, vulgar latim was the term used to refer to the vernacular dialects of Latin mainly spoken in the western provinces of the Roman Empire. It was used until the differentiation of the Roman languages.
When we talk about the languages that have an origin in the vulgar latin, normally we talk about Portuguese, French, Spanish (Castilian), Italian and Romanian. But there’s more, cuz these are the majoritary groups that use the vulgar latin. There’s the minorities groups as:
in the different regions of Spain, where the Catalan (which has the Valencian as dialect), the Aragonese, the Galician, the Asturian and the Leonese are spoken;
in Portugal, where Mirandese is spoken;
in the different regions of Italy, where the Lombard, the Veneto, the Ligurian, the Sicilian, the Piedmontese, the Neapolitan (with their dialectal variations) and the Sardinian are spoken;
in the south of France, where Occitan (which has Provencal and Gascon as dialects), French-Provencal and other dialectal languages derived from the language itself, such as Picard, Pictavo-Sántone and Norman, are spoken;
and in Switzerland, where Romansh is spoken.
Despite the influences of pre-Roman languages and invasions, the phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax of all Roman languages are predominantly an evolution of Vulgar Latin. In particular, with only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system present in Latin and, as a result, have a SVO (Noun - Verb - Object) phrase structure and make extensive use of prepositions.
So the difference between portuguese and these others is on the invasions that Portugal had. We can say that portuguese is the mixture of vulgar latin with other european languages influency, and a substract of celtic. Archaic Portuguese developed in the 5th Century AD, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Germanic invasions, called barbarian, as a Romanic dialect, the so-called Portuguese Galician, which differed from other Iberian Romance languages.
So, basically, if you already know one of these majorities languages you’ll learn more easly the others from the same group, because is the same structure. You just need to know more vocabulary!
Well, this is like, portuguese 101. Let me know what else should I talk about on my posts!