Do Spanish and Italian understand 40 percent of what they are saying?

[Vivaldi]

Do Spanish and Italian understand 40 percent of what they are saying?

[Googlemyahoo]

What was wrong with the one armed Italian?

Speech impediment

[Vivaldi]

Who is he?

[Googlemyahoo]

Its a joke. Italians can’t speak without waving their hands around 😕😀

[ODC2112]

The answer is more complex than it appears. In terms of vocabulary there are very similar words, about 82% of words are of common root, however there are many false friends. However, it must be borne in mind that there is much more similarity between Italian and French, which share a vocabulary with common roots for 89%. In addition, unlike Spanish, French has grammar in common with Italian.

Another interesting concept is that of mutual intelligibility. It is the relative ease with which speakers of two different languages ​​can understand each other's language without having to learn it. This occurs especially between languages ​​belonging to the same family, which provide a certain degree of similarity between grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, facilitating intercomprehension.

Intelligibility can also be asymmetrical, when understanding does not occur with the same ease in both directions. Spanish speakers claim to have difficulty understanding Portuguese (mostly spoken) while Portuguese speakers claim to understand Spanish very easily. Even in understanding Italian, Spanish speakers have greater difficulty than Italians seem to have in understanding Spanish.

Spaniards find it easy to speak Italian with southern accents, or to speak southern dialects.

Sharing the same origin, Spanish and Italian share words and structures originating from the Latin language. This is where mutual intelligibility and this close kinship can mislead us, mistaking the affinity for an excessive ease that leads us to blunders (the infamous Italian usage "just add an s at the end" to speak Spanish) or to fakes friends. Indeed, it is when languages ​​are more similar that it is sometimes more difficult to learn them, precisely because one relies on an intuition that often turns out to be wrong!

A classic example is Burro, Italian for butter which in Spanish is donkey, or Acero which in Italian is maple, in Spanish it is steel.

[Anonymous]

I've heard the languages are very similar.