User:Rivera5nine0

Question
I have always been told that someone who knows Spanish will be able to understand Portuguese and vise versa, but may not be able to speak it back, and I have always wanted to know why that was.

When Did I Begin to Wonder
I began to think about this around the age of 12. My mom had a co-worker who had children around my age and I would often stay over her house. One day, she decided to sing a Portuguese lullaby and while she was singing to us I realized that some of the words sounded familiar. Later on in life, it was my mom who told me that Portuguese could be understood by people who knew Spanish during a conversation in which her co-worker was mentioned. This was the first time I thought about it but I never took the time to find out why and this struck me as the perfect opportunity to do so.

Lullaby
Recently I asked my mom's friend, Bia, for the words to the Portuguese lullaby, which I found out was named 'Nana, Nene', as well as a translation of it and here they are:

Nana, Nene

Nana, nene

Na casa do vovo

Vovo no tien cochao

O nene dorme no chao Sleep, Baby

Sleep, baby

At grandpa’s house

Grandpa doesn’t have a mattress

The baby sleeps on the ground.

Similarities in Lullaby
Immediately, I noticed words that looked alot like words in the Spanish dictionary and that also have the same meaning.

This is a short lullaby and there are already a large amount of words that are common in both languages. The spelling maybe slightly off but someone familiar with Spanish will be able to identify it.

Arabic Influence
Both, Portuguese and Spanish, have been influenced by the Arabic language due to the Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula, which consists of modern day Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar. Circa 711,Visigothic Christian Hispania( the name of the region at teh time) was invaded by an army of 2,000 Arabs and 10,000 Berbers. The campaign to bring the Iberian Peninsula under Islamic rule lasted about 8 years and by the year 1000 most of the peninsula had become "Arabized" or "Islamized". This helps us understand why Spanish and Portuguese have Arabic infuenced, since they were both thought to have been created before this time.

Reasons
A main reason that Portuguese and Spanish are so similar and closely related is that they are both Romance Languages, meaning that they were both derived from Latin.However, this could not be the only reason because there are more Romance languages and none of the others are as closely related. Another possible reason is that the countries that these languages originated in border each other. Upon further research, I discovered that both of these languages originated in northern Spain, which was a huge step forward in finding the answer to my question. The original location of these languages was so close that these languages were probably very closely related if not identical. The only reason that they are seperate languages today is the seperation of Spain and Portugal, which at the time, did not exist. The land was ruled in areas by certain groups of people. This geographic seperation would explain the similarities and differences in these languages and their distribution today. Spain was heavily involved in the colonization of the southern United States, such as Florida, and the Carribean which partly explains why Spanish is spoken in the Carribean and Latin American countries. Portugal was able to colonize in South America in countries like Brazil and today, Portuguese is the national language of Brazil.