spanish

  1. Maciamo

    Common English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words of Arabic origin

    Wikipedia has list of words of Arabic origin by language. But these lists are typically long and include plenty of rare and arcane words, or words that are specific to Arabic culture or to Islam. Other words came from Persian (e.g. assassin, aubergine, candy, caravan, cheque, chess, lemon, lime...
  2. Maciamo

    Different suffixes in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese

    If you already speak one Romance language, learning another one is going to be relatively easy. The grammar is basically the same and over 80% of the vocabulary is shared. The lexical similarity is even 89% between Spanish and Portuguese, and also 89% between Italian and French. But there are...
  3. Maciamo

    Spanish word with one letter added, changed or missing

    Mutations are not exclusive to genes. Languages mutate too and often in a similar way as genes, with just single letter changes (like SNPs in genetics). This happens because humans aren't perfect. They mishear words or mispronounce them. It was all the more frequent before universal education...
  4. Maciamo

    Spanish, Portuguese and French words that changed gender from Latin

    A great advantage of being a native speaker of a Romance language is that the gender (masculine or feminine) is the same in over 99% of cases in other Romance languages, which makes learning them much easier than for speakers of non-Romance languages (and English, which is half-Romance but lost...
  5. Maciamo

    Spanish words that acquired an a- at the beginning (unlike other Romance languages)

    One striking characteristic of Spanish language is the number of words that start with 'a'. Many among those are Arabic loan words (adobe, ajedrez, alcade, aldea, alquiler), including words that are an amalgamation of the Arabic preposition al (the) + the word itself (e.g. albahaca, alcázar...
  6. Maciamo

    Spanish words with corrupted meaning

    I am currently reading a book in Spanish and watching a few series in Spanish as well. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to analyse a bit the language as I came across words that seemed to have undergone a change of meaning from their Latin root. There are of course many words like that...
  7. Maciamo

    The disappearance of the Spanish 'f' sound

    Anyone who speaks Spanish and at least one other Romance language will probably have noticed that many f sounds have disappeared entirely in Spanish, usually at the beginning of words. This atavistic 'f' has been replaced by a silent 'h', which at one point during the Middle Ages might have been...
  8. A

    How similar are Spaniards and Southern French people? Common ancestry?

    Are the haplogroups for both groups nearly identical? What differences are there, if any, for both y DNA and even maternal DNA? Caesar said the aquitanians were essentially Spaniards, is that true even today when it comes to genetics and linguistics and culture? Thanks
  9. A

    Spanish/Iberian/Southwestern European genetic influence and haplogroups in Sicily?

    Hi all, as you can probably already tell, I'm a little surprised by my DNA results judging by my previous thread. None the less, I'm roughly speaking half Italian (Sicilian and Italian) and half 'American' (French) and Eastern European. Although my DNA results have shown that I'm mostly...
  10. Jovialis

    Teotihuacan May Have Been Renamed by the Spanish

    MEXICO CITY, MEXICO—According to an Associated Press report, archaeologist Veronica Ortega of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History thinks the city known as Teotihuacan, or “city of the gods,” may have originally been called Teohuacan, or “city of the sun,” by the Aztecs. Some...
  11. Maciamo

    You know you've been in Spain too long when...

    After posting similar threads about Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan, I am completing the series of non-English-speaking countries in which I have lived. I am planning to do Britain later. Feel free to comment and add more lines about culture shock in Spain. :satisfied: You know...
  12. A. Tamar Chabadi

    More Early Neolithic mtDNA from Spain

    Ancient DNA from an Early Neolithic Iberian population_MtDNA Ancient DNA from an Early Neolithic Iberian population supports a pioneer colonization by first farmers C. GAMBA,* E. FERNA´ NDEZ,*† M. TIRADO,* M. F. DEGUILLOUX,‡ M. H. PEMONGE,‡ P. UTRILLA,§ M. EDO, – M . MOLIST , * * R . RASTEIRO...
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