
Originally Posted by
Duarte
About the mutual intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese and about the hardest difficulty of hispanophones to understand the lusophones than the other way around, I found the following explanation:
‘Why do Spanish speakers find it more difficult to understand Portuguese?
Have you noticed that Spanish speakers do not understand our language as we assimilate theirs? There is a linguistic explanation
The explanation for this lies in what linguistics calls asymmetric intelligibility, when speakers of different but related languages understand each other without extraordinary efforts. In general, they are languages from regions that are geographically close or have a dialectal continuity, when one or more dialects of a language mix without geographical borders — as is the case of the Romance languages of Portugal, Spain, France and Italy.
But, in asymmetric intelligibility, although both languages are intelligible, generally one group has greater difficulty in understanding than the other. It can be at the time of reading, speaking, or writing.
The explanation for the difficulty of Spaniards in understanding us possibly lies in the fact that in Portuguese, writing often does not reflect the way it is spoken. While in Spanish some letters, for example a, e, i, o, u, r, n, s, have the same pronunciation, in Portuguese their sound varies depending on the context and position within a word.
Another factor is that we have more words than Spaniards—somewhere around 400,000 versus around 100,000. It also tells us that we are much more exposed to Spanish than speakers of that language are to Portuguese. Spanish is, after all, the second most spoken language in the world, with around 400 million adherents, while Portuguese is used by no more than 250 million people.
In addition to Portuguese and Spanish, other languages have mutual intelligibility (when both fully understand each other) or asymmetric, among them: Danish, Norwegian and Swedish; Russian and Ukrainian, Malaysian and Indonesian.’