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axegon_01/22/20251 replyview on HN

I speak Spanish, but it's a different story there: "dos doses, zero treses y un cinco". Numbers can have plurals, which from what I understand is not the case in Italian. Weird cause the languages are very similar in general - I can somewhat easily understand Italian, particularly reading. Listening - not so much. But as far as grammar, they seem to be almost identical. Same with French grammar though Spanish has the equivalent of the English present continuous tense and French does not(also worth mentioning that I don't speak French either, that's what my mum has told me).


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Tainnor01/22/2025

Linguistically, Spanish and French are Western Romance languages and technically should be closer to each other than Spanish and Italian. However, French also underwent certain significant changes (possibly due to Germanic and/or Celtic influence) that most other Romance languages didn't, hence why it seems more "foreign". But there are a lot of common things between French and Spanish that Italian doesn't share (e.g. the way plurals are formed with "s", or particular sound changes, like adding "e" in front of certain consonant clusters, c.f. Spanish "estrella", French "étoile", but Italian "stella")

> But as far as grammar, they seem to be almost identical.

Apart from the different plurals, probably the biggest difference to me seems to be that Spanish has three different past tenses, including indefinido, while the corresponding tenses in Italian and French (passato remoto / passé simple) have completely fallen out of use except of highly formal contexts (or, in the case of Italian, certain Southern dialects). Instead you'd just use the perfect.

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