• Itzz Me
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    2 months ago

    by knowing spanish and guessing at cognates

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      I don’t know Spanish but I wouldn’t have made the connection to French sans (the only Romance language in which I knew how to say “without”).

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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        2 months ago

        Not surprised - Latin “sine” without became a mess in the descendants, that’s why they don’t resemble each other much:

        • Portuguese (sem), Sardinian (sine) - plain inheritance
        • Spanish (sin) - likely re-borrowed, otherwise it would be *sen
        • Catalan (sense), Occitan (sense) and French (sans) - partially mixed “sine” with “absens” (absent, away, missing), so it got a random -s out of nowhere
        • Italian (senza) - similar to the above with “absentia” (absence, awayness). -tia → -za is regular in IT.
    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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      2 months ago

      It wouldn’t help much in this case as ES “sin” /sin/ and PT “sem” /sẽ/ already look quite different from each other.

      • Itzz Me
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        2 months ago

        i thought it wasn’t too far of a leap myself (both start with s, end with nasal), and being able to understand the rest of the sentence was also helpful

        you did note the pronunciations in there though, and to be fair, i’d probably struggle more with understanding the portuguese if it was spoken out loud instead