Are Catalan and Romanian really similar?

BarcelonaThe Romanian presidential elections have placed in prime time Speeches and posters in Romanian. Perhaps some astute spectators have thought that Catalan and Romanian sound quite similar. Beyond a certain familiarity, can a Catalan and a Romanian understand each other speaking their own language? Are they two mutually incomprehensible languages? Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Barcelona, José Enrique Gargallo, is quick to add insult to injury: "We are occasionally dazzled by purely orthographic coincidences, but I, who understand and speak Romanian, continually find that those who don't know it don't understand it when someone says a sentence."

The ear, however, doesn't deceive us. "The intuitive feeling is that all Romance languages are similar, which is purely logical," says the professor, who places French as an exception. However, he is sure that the similarities between Romanian and Catalan are "magnified." "Italian is a reality very similar to both Catalan and Spanish, and it is the easiest language to understand for speakers of other Romance languages, because it is a very conservative language, which has maintained the roots of Latin words (home, beautiful, land, mother) and we also have a lot of cultural contact," he points out.

Romanian, on the other hand, is a Romance island in a sea of languages from other families from which it has also been contaminated—Germanic and Slavic languages, Turkish, Neo-Greek, Hungarian—, which has made "the Romance of Romance." For example, there are amusing coincidences with the sound of Catalan when saying the numbers from 1 to 10: one, doi, three, patrol, five, șase, suitable, opt, new, zece. Instead, the tens would be some praise, doisprezece, tresprezece, that is, unrecognizable to a Catalan speaker, because the base is Romance but the structure is a copy of Slavic (they count one out of ten, two out of ten...). In fact, if Romanian sounds familiar it may be because it has five vowels and the neutral vowel, and a ɨ which is its most unique mark.

On the other hand, the isolation in relation to the rest of Romania has made forms survive in its speech that in the Iberian Peninsula would be considered ancient, such as fruits to say beautiful, beautiful. In fact, if you try to read a newspaper, the feeling is that it's a kind of Latin. The evolution of words has also had very different paths compared to the rest of the Romance languages. For example, to say world they say lume, when in the rest of the languages it would be the root of light.

Wikipedia states that Romanian is 73% similar to Catalan and 77% similar to Italian. Some say that Catalan and Romanian share 2,000 words. But the professor at the University of Barcelona considers this "excessive" and not very important, for practical purposes, because they are individual words that simply have the same etymological root. For example, there are words that are spelled and sound practically the same: egg, none, nose and fire. Then there are also those who have a withdrawal to Catalan words because they are pan-Romance, for example words from the basic lexicon, like pain (bread), canine (dog, ca), mother (sea), nails (nail). And finally, there is a huge amount of vocabulary that is not Latin but from the surrounding peoples.

Gargallo, a linguistics professor for 43 years, speaking of all the state Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, French, Italian, Romanian) and even Asturian—warning, because there are arguably around forty Romance languages; in fact, defining languages is one of the biggest headaches for Romance scholars—states that "if you have no idea about Romanian and no context is given, it's difficult to understand."