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To: Volsi Mimir who wrote (5745)	5/10/2000 11:28:00 PM
From: Volsi Mimir	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13018

Language Lesson Andre Maurois has recounted an incident between soldiers who met in the trenches during World War I. A Portuguese soldier offered to teach a French soldier a thousand words of Portuguese in less than one minute for 100 francs. The French soldier accepted. "Look," said the Portuguese,"all the words you have in French that end in -tion are the same in Portuguese, except that they end in -cao, which you should pronounce -saong. There are over a thousand of them and they are all feminine gender, just like French. That took less than a minute, didn't it? One hundred francs, please." Since English is basically a language derived from both French-Latin and Germanic Anglo-Saxon, it has more common words in two separate language groups than any other modern language. Thousands of English words can easily be converted into French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese. Thousands of others, derived from Anglo-Saxon, have their cognates in German, Dutch, and the Dutch-related languages Flemish and Afrikaans, as well as in the Scandinavian languages, and, with only a little effort, can be identified like recognizable features in family portraits. -- Many English words of Romance origin can be changed according to their endings into the Romance or Latin languages. English words ending in -tion, such as "nation," "situation," "revolution," and hundreds of others, have exact equivalents in French and are spelled the same, except for some written accents: nation, situation, revolution. (In French as well as the other Latin languages these are feminine gender.) In Spanish the -tion words end in -cion: nacion, situacion, revolucion. In Italian the ending is -zione: nazione, situazione, rivoluzione. In Portuguese, as pointed out by the Portuguese soldier to the gullible poilu, the ending is -cao: nacao, situacao, revolucao. -- Multisyllable English nouns ending in -ty, such as "fraternity ," "liberty ," "society ," become French by changing the -ty to -te, to -dad in Spanish, to -to in Italian, and to -dade in Portuguese. ENGLISH.... FRENCH ...SPANISH...... ITALIAN.... PORTUGUESE fraternity fraternite. fraternidad. fraternitd. fraternidade liberty.... liberte... libertad.... libertd.... liberdade society.... societe... sociedad.... societd.... sociedade Words that end in -able or -ible in English can be turned into French or Spanish by using the same endings, into Italian by changing the endings to -abile or -ibile, and into portuguese by using -vel. FRENCH ....SPANISH.... ITALIAN... PORTUGUESE possible.. posible.... possibile. possivel probable.. probable... probabile. probovel -- ~Native Tongues Charles Berlitz