Marah wrote:Grammatically speaking they share features like "ne/en" "ci/y".
On the other hand, Spanish and Italian are pro-drop while French (which has half the number of distinctive personal endings in most conjugations) isn't. French also uses 2P for politeness whereas Standard Italian agrees with Standard Spanish in using a 3S form.
Marah wrote:The difference between passé composé/ passé simple is comparable to the difference between passato prossimo/ passato remoto. Spanish and its Pretérito perfecto compuesto/Pretérito perfecto simple. use a different concept.
My impression is that both Spanish and Italian show a lot of variation in this area. The perfect is most common in north-central and northeastern Peninsular dialects of Spanish and northern dialects of Italian whereas in Galicia, southern Spain, and Latin America on the one hand and southern Italy on the other, the simple past forms are far more frequent. There is, as far as I know, no comparable variation within French.
French and Italian share a distinction between "be" and "have" verbs in using forming auxiliary tenses , whereas Spanish only uses "have" (French "je suis venu" Italian "sono venuto" compared to Spanish "he venido").
On the other hand, Spanish and Italian share a distinction between a copula verb (
ser/
essere) and a verb of position (
estar/
stare) that is lacking in French.
Marah wrote:And quite frankly it makes sense that Italian is closer to French, they're neighboring countries, they're more likely to have similar grammar/vocabulary.
Neighbouring countries, but not neighbouring
varieties. It's only within the last century that Standard French and Standard Italian have come to brush up against each other at the border; historically, the native varieties here were Occitan on one side of the border and Gallo-Romance on the other, whose close affinities are immediately self-evident. Also, geographic proximity isn't everything; southern Italy was long dominated by first the Aragonese and then the Spanish crown, which created a channel for mutual influence between the two peninsulas.
Moreover, although the position of Tuscan, the basis for Standard Italian, is relatively central within Italy (making it a natural choice for a koiné), the same can't be said of Francien, spoken in the far north of the country. The only varieties more peripheral to the Gallo-Romance
Sprachraum are Norman, Picard, and Walloon. Similarly, Castilian occupies a relatively central position in Iberia and shows the influence of having been a koiné between varieties of the northern and southern parts of the peninsula on the one hand and the eastern and western ones on the other. (As I pointed out in the recent thread on Standard Italian, koineïsation tends to disfavour more progressive features.) A lot of attention gets paid to Eastern vs Western Romance, but core vs periphery is at least as important when talking about common features.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons