What Slavic language sounds most like European Portuguese?

[taco.fifitib]

What Slavic language sounds phonetically most like European Portuguese? Croatian, Bulgarian, Russian or another Slavic language??? Or possibly a non-slavic Eastern European language such as Romanian or Albanian?

[Rivaldo]

Who dares to answer it?

[Levike]

Obviously Polish, duh, because vowels are funny and consonants are many. Plus that sh-sh-sh.

Brazilian Portuguese is more like Romanian with a Moldovan accent,
or maybe even Russian, but in any case with very long vowels and the a lot of s's.

But I would best describe European Portuguese as a grumpy Polish guy
who tries to read an Italian text in a Romanian accent, obviously unsuccessfully,
while eating random vowels and randomly adding sh-sh-sh at the end of almost every second word.

And I'm as sincere as I can be.

[Luís]

This is a very subjective question. In terms of prosody I don't think Polish and (European) Portuguese sound the least bit alike.

If you look at individual phonemes, Polish is indeed the only Slavic language I know of with nasal vowels. [ɨ] is also present in both languages. Not sure if that's enough to say they "sound similar", though.

[SoFlaTom]

Another correspondence: both languages have an issue with /l/... it regularly /systematically becomes [w] in Portuguese (European, too?) in syllable coda. In Polish, in many positions, not just syllable coda, it has undergone this transition as well, especially when at the end of a masculine adjective or after a consonant, to the point where a new letter was developed just for this differentiation.

[PiotrR]

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO

[Luís]

What's transcribed /ɨ/ in Polish and European Portuguese are two different vowels, and the only thing they have in common is that they're unrounded.

Maybe, but to most people I guess they sound pretty much the same. To me, Portuguese "te" and Polish "ty" are almost undistinguishable. Also, even if Wikipedia uses /ɯ/ to describe the sound, I rarely ever see it used in Portuguese materials.

Another correspondence: both languages have an issue with /l/... it regularly /systematically becomes [w] in Portuguese (European, too?) in syllable coda.

No, it never happens in European Portuguese. It's always [ɫ].

[PiotrR]

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO

[Luís]

Yeah, I guess that's possible. After all, it's not exactly the most stable phoneme in the language and most of the time it even gets deleted and not pronounced at all. Some old Portuguese reference grammars even transcribe it as /ə/ ( ), something that seems completely off to me...

[PiotrR]

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO

[Prowler]

No idea. I often get told that I sound Russian(as in Slavic. All Slavic languages sound like Russian to most people, it seems).

I remember watching a Bulgarian video on Youtube once and it sounded fairly close, I guess. The pronunciation of certain consonants, at least.

[הענט]

Russian and Bulgarian. EP doesn't sound anything like Polish.

[mōdgethanc]

Portuguese gets compared to Polish because they both have nasal vowels, but that's it. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a South Slavic language like Bulgarian or Macedonian or something.

Polish has way too many affricates to sound like Portuguese (unless it's Brazilian, naturaumentchi).

[TeneReef]

To me it sounds like Bulgarian (European Portuguese) or Polish (Brazilian Portuguese).
It does not sound at all like Croatian or Macedonian (5 Spanish-like vowel languages with no open
and close vowels, and no vowel reductions or nasal vowels).

[TeneReef]

No, it never happens in European Portuguese. It's always [ɫ].

Why does Cape Verdean Portuguese (not /only/ the creole) has the front ''Spanish'' L? [l̪ ]
I heard it in Slovenian too (in words like val ''wave'')



Cape Verdean and Spanish L: [l̪ ]
Brazilian Portuguese L [l] (at the end of syllables [w])
European Portuguese L [l] (at the end of syllables [ɫ].)


l̪ dental lateral approximant
ɫ voiced velarized alveolar lateral approximant
l in between

[vijayjohn]

I don't think I ever realized there was any notable difference between the Spanish <l> and the Portuguese <l>. There definitely is between the American <l> and the alveolar lateral approximant I hear in pretty much every other language that has one.

[mōdgethanc]

I don't think I ever realized there was any notable difference between the Spanish <l> and the Portuguese <l>. There definitely is between the American <l> and the alveolar lateral approximant I hear in pretty much every other language that has one.

You never noticed the EP /l/ is all dark and Russian-sounding? Maybe you didn't if you focus more on BP, which only has /l/ and /w/, Polish-style.

[vijayjohn]

Oh whoops, yeah, I didn't mean the whole allophonic variation thing. My mistake. I just meant that I never noticed that Portuguese had [l] except in Cape Verde, where TeneReef says they and Spanish-speakers have [l̪] instead.

[TeneReef]

You can compare the Spanish [l̪] and the ( Brazilian ) Portuguese [l] here,
the example word: Daniela , they sound pretty different:

http://youtu.be/zSyHoTDnbZg?t=21s

Daniela
as pronounced by Gabriela Spanic: [Dan'jel̪a]
as pronounced by Sílvio Santos: [Dan'jɛɫɐ]

Cape Verdean [l̪] can be heard here:
http://www.rtc.cv/index.php?paginas=47&id_cod=31513

[vijayjohn]

But that could just be the allophonic variation, as opposed to an actual dental [l̪]. I mean, how do you know that Spanish and Cape Verdean Portuguese actually have a dental lateral, as opposed to an alveolar one that is never velarized? Would the <l>s in Spanish la and Portuguese lá be different?