Carl W. Brown wrote:
>
> Because Brazil produces a large number of TV programming and Movies the
> Iberian language is being influenced by the Brazilian idioms.
But Brazilian TV and movies that are given in the rest of Latin America
are translated to Spanish, they are not left in Portuguese, are they?
> Some Portuguese has even been borrowed from French such as the pronoun for
> the third person.
That I cannot understand.
There are a number of pronoun for the third person:
- nominative (il/elle/ils/elles)
- nomitative with emphasis (lui/eux)
- accusative (le/la/les)
- reflexive (se)
- dative (lui/leur)
etc.
Most of them are in straight line from Roman/Latin, and appear in
similar form in the other Romance languages.
> However, Catalan is another candidate if it were not spoken by
> a small number of people.
Catalan is by many ways an archaic language. Furthermore, there is
a notable difference between the written form (which is stable) and
the spocken form (which enjoys important variations, and the way it
is spocken in Barcelona is by no mean the most alike to the written
form). Due to political reasons, it is *not* advisable as a lingua
franca in Spain (this is like if you ask Canada to unify on speaking
French...) And while my Catalan-speaking friends do understand
Italian without too much effort, the reverse is not that easy, so
I think that they are more helped by their proper bi-linguism than
by any proper feature of Catalan.
As you note, the number of present speakers is a key feature. That
is a big point for English, of course.
Antoine
