Answering the Unanswered Linguistics Question on the Film 'Arrival'
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At the beginning of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 masterpiece Arrival, Professor Louise Banks, portrayed by Amy Adams, enters a university auditorium to find it almost empty save a handful of distracted students. “Where is everyone?” she asks. Nobody responds. Unperturbed, Banks begins her lecture, still unpacking her teaching materials, “today, we’re talking about Portuguese… and why it sounds so different to the other Romance languages,” she adds, removing her laptop from its sleeve. “The story of Portuguese begins in the Kingdom of Galicia…” A student’s phone vibrates, briefly interrupting the lesson. Banks continues… “In the Middle Ages… when a language was seen as an expression of art.” Another phone starts to ring. Followed by the beep of yet another student’s phone. “Any news you want to share?” Banks asks, ever so slightly miffed. A girl replies in a worried voice, “Dr Banks, can you turn the TV to a news channel?” A phone rings.
Image: Heptapod Language, Arrival
To avoid any spoilers, this is as far as my audio description will go. Needless to say, however, that this moment marks a pivotal point in the movie, which is all well and good, except for the fact that we are left dangling for an answer to Banks’ intriguing linguistic question. For the perpetually curious, this article aims to provide an answer to that question, namely “Why does Portuguese sound so different to the other Romance languages?” With the added caveat, that although it does possess a distinctive phonology, there are other Romance languages that do share some of the same features–– and for similar reasons.
As Banks correctly notes, the story of Portuguese begins in the Kingdom of Galicia, which was founded in 409 CE by the Suebic king, Hermeric. The Suebi were a large group of related Germanic peoples who had originated in Germania at the time of the Roman Empire, before taking control of the former Roman province of Gallaecia in the north-west corner of the Iberian Peninsula.
Over the next millennium and a half, the territory passed through the hands of several different ruling powers. After the Suebi, came the Visigoths, another group of Germanic peoples who, after a stint in control, were themselves ousted from power. Galicia then became incorporated into the Kingdom of Asturias in 718, forming part of a small native stronghold against the invading Umayyad Moors. This is generally considered to be the beginning of the Spanish Reconquista, an approximately 780 year-long-period of territorial and religious struggle between the allied Christian Iberian kingdoms and the Muslim Moors.
It was around the time that the Kingdom of Galicia was formed in the fifth century CE, that the variety of Latin spoken in the region began to diverge enough from other neighbouring Romance languages to be considered a separate language, Galician-Portuguese. Galician-Portuguese, sometimes known as Old Galician or Old Portuguese for political reasons, matured over the centuries into a rich literary language. Over time, this language would bifurcate into two separate sister-languages, Portuguese and Galician, which are still spoken today in Portugal and the community of Galicia, Spain. However, prior to the advent of Latin with the Roman forces in the third century BCE, the area was home to a confederacy of Celtic-speaking tribes known as the Gallaeci. It was after these pre-Roman inhabitants that the Romans named their province Gallaecia.
Image: Gallaecia
The Gallaeci, unlike the invading Romans, were Celtic-speaking peoples whose language was closely related to the more easterly Continental Celtic language, Celtiberian. Another, possibly Celtic-speaking peoples, known as the Lusitani, also occupied territory comprising parts of present-day Portugal and Spain. Under pressure from Vulgar Latin, these Celtic languages gradually faded into oblivion, but nevertheless exerted a lasting impact on the varieties of Latin spoken in the region. When the Gallaeci, and other Celtic tribes, ceased to speak their native tongues in favour of Latin, they naturally spoke the new language with a “foreign” inflection. The phenomenon whereby one language influences, or is influenced by another through contact is known by linguists as a “stratum”. Latin, as the supplanting language, was the “superstratum”, while Gallaecian formed the “substratum”. During this language shift, Gallaecian continued to influence Latin through the transfer of loanwords, place names, as well as grammatical and phonological elements. It is these phonological features–– or speech sounds–– which are the key to answering Professor Banks’ question: Why does Portuguese sound so different to other Romance languages?
When the Gallaeci, and other Celtic tribes, ceased to speak their native tongues in favour of Latin, they naturally spoke the new language with a “foreign” inflection.
To answer this question, we first need to understand the reasons why the phonology–– or sound system–– of Portuguese, compared to say, Italian, stands out as being distinct among the phonologies of other Romance languages. What compelled the question to be asked in the first place? To better understand the impetus for asking this question, the logical place to start would be to compare and contrast the phonemes (sound units) of Portuguese with those of its Romance cousins.
Portuguese has one of the richest vowel phonologies of any of the Romance languages, containing both oral and nasal vowels, diphthong and triphthongs. While Portuguese shares a staggering 89% lexical similarity with Spanish (85% with Catalan and 75% with French), the two languages differ a lot when it comes to their phonologies. This phonetical difference is likely explained by the stronger Celtic substratum in Portuguese in comparison to Spanish. Good evidence in support of this hypothesis can be found in the surviving Celtic languages, such as Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, which all possess a rich variety of nasal vowels. In terms of its phonology, Portuguese bears a closer resemblance to Gallo-Romance languages like French and Gallo-Italic languages like Genoese, than it does to either Spanish or Italian. The similarity between Portuguese and French phonology can also be explained by the presence of Celtic, namely Gaulish speakers, in Gaul (France) at the time of the Roman invasion. In a similar dynamic, Vulgar Latin and Gaulish formed a superstratum/substratum relationship, influencing its phonology in comparable ways.
Overall, Portuguese has a considerably larger number of phonemes than Spanish, which might explain why Spanish speakers struggle to understand their Iberian neighbours despite sharing a very similar vocabulary and grammar. While Standard Spanish has a total of 5 phonemic vowels (although Murcian and East Andalusian dialects have as many as 8-10), Portuguese, on the other hand, has 7 to 9 oral vowels in addition to 5 phonemic nasal vowels. Moreover, while phonetic nasalization does happen in Spanish, this phenomenon only occurs between nasal consonants or in front of a syllable-final nasal consonant (/n/ and /m/) and is not as distinctive as in Portuguese. In addition, Portuguese contains a rare phoneme, the ‘close back unrounded vowel’ ⟨ɯ⟩, which only appears in a handful of languages, including Korean, Turkish, and intriguingly, in the Ulster dialect of Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
Of these features, what sets Portuguese apart from Spanish the most is its pervasive nasalization, which together with its ‘voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant fricative’ (“sh”, as in ship [⟨ʃ⟩]), compels people to liken it to a Slavic language like Polish when they hear it spoken. Nasalization is a prominent feature of Portuguese and started to occur between the 6th and the 7th centuries, under the influence of Gallaecian. These nasal sounds persist in modern Cetlic languages, like Welsh, which has 3 voiced and 3 voiceless nasal consonants. French also has nasal vowels as well as the Gallo-Italic, Lombard language of Italy and Switzerland, likely from a Celtic substratum too. In these languages, nasal vowels are indicated by a silent <n> or <m> after the vowel, as in French “la main” (the hand), where the “n” is not pronounced. This is true of Portuguese “bom” (good) from Latin “bonum”, but when a nasal vowel precedes another vowel, Portuguese indicates the nasal with a tilde (~) as in ã, õ. While Latin “manum” became “la main” in French, in Portuguese the word developed a nasal diphthong and became “mão”. Incidentally, if you take a closer look at the small tilde over the <a>, then you can just about make out the missing <n> retained in French, albeit in highly stylized form.
To summarise, why does Portuguese sound so different to the other Romance languages? Well, for the simple reason that it emerged from a brand of Latin which was adopted by a group of speakers who had, for centuries, spoken a Celtic language which had many different phonological qualities. For this reason, when Galicia-Portuguese emerged in this former Gallaeci region, it sounded different to other Romance languages which arose in areas which had no such substrata. The reason why French sounds more similar to Portuguese than does the neighbouring Spanish, is because of the presence of a Celtic (and Germanic) substratum too.
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