How do the person who invented spanish use english to help understand spanish languauge?
To me I think they look or examine a word in Spanish and compare it to English and see if the Spanish word look likes and sounds like an English word`
- pacifico = pacific
- oceano = ocean
3 Answers
Words like these are called "cognates", words that you can recognize due to their similarity between languages. Mostly, these are words of Latin or Greek origin.
You must take care, though, because there are words that are very similar, but do not carry the same meaning. These are "false friends", and can really throw your meaning off.
A couple of examples:
Asistir means "to attend", not to help or assist.
Éxito means "success", not an egress or "exit"
You have to think that with the internet we get to be copycats.
hmmm?
Well, no one person invented Spanish. It's more a matter of both English and Spanish evolving from Greek and Latin roots. That naturally resulted in quite a few words that sound similar and have similar meanings, i.e., cognates. It was not a conscious decision on any individual's part to have it turn out like that.
