I think Catalan is the prettiest of Latin's surviving children. Catalan may not survive for long.
There's a new wave of cultural conservation sweeping the world. So it's probably safe for a while, considering that millions of people speak it at home.
I felt Catalan was closer to Italian than it was to Spanish French or Portuguese. I did hear the sound of all four Languages in Catalan and felt that Catalan was in between them all.
I agree that it is somewhere between them, but having some familiarity with all four my impression is that it's very close to Spanish and Portuguese and farther from French and Italian. I don't know any Occitan but it's said to be closely related, which makes sense. With my moderate fluency in Spanish and passing familiarity with Portuguese I was able to understand everything everyone said in Catalan. And my Catalonian friends said that when they went to Portugal they found that they and the Portuguese could understand each other rather easily.
I found some web site where Catalan speakers also backed the viewpoint that Catalan was closer to Italian than it was to the other major languages.
The Catalonians have a history of bitterness with the Spaniards, so it's a reflex to distance themselves from everything Spanish.
For me I just meant the sound of the language not the vocabulary or grammar.
Phonetics are not a good measure because they can change so rapidly. You would have a very hard time understanding someone speaking Elizabethan English (assuming you're American), but you can read Shakespeare with little difficulty. For that matter, you'd probably be even more bewildered by some of the modern regional dialects of England or Scotland.
The phonetics of Spanish and Portuguese--especially Brazilian Portuguese--have diverged to the extent that a foreigner would probably not guess that they're closely related. On paper the similarity is obvious, but not in speech. Spanish
siete, ocho, nueve are
sete, oito, nove in print. But in Lisbon they're pronounced
set, oit, nov and in Rio they're
setchi, oitu, novi.
The people at the web site were basing their opinion on being able to understand each other. Some Italian guy said understanding bits of Catalan is easier than understanding bits of Spanish for him.
The phonemes are more familiar. Catalan does not have the TH and KH sounds of Castilian.
According to certain linguists Occitan should be included in Gallo-Romance, and according to others both Occitan and the Catalan should be considered Gallo-Romance. However, other linguists consider Catalan as part of the Ibero-Romance languages.
I lose my patience with linguists who labor so furiously over taxonomy at any level below the family. Of course it would be millennial news if we discovered that, say, the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic families have a common ancestor. But to argue over whether Catalan is closer to Occitan, French or Spanish may simply be judging the relative influence on the language of three powerful medieval families whose lords emigrated from three different places due to war or patronage.
Take Modern English. A Hungarian friend looked at a page of an English dictionary and said, "It's obvious that your language was once a dialect of French."
