A friend asked me some time ago how different Catalan and Castilian really are. I should have a pat answer to this question, but I don't. (When I'm feeling glib, I quote the Spanish saying "To make a Spanish word Catalan, cut it in half".) It's hard to sum up differences between related speech varieties in a concise manner and labels like "separate language" or "dialect" are crude and misleading.
The best I can really do, then, is to toss out examples and let people draw their own conclusions. I can't remember what example sentence I tossed out for my friend (who speaks some Spanish and, therefore, has a basis for comparison), but I think it had
vaig veure ("I saw") in it, since I like the sound of it so much. The tricky thing is, of course, that it's almost as easy to come up with a Catalan sentence that's hardly different from its Castilian equivalent as it is to find one that's completely unintelligible.
I recently finished reading
El capitán Alatriste (soon to be a major motion picture starring Viggo Mortensen!), which is an enjoyable little homage to the Golden Age of Spain and the picaresque literature it produced. The lead character is a strong silent type, which leads to enough shrugging of shoulders to bring to mind
a recent Onion article.
The Castilian phrase is
(se) encogió los hombros.
Hombro is a regular development from Classical Latin
humerus, a word which doesn't survive in more lexically "progressive" Romance varieties. The verb is a derivative of Latin
colligere "collect" and means "shrink, contract" (literally, to "pull in").
One of the many times I came across the phrase, it occurred to me that I had no idea what the Catalan equivalent was. The cognate development of
colligere is
collir, which is narrower in meaning than Spanish
coger; it mainly refers to the act of harvesting.
Encollir, the form answering to
encoger, is even rarer and isn't found in the modern standard language.
What would the Catalans say for "He shrugged his shoulders"?
Va arronsar les espatlles. Arronsar also means "contract", but it comes from an Arabic rather than Latin root. (
Romz "wink, tic".) AFAICT, there's no Castilian cognate. (
Ronzar is onomatopoetic in origin and refers to a very different action.) Catalan also goes with French (
épaule) and Italian (
spalla) in its choice of term for the body part, but speakers of those languages "raise" (
hausser bzw.
alzare) their shoulders, they don't "contract" them.
In terms of syntax, the chief contrast is between the Castilian synthetic preterite and the Catalan periphrastic past, idiosyncratically formed with the present tense of "go" plus the infinitive. (A synthetic form,
arronsà does exist, but you'd be unlikely to hear it in speech.)
Now a pronunciation comparison, in broad IPA:
Encogió los hombros. [eŋko'xjolos'ombɾos]
Va arronsar les espatlles. ['varun'saləzəspaʎ:əs]
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