Spanish to Catalan: what if just dropping ‘n’?

Some people speak Spanish and they learn Catalan… and some vocabulary is the same.

Actually, I remember checking, in 2006, how many words are exactly the same in Spanish and Catalan compared with Catalan and French or Catalan and English. I was trying to explain “how different are these languages” to Estonians and I thought that some numbers might help. See that entry, in Catalan.

I asked to a super Catalan learner: “how is ‘camión’ in Catalan?” and she didn’t guess it. I said that in case of doubt just drop the ‘n’… seems to work (‘avión’, ‘camión’,…)

Of course, we had to check comparing words to know the hit/miss rate! Given a random word in Spanish ending with ‘n’: removing the ‘n’: how likely is that will appear a Catalan word?

The success is 45.57%! (this is ignoring accents and using wspanish and wcatalan Debian packages).

I might add some other variations like “universidad” -> “universitat”… stay tuned here for more results.