Why do Spanish and Greek have so many things in common?

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There are more than 480 million of people whose mother language is spanish, therefore this being the second most spoken mother language in the world after Chinese. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela, in addition to Puerto Rico.


 And although it is not an official language, Spanish is also spoken in Belize, Andorra, The Philippines, Morocco, Brasil, Canada, Gibraltar and the United States, where there are more than 8 million students of Spanish and it is the second most used language due to 41 million people speak it. Spanish statistics say that by 2030, 7.5% of the world's population  is expected to speak Spanish (535 million). By 2050 this figure will rise to 10% (900 million people).


Also in Europe there are about 19 million Europeans who speak Spanish correctly outside of Spain. In France there are 2 million students of Spanish, one million in Great Britain, half a million in Germany, and in the Nordic countries it is increasingly studied, according to the Cervantes Institute.


Spanish is a romance language, that is to say, it is an evolved language of which the Romans spoke at the time of the Roman Empire, and which has been deeply influenced by Arabic and Greek. The relationship between Spanish and Greek is seen in the large number of words present in the Spanish language and that have their origin in Greek. In spite of the great geographic distance and the lack of historical relation, the Greek words arrived at the Iberian Peninsula by means of the Latin, although also it does in the Average Age by languages ​​like the Arab, the Italian and the French. The Greek words present in the cultured language survived from ancient Greek, and extended to the western world with the conquests of Alexander the Great, and dominated the areas of mathematics, medicine, science, philosophy, linguistic and literary analysis.
The similarities between these two languages ​​facilitate learning, however, why are they so similar or sound so similar?

Between the common points of these two languages ​​are these phonemes:
  • The sounds [ð, ɣ] are quite infrequent in languages ​​in general (especially [ɣ]). However, its appearance rate in both Spanish and Greek is very high, which approximates the two languages ​​upon hearing them.
  • Both Spanish and Greek have phonemes (Χ, Θ) (J, Z/C), not so frequent in other languages.
  • On the other hand, the Greek has a phoneme / z / represented by ζ in a prototypical way (ex: κουζίνα [ku⁠⁠zina]), but also by σ / ς <s> followed by β, γ, δ, μ, ν, ρ, λ, that is, practically the same contexts in which in some varieties of Spanish / s / has the sonorous allophone [z] by assimilation of sonority to the following consonant: in the sequences / sb /, / sg /, / sd /, / sm /, / sn / and / sl /.
  • Finally, we will talk about other consonants that, to a lesser extent than the others, can bring Spanish and Greek closer together. For example, [ɲ] <ñ> is the norm in the romance and Slavic languages.
  • Beginning with the one already mentioned [ɲ], it exists in Spanish as a well-recognized and established phoneme, and in Greek as an allophone in sequences of / n / + yod (the original source also of the <ñ> Spanish), as in μπάνιο / ⁠ ⁠Banio / [⁠⁠baɲo].
  • In a similar way we could talk about [ʎ], moribund phoneme in spanish and allophone in Greek in the sequence of / I / + yod, as in ήλιος / [iʎos]. However, the clear decline and decline of / ʎ / in Spanish (yeísmo) I think justifies not considering it as a factor.
  • As the verb of the question advances, the main keys seem to be in the sounds. The phonological inventories of both languages ​​are quite similar, with some frequent sounds in common like [ð, ɣ] compared to many other languages ​​that lack them. The syllabic structure of Spanish and Greek are reasonably similar, which may contribute, in part, to the rhythm being perceived as similar.

The phonotactic of Spanish, on the other hand, is much simpler; for example, 72% of Spanish syllables end in a vowel, and generally consonant combinations are few and quite restricted. Something similar happens in Greek, although in this language we can also find tautosyllabic consonant groups (within the same syllable) that do not exist in Spanish directly or that, at least, have to belong to different syllables. They are quite difficult sequences for Spanish speakers, for example:
  •  /pt/ en πτώση [⁠ˈ⁠pto.si]
  • /kt/ o /xt/ en κτήριο [⁠ˈ⁠kti.ɾi.o] o χτίριο [⁠ˈ⁠xti.ɾi.o]
  • /ft/ en φτάνω [⁠ˈ⁠fta.no]
  • /fθ/ en φθείρω [⁠ˈ⁠fθi.ɾo]
Practically all the words in Greek end in vowel, ν or ς, and almost all in Spanish they do it in vowel, n or s (and more secondarily in r or l, and more tertiarily in d, z...).
Therefore, we see a striking feature that is practically identical, as we can see, for example, if we conjugate the present indicative in Spanish and in Greek.


There are also many other similarities in the nominal morphology, such as the high frequency of os, as, is, majority plurals in Spanish, and their equivalents ος, ας, ες, which can be diverse, very frequent cases, of the nominal Greek flexion. Therefore, it is likely that these endings equal in sound and more or less in frequency are a factor to be taken into account.
For the spaniards the vowel sounds are the same and we do not have great difficulties to pronounce the Greek, although there are some non-existent consonantal sounds in Spanish (ζ, τζ, ...) and some differences when pronouncing certain combinations (ντ, μπ ...). For this reason, it is easier for the Greeks to speak Spanish than for the Spaniards.
There are also other difficulties when it comes to learning Greek as it is to learn Greek orthography well since a sound like "I", for example, can be written "ι", "η", "οι".
Although there are word loans in all languages ​​and for all languages, in Spanish there are many examples of how ancient Greek words are used in many words of modern Spanish:
You can find more examples here: http://aliso.pntic.mec.es/agalle17/lexico_selectividad/Lexico_ordenado_por_palabras_griegas.pdf

 Although we cannot say that the two languages ​​sound ⁠-⁠ni by far⁠-⁠ identical, the perceptual resemblance can be increased by simple comparison with other languages ​​with less similarity. This, although Spanish is genetically and geographically closer to Portuguese, French and even Italian, however, to the ear it is much more similar to Greek.
Today, the teaching of spanish is experiencing an amazing increase in Greece in recent decades, therefore, it is not strange that the Cervantes Institute in Athens has become the center that manages more exams to obtain the diplomas of spanish as a foreign language (DELE) in the world.
For a spanish speaker or a greek speaker, learning the other language should not be extremely difficult, since there is not so much foreign content for a spanish native or for a greek native. I think that, on the contrary, it has many facilities. The challenge for the student, and for the teacher above all, is to become aware of these facilities and of those similarities and of that greek or "unconscious" spanish that we speak when speaking Spanish or Greek. It is a matter of letting it emerge, that that Greek or Spanish element that is in our own language, and in our own linguistic structure, be visible. That is a facility or, at least, a potential towards the easiest if you know cultivate teach.
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