For example, English speakers commonly mix up your/you’re or there/their/they’re. I’m curious about similar mistakes in other languages.
For example, English speakers commonly mix up your/you’re or there/their/they’re. I’m curious about similar mistakes in other languages.
Wait, the resemblance thing is also used in other languages: “spitting image” in English, for example, and “copia sputata” in Italian. I’m actually wondering for the first time where it comes from, so maybe there’s a reason for the Portuguese saying to be related to spit
I think that there is some semantic association between spitting and copying, that all three languages are using. (I wonder how modern it is; photocopy machines spitting copies come to my mind.)
However in Portuguese it might be also because most people don’t know the reference of the original saying (the marble sculptures of that Tuscan city), so they parse it as a phonetically similar saying. And in quick speech they do sound similar, e.g. for me:
From a quick search that didn’t provide anything really insightful, it seems that at least in Italian the term has been used since the XIV century, so it’s not photocopy related