Shoutbox

Cookie, I see your point. The thing is that we've been living very far from Portugal for over 500 year, and our cultural development took very distinct paths. I understand that it was easier for German, French, Dutch, etc to unify the language because you, speakers, were still living close to each other, in touch as (almost) one single population, with small variants.

For Portuguese and Spanish (and that is what Chrono was saying), it's not that easy. We have different vocabs, and they are very well established. For a few examples, in the order: EN - PT - BR
File - Ficheiro - Arquivo
About - Acerca - Sobre
Nickname - Alcunha - Apelido
I am doing [whatever] - Estou a fazer [whatever] - Estou fazendo [whatever] > orthography is unified, but constructions are still different.
Log - Registo - Registro > words like this are still different, and people may think they are misspelled.

And one very noticeable, in Portugal, people prefer to talk on the 2nd person, when speaking directly to someone else. Here in Brazil, we have our very characteristic to speak in the 3rd person instead of 2nd. It can sound weird, but it's been like this for generations.

The great difference is this lexical variance, it's cultural. The orthography is the least important. Anyone can understand both "seleccionar" and "selecionar", "activar" and "ativar", "seqüência" and "sequência". When we talk about etymology, however, it's harder to understand each other. You need to re-learn many words.
I mean, you don't need to study 2 hours a day to learn it. Of course not. But their words are not part of our vocab, as much as our word don't belong to theirs.
In the end, even though we have the agreement, and we can easily understand each other, the linguistic difference will still sound strange to either sides.

Perhaps in the future this things can change and there will be a really unified language. However, it doesn't happen today, and will take a while until it does.
IMHO, I like my language the way I speak, and I don't want it to be changed by force. It's something that has to be molded thru time, as people change, as the world evolutes. People are trying to bring them back together, as one single language, when the natural path may be to get further and further.