History of the French language

[Pangur Bán]

A few points:

1) Charlemagne spoke Frankish and that definitely was his native language. Einhard speaks of Charles' reforms:i

It was after he had received the imperial name that, finding the laws of his people very defective (the Franks have two sets of laws, very different in many particulars), he determined to add what was wanting, to reconcile the discrepancies, and to correct what was vicious and wrongly cited in them. However, he went no further in this matter than to supplement the laws by a few capitularies, and those imperfect ones; but he caused the unwritten laws of all the tribes that came under his rule to be compiled and reduced to writing . He also had the old rude songs that celeate the deeds and wars of the ancient kings written out for transmission to posterity. He began a grammar of his native language. He gave the months names in his own tongue, in place of the Latin and barbarous names by which they were formerly known among the Franks. He likewise designated the winds by twelve appropriate names; there were hardly more than four distinctive ones in use before. He called January, Wintarmanoth; February, Hornung; March, Lentzinmanoth; April, Ostarmanoth; May, Winnemanoth; June, Brachmanoth; July, Heuvimanoth; August, Aranmanoth; September, Witumanoth; October, Windumemanoth; Novemher, Herbistmanoth; December, Heilagmanoth. He styled the winds as follows; Subsolanus, Ostroniwint; Eurus, Ostsundroni-, Euroauster, Sundostroni; Auster, Sundroni; Austro-Africus, Sundwestroni; Africus, Westsundroni; Zephyrus, Westroni; Caurus, Westnordroni; Circius, Nordwestroni; Septentrio, Nordroni; Aquilo, Nordostroni; Vulturnus, Ostnordroni

2) There is no evidence for "French" among the military aristocracy of Gaul until 842, when Louis the German and Charles the Bald swear the oath of Strassburg. ONE does it in "German" and the other does it in "French":

Lingua romana:

Pro deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvaraeio cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradre salvar dist, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid numquam prindrai, qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

Si Lodhuuigs sagrament, que son fradre Karlo iurat, conservat, et Karlus meos sendra de suo part non los tanit, si io returnar non l'int pois: no io no neuls, cui co returnar int pois, in nulla aiudha contra Lodhuuuig nun li iv er.


Lingua teudisca

In godes minna ind in thes christanes folches ind unser bedhero gehaltnissi, fon thesemo dage frammordes, so fram so mir got geuuiczi indi mahd furgibit, so haldih thesan minan bruodher, soso man mit rehtu sinan bruodher scal, in thin thaz er mig so sama duo, indi mit Ludheren in nohheiniu thing ne gegango, the minan uuilon imo ce scadhen uuerdhen.

Oba Karl then eid, then or sinemo bruodher Ludhuuuige gesuor, geleistit, indi Ludhuuutg min herro then er imo gesuor forbrihchit, ob ih inan es iruuenden ne mag: noh ih noh thero nohhein, then ih es iruuenden mag, uuidhar Karle imo ce follusti ne uuirdhit.

3) Someone claimed that Charles is a Latin name. That isn't true. Carolus is the Latinized version of the name. Check the texts above: the name was "Karl" or "Karlus" (in Old French). And BTW, CLovis isn't Germanic. It is a Latinized form of Chlodovech, the name which would become Ludwig (Louis/Lewis)

4) Frankish was merely a language for the military aristocracy. It is possible that Germanic language was influerntial in simplifying the Gallo-ROman case system. But this was happening everywhere.

On the other, most "French" names [i.e. names used in France beside biblical names] are of Germanic origin. E.g. Louis/Ludwig, William/Guillaume, Robert, Charles, Francis, Henry, etc, etc

 

[Adso de Fimnu]

Honestly, why can't all Europeans just speak Basque? That would eliminate the need for any debates like this...

 

[privatehudson]

And why don't all americans speak Navaho?

 

[Sodak]

First, to clear up the matter about english - thru and thru a germanic tongue! Marla says that the vocabulary comes from french, which is complete bollocks. About 1/4 of english words come from latin/french - open any medical or science textbook and you'll see how most of them are accounted for. Of the hundred most used words in english, ALL are germanic. In other words, french has peppered english with many many words and terms, but in the end had less sway than what many people believe.

(now count the french/latin words in that paragraph )

French is a romance language, but it is clearly the black sheep of the family. English speakers typically have little trouble learning it (ok, the french may now chime in about the quality... ) because it bears strong germanic qualities - For example, besides reflexive verbs and putting adjectives after nouns, there's little difference from english. Sentence structure is more germanic, too. Word order matters a great deal in french - Not so for the other romance languages. (ex. c'est la vie vs. vie ce la est)

Back on topic - French may be as much a mix of other languages as english, tho the mix may be of greater variety.

 

[MCdread]

Originally posted by Sodak

Word order matters a great deal in french - Not so for the other romance languages. (ex. c'est la vie vs. vie ce la est)

Although overall you may have a ppoint, this is not a very fortunate example. How would you plan to change the word order for the literal translation of c'est la vie in other romance languages?

 

[Pangur Bán]

Originally posted by Sodak
First, to clear up the matter about english - thru and thru a germanic tongue! Marla says that the vocabulary comes from french, which is complete bollocks. About 1/4 of english words come from latin/french - open any medical or science textbook and you'll see how most of them are accounted for. Of the hundred most used words in english, ALL are germanic.

You'll have to forgive Marla, she's very passionate about promoting France and the French, not totally disimilar from my own tendency to promote Scottishness.

Interestingly, English has a 60% lexical similarity with German, a 27% lexical similarity with French and 24% with Russian ( SOURCE:ethnologue.com ). French has "89% lexical similarity with Italian, 80% with Sardinian, 78% with Rheto-Romance, 75% with Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, 29% with German, 27% with English" (SOURCE: ethnologue.com )

 

[Steph]

A better example about order or words in French:
"Un brave homme" --> "A good man"
"Un homme brave" --> "A courageous man".

"Vie ce la est" doesn't mean anything.

French is a relatively difficult language, because:
- You can completly change the meaning of a sentence by changing the order of words. The cases when it really happens are relatively few, most of the time you don't have much choice, or the order doesn't change the meaning. However, there are some example where the meanings really change, and the sentences are still in perfect French.
- Spelling is not always obvious, are many letters are written, but not pronounced when speaking.
- Verbs are very difficult. We don't really have regular / irregular verbs... They are all irregular.

 

[RagingBarbarian]

What type of languages were spoken in these areas before the latin influence on them. why have these early languages not survived.

 

[Sodak]

Originally posted by Steph
A better example about order or words in French:

Thank you! I'm only familiar with french, I hardly have tourist fluency.

"Vie ce la est" doesn't mean anything.
...
- You can completly change the meaning of a sentence by changing the order of words...

My point exactly. "C'est la vie" is a phrase recognized by hundreds of millions worldwide; "Vie ce la est" would earn the speaker nothing but puzzled looks. No meaning at all is a different meaning from the word order version that makes sense.

 

[Steph]

Almost all the languages have an importance in the order of the words.

In English, "It is life" and "Is it life?" used the same words, but follow two different grammatical rules, making the first sentence affirmative, and the second one a question. "It life is" is not correct, because it doesn't respect standard grammatical rules.

It's the same with your exemple : "C'est la vie" -> affirmative, "Est-ce la vie?" -> question, "vie ce la est" -> no meaning.

So your example only demonstrates that if you put words in a random order in a sentence, so it doesn't follow standard gramatical rules of the language, then you deny a standard meaning to your sentence. The effect is the people who will read it has to do some thinking to put the sentence back in order, and give it a meaning. So if you say to a Frenchman "vie ce la est" he will think you are foreigner, try to identify the words (can be harder if you speak them with a strong accent), and then put them back into "oh, he probably means c'est la vie".

Thus, changing the words in a random, non gramatical order, doesn't change the meaning of a sentence (because the result doesn't follow a gramatical rule), it makes it harder to understand, as listener have to rebuild a gramatical rules from your words.

But this is not typical to the French language, it should be common to most languages.

In my example, both sentence are completly correct gramatically speaking. So someone reading them will not thing they could be incorrect, will not try to "guess" what you are saying, and thus you can have a big misunderstanding.

That's one of the difficulty of French language : you can change the order orf words, and still follow the rules, but change the meaning. French is a relatively subtle language, that's why it can give beautiful poetry, some very good piece of literature, and is often use for international political treaties, because you can find nuances in the wording of agreements that other languages lack.
However, it is not so efficient for commercial agreement and technical description, English is better there because I think it is shorter and more precise.

One more little thing : according to "Ethnologue, 13th Edition, Barbara F. Grimes, Editor. © 1996, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc", French is spoken by 72 M people (this count only people who use the language everyday, not people who learnt it as a second language), putting it at the 14th rank in the world most spoken language

 

[SeleucusNicator]

Originally posted by RagingBarbarian
What type of languages were spoken in these areas before the latin influence on them. why have these early languages not survived.

In France? Continental Celtic, which hasn't survived because the Celts were greatly displaced in importance by Romans and Germanic invaders who brought their own languages. People tend to want to speak the language of the most prestigious group, which would of course be the Romans, although certainly with some German influences.

Of course, the Celts were themselves invaders and France was originally inhabited by non-Indo-European peoples that would have spoken a completely different language, perhaps something like Basque. But, in the good Indo-European tradition of genocide, these were eliminated, at least linguistically.

 

[Xen]

@Sodak- yu cant say a single sentence in Moder english with saying one Latin/Fech based word (I prefer say latin is the root, as i like Rome better tyhen france, no offense Marla , but latin is you languages' daddy )

in fact, its rather absured tolimit the number of words that have a LatinoFrench root to them- I've heard from prominant sorces- teachers, and books, and even national geographic (the only source other then a few teachers that sticks out in my mind) that OVER 60% of modernEnglish is undoubtlly Latin based...

@Calgacus- your the better man in terms of languages, but am i right to suspect that its very possible that the Franks were bi-lingul? They had been known after all since rather well before the fall of the western (Roman) empire, and it seems that a good deal of barbarian leaders knew latin... which why i suspect that the franks were bi-lingul, orginally keeping a native germanic toungue for themselves, but eventually reasserting to what was most convientent to rule with after the splitting of Charlemagnes empire

 

[Xen]

assuming of course that they kept the traditiond of being bi-lingual in the blood fromt he eafes of the early-franks at least- if they were bi-lingual in the first place

 

[Sodak]

Originally posted by Steph
Almost all the languages have an importance in the order of the words.

No. Most languages, yes, but very many do not require word order at all. For example, various affixes added to roots tell tense, person, etc, rendering word order moot. Nearly all languages do have a typical preferred form, but saying the order is necessary to meaning is not always true.

Xen, whoever said >60% of english is of latin origin is filling your mind with bunk. It's simply not true. Sharing 60% might be realistic, IF you count common roots shared with english and latin, as in going back to whatever proto-indo-european was. That just means that much is in common, not that it's of latin origin!

 

[raven15]

Hello all.
First, I'd like to say that as a measure of how old Basque is, the word for "knife" in Basque actually means "rock" (I remember my Basque teacher saying this, though I have forgotten what the word was, it's been a few years).

A good estimation of the similarity between English and other languages is the ability of English speakers to understand the other languages. My experience agrees with the 27% similarity with French, 60% with German given above.

At first glance, an English speaker trying to read French or Spanish would find much more similarity in the spelling of words than in German. Looking through a French sentence an English speaker would be able to understand about one word in four with a little thought; this isn't much but is probably enough to guess the meaning of the entence. The understandable words would make up key points, but the meat of how those words relate to each other would have to be inferred. Also, the method of spelling words would be recognizable. However, understanding spoken French or Spanish is very difficult, and all the words that are easily caught when written would be lost in different pronounciations spoken.

German or Swedish, on the other hand, would appear incomprehensible at first glance. However, if you took time to
pretend you were in the first grade and pronounce each word phonetically, you would soon understand most of the sentence. Similarly, slowly breaking down the syllables in spoken Germanic languages would reveal much similarity to English. And the degree of similarity increases the closer the language developed to England (Flemish?).

If you think about it this makes sense, because Latin is the language of learning and prestige, and French is the language
of diplomacy, whereas English was used in day-to-day affairs. Since the people who developed written English were
the most learned and prestigious people, and heavily interested in the affairs of the kingdom, it makes sense that they
would borrow more heavily from French and Latin. But the people who spoke English were Germans at heart.

 

[Seanirl]

French is a relatively difficult language, because:
- You can completly change the meaning of a sentence by changing the order of words. The cases when it really happens are relatively few, most of the time you don't have much choice, or the order doesn't change the meaning. However, there are some example where the meanings really change, and the sentences are still in perfect French.
- Spelling is not always obvious, are many letters are written, but not pronounced when speaking.
- Verbs are very difficult. We don't really have regular / irregular verbs... They are all irregular.

Speaking of difficult languages, how is English to learn? How difficult is it? I've wondered that before...

I would assume it's hella easy compared to say... learning French.

It's so simple to form.

You have the present tense - e.g. I close
then to put it in the future tense you just make it - I WILL close

compared to French the way you have either Etre verbs or Avoir verbs. You have to remember the list of endings and then there's the agreements... or no wait... is that just with the passé composé?

same with the conditional - I would close
and for most past tense verbs you just add d or ed - I closed

Of course then there's - I run/I ran, I see/I saw but mostly English seems a very easy language to learn.

Unless of course by being a native speaker I'm overlooking some detail...

Anyway, I find it interesting when you look at several languages like when you learn 4 like me and start noticing similarities between some and not with some others and stuff...

Like how in French and German saying for example I do and I am doing are one and the same but you have both I do and I'm doing in Irish and English.

Whereas out of the four, Irish is the only one to have the verb before what's... doing the verb, if you get me. The subject of the verb I suppose you'd say. Does anyone know of any other languages like that? Come to think of it, in certain situations in German the verb comes before e.g. Ich right?

One of the most confusing things I find with German and French is knowing what to use for the and a.

Der, Die, Das Ein,Eine oh and then there's for my Mein, Mein and sometimes meinem I think... or meiner... can't remember.

Then in French you have le, la and les and un and une.

Whereas in English it's just The and a no matter what except before a vowel where a is an. See what I mean? English is so easy to form.

Whereas in Irish the is An or Na is the plural, however it doesn't have a way of saying a.

Yeah... that's pretty much it.

How many posts did you need again to use a custom avatar?