# Is French a lot different than it was 100 years ago?



## mytwolangs

I bought this book called "parallel text" and really, though it is in English and French, the French hardly looks like French. Maybe because my level isn't all that great. Though I can usually stumble most of the way through a French text, the stories in this book have me stumped. 
I am not asking for a bunch of specifics, only - has it changed a lot in about 100 or so years? 




*Note:*
*Your English hardly looks like English  Please stick to the regular spelling.

Frank
Moderator EHL
*


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## aftereight

I don't think it changed a lot, although writing style did certainly evolve, pretty much like what happenend in English. I'm reading "The picture of Dorian Gray" at the moment, and you can certainly tell that it's from an older time, but I don't feel like this is a different language at all.
The same happens when you read Flaubert, Hugo, Balzac... in French : definitely the same language, definitely not the same style. It remains yours to judge which one is better


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## mytwolangs

OK so the style is different. I cannot argue with that. Wit the different words and stuff, it is very difficult for me as I am learning French.


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## mysteriouscreep

I doubt we, being non-natives of France, would be able to tell. We'd just think all the ye-olde words are simply synonyms and variations of grammar.


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## orlando09

I wouldn't say it is very different - have you read many recent books to compare it with? Most novels have a slightly larger vocab than you need in everyday conversation.. obviously there are some words or turns of phrase they used then, that now seem a little old-fashioned, and there are new words now connected to fashions of slang, or new inventions etc that did not exist then - just like in English. It also depends what book you read - for example Zola can be tricky because he deliberately used a lot of working-class 19th Century slang, and used slang dictionaries to find good expresions to make his characters seem more colourful and realistic. Other 19th Century writers use simpler vocabulary - Maupassant, for example. My impression, having read French books from all periods, is that older French writing is usually more like modern French than the equivalent English is to modern English. E.g. I find Moliere simple to read apart from a few expressions and bits of vocablery typical of his period - much more straightforward than, e.g. Shakerpearian English (even bearing in mind Shakespeare was a bit earlier). And medieval French looks more like modern French than Chaucer looks like modern English.


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## francois_auffret

Let's mention spoken French. Yes it is much different, especially the pronounciation. All 'R's used to be pronounced like in standard iItalian. Now they are 'grasseyés' and not 'roulés" anymore... This we know it thanks to our grand parents and the way they spoke...


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## Pedro y La Torre

If you're reading a novel, a lot of it is probably in the passé simple, that may be the reason it looks so foreign to you.


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## 0stsee

francois_auffret said:


> Let's mention spoken French. Yes it is much different, especially the pronounciation. All 'R's used to be pronounced like in standard italian. Now they are 'grasseyés' and not 'roulés" anymore... This we know it thanks to our grand parents and the way they spoke...


 
Where I live, you can also notice that the "grasseyé" R was the newer one. Because the older people still tend to use "roulé" R.


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## sokol

Pedro y La Torre said:


> If you're reading a novel, a lot of it is probably in the passé simple, that may be the reason it looks so foreign to you.


Yes, I think I would describe that as the main difference: I didn't even get to the passé simple in school, our teacher just told us we needn't learn it as it is hardly used any more, as she told us.

I was in for quite a surprise when I read my first piece of French literature (which was written sometime in the 1930ies).

Apart from that, I think French (standard language) did change less than many other languages did.


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## sokol

*[The part about /r/, /R/ etc. has been moved to a new thread.*
*Frank (Moderator)]*

Myself I would consider another thing more significant, if (if!) French really did change in that matter (my observation is based mainly on films and chansons):
In older French language (in films; some chansons still are sung like that so that they still rhyme) I think I noticed that after the stressed syllable (which supposedly is always the last one, in French) there was a schwa spoken, in cases like (I take the chanson title because many will know that one): _La vie en rose_ where 'rose' is pronounced ['rose] (with the last 'e' being a schwa) instead of ['ros].

Now: did the French really speak like that at any time in the 20th (or even 19th century) or is this just a kind of formalised speech that never really was spoken?

For me this type of pronunciation distinctly sets apart the 'chanson' language from the 'colloquial' French I know.


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## miyamoto_musashi

Read Victor Hugo, and you will see it is not different at all, except within a few contexts: economics, IT, popular music, and slang. These four areas have had a large influx of English words, but for the rest of the language, it is no different at all than in the nineteenth century.


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## Frank06

*Hi,*

*I moved the posts about the pronunciation of <r> in French and in other languages to a new thread **here**.*
*Please, guys, stay on topic or open a new thread.*


*Groetjes,*

*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


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## palomnik

After years of struggling to understand spoken French, my impression is this:  written French has tended to be somewhat conservative in development, perhaps because there is a national academy that establishes what is good style, but perhaps more because the French tend to be conservative in that way.  Spoken French, on the other hand, and literary forms that rely heavily on the spoken idiom like movies, plays and some novels, tend to be very much at variance from the standard written style.  Writers like Moliere and Balzac do indeed seem less antiquated than Dickens or Ben Jonson do in English, and Stendahl - my favorite - could be a modern writer if he didn't show such an affection for the perfect subjunctive.

But sometimes it seems to me that spoken French, or some spoken French, has frequently consciously strived to be at variance from the written form.  A few weeks ago on the internet I stumbled across some pages from _Le Fils du père Duchêne _dating from the Paris Commune (1871), and I could hardly understand a word of it.


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## J.F. de TROYES

sokol said:


> Myself I would consider another thing more significant, if (if!) French really did change in that matter (my observation is based mainly on films and chansons):
> In older French language (in films; some chansons still are sung like that so that they still rhyme) I think I noticed that after the stressed syllable (which supposedly is always the last one, in French) there was a schwa spoken, in cases like (I take the chanson title because many will know that one): _La vie en rose_ where 'rose' is pronounced ['rose] (with the last 'e' being a schwa) instead of ['ros].
> 
> Now: did the French really speak like that at any time in the 20th (or even 19th century) or is this just a kind of formalised speech that never really was spoken?
> 
> For me this type of pronunciation distinctly sets apart the 'chanson' language from the 'colloquial' French I know.


 
You are quite right when you mention this feature specific to the "chansons". Unlike prose and poetry ( I mean at the end of verse ) where the final "e" is never pronounced, it can be heard in songs, what is usual in old songs, but possible as yet. So in such lines the number of musical notes do not match the number of feet :
                      " A la claire fontain*e* [...]
                        J'ai trouvé l'eau si bell*e*
                        Que je m'y suis baignée"
The two first lines are made up of six feet and seven notes, just because notes are not phonems, chiefly in French where the opposition short vs. long vowels does not exist.
But what is found in songs doesn't reflect at all any stage of the spoken language : this final "e", usually called " e muet" (mute "e") was never pronounced.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Pedro y La Torre said:


> If you're reading a novel, a lot of it is probably in the passé simple, that may be the reason it looks so foreign to you.





sokol said:


> Yes, I think I would describe that as the main difference: I didn't even get to the passé simple in school, our teacher just told us we needn't learn it as it is hardly used any more, as she told us.



I beg to differ. The preterite or better the historical past is not at all a dead tense, but nowadays still commonly used in any kind of written stories. As an exemple I'll take whatever I am coming across : in an article of the newspaper "Le Monde" (13-01-08 ) celebrating the anniversary of Hillary and Tensing having conquered the Everest, you can read : " Tensing Nurgay *devint* un Dieu vivant (...), Hillary *fut* _juste _anobli par la jeune reine Elisabeth (...) En 1992 la Banque centrale de Nouvelle-Zélande *émit* un billet de 5 $ à son effigie ...". The journalist didn't write "*est devenu...a été...a émis* " , because he tells a written story. Its the same in many narrative parts of  novels of whatever time. The truth of it is that the "passé simple" has'nt been orally used for ages so that it is useless to speak French, but necessary to recognize it to read texts and especially novels.


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## sokol

J.F. de TROYES said:


> But what is found in songs doesn't reflect at all any stage of the spoken language : this final "e", usually called " e muet" (mute "e") was never pronounced.


Ah, the _e muet,_ I've forgotten the name for it.

My French teacher in school told us that the _e muet_ is not spoken "any more", and with all the signs of being willing to fight for her opinion (which I didn't contest, certainly) which, however, told me at the time that this might not be true _entirely _- and later I discovered the chansons.
However, thanks for clearing this point!



J.F. de TROYES said:


> The preterite or better the historical past is not at all a dead tense, but nowadays still commonly used in any kind of written stories.


You're the expert here, of course, and I already wrote that I only did discover it in the first French novel that I tried to read (I failed, but only because I only knew simple past tense ...).

My French teacher in school was no native speaker, and really she should have insisted on us learning passé simple.


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## 0stsee

J.F. de TROYES said:


> You are quite right when you mention this feature specific to the "chansons". Unlike prose and poetry ( I mean at the end of verse ) where the final "e" is never pronounced, it can be heard in songs, what is usual in old songs, but possible as yet. So in such lines the number of musical notes do not match the number of feet :
> " A la claire fontain*e* [...]
> J'ai trouvé l'eau si bell*e*
> Que je m'y suis baignée"
> The two first lines are made up of six feet and seven notes, just because notes are not phonems, chiefly in French where the opposition short vs. long vowels does not exist.
> But what is found in songs doesn't reflect at all any stage of the spoken language : this final "e", usually called " e muet" (mute "e") was never pronounced.



I've read several times that a feature of the French accent in Occitanie is that the "final e" is pronounced there.

I suppose the people in their twenties don't do this anymore, but I actually heard a guy from Provence who pronounced the "final e". Not all the time, but quite frequently that you couldn't help but notice it. And he definitely wasn't trying to overarticulate. That was just the way he spoke.

I can't really agree to what you said that the "e muet" was never pronounced at all at any stage of the spoken language.

Groetjes,


0stsee


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## englishman

J.F. de TROYES said:


> I beg to differ. The preterite or better the historical past is not at all a dead tense, but nowadays still commonly used in any kind of written stories.



Right. This is one of my major bug bears - "you don't need to learn the passé simple as it is dying out". That may be true if you don't intend, ever, to _read_ any French, but apart from that, it seems to be nonsensical.

As far as I can tell, it's a myth that's grown up in British educational circles to provide a convenient excuse for the dropping of the passé simple from the curriculum. I don't think any French teacher could make a serious argument that the tense is no longer needed.


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## 0stsee

englishman said:


> Right. This is one of my major bug bears - "you don't need to learn the passé simple as it is dying out". That may be true if you don't intend, ever, to _read_ any French, but apart from that, it seems to be nonsensical.
> 
> As far as I can tell, it's a myth that's grown up in British educational circles to provide a convenient excuse for the dropping of the passé simple from the curriculum. I don't think any French teacher could make a serious argument that the tense is no longer needed.



I learned French for two years in Centre Culturel Français and we were not taught passé simple.
I think it's important to have a passive knowledge of it. So students of French should be told that passé simple exists, and shown how they are built, including the irregular forms, but not to be asked to conjugate themselves in a test.
As a matter of course, this does not apply for professional writers, including journalists.

This makes another question pop up in my mind:
When did passé simple cease to be used in the colloquial speech? I guess I should create a new thread for this.


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## Nanon

0stsee said:


> I've read several times that a feature of the French accent in Occitanie is that the "final e" is pronounced there.
> 
> I suppose the people in their twenties don't do this anymore, but I actually heard a guy from Provence who pronounced the "final e".



Definitely. And it does NOT sound dated for any speaker from Southern France.



J.F. de TROYES said:


> (...) where the opposition short vs. long vowels does not exist.



I would say "does not exist _anymore_". In modern dictionaries, you can still find the typical minimal pair patte / pâte [pat / pɑ:t] and many other examples of short vs long vowel oppositions. For many contemporary French speakers, this opposition is neutralised. But this is a very slight, hard to perceive change.
Actors, radio and news speakers etc... of the past decades (say, 50-70 years ago) pronounced short and long vowels and slight final e's (which were much less audible than in contemporary _Marseillais_).



sokol said:


> Now: did the French really speak like that at any time in the 20th (or even 19th century) or is this just a kind of formalised speech that never really was spoken?



IMHO, even by that time, it sounded like over-articulation and hypercorrection. Alas, no time machine to check. So let's say "it _may _have sounded like hypercorrection". 
I will need a brushup in historic phonology of French to investigate further, so let's also say that my response is based on subjectivity.

And to go back to the initial question: French has not changed that much in ~100 years. I understood my grandparents perfectly (unless my grandfather switched to Occitan on purpose) except for a few words that really belong to a specific generation, and this happens in any language.


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## sokol

Nanon said:


> IMHO, even by that time, it sounded like over-articulation and hypercorrection. (...)
> I will need a brushup in historic phonology of French to investigate further (...)



My guess would be that at some point in the history the _e muet_ indeed _was _pronounced, as it certainly was still pronounced in Latin and only lost somewhere on the way.

Your metioning of, in a previously Occitan region, the _e muet_ still being pronounced in everyday speech however could mean two things:
- either this is interference from Occitan, meaning: when Occitan speakers switched to French they transferred some Occitan pronunciation to their French pronunciation
- or this is a sign of_ e muet _being pronounced only, say, two or three centuries ago (as, if I remember correctly, the main shift from Occitan to France happened only after the revolution although there were signs of language shift already before 1789)

Anyway, according to the postings above it seems that at least in the _younger _history of French language _e muet _wasn't pronounced, at least not in the north of France.


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## Nanon

sokol said:


> My guess would be that at some point in the history the _e muet_ indeed _was _pronounced, as it certainly was still pronounced in Latin and only lost somewhere on the way.



Yes, it was pronounced and it has been lost gradually, depending on its position. It seems that the final e muet was pronounced until the XVI-XVII centuries (more about the history of e muet here).
Singers interpreting French baroque vocal music tend to reconstitute the pronunciation of those times, so the e is not _muet _anymore. However one of the most noticeable changes is the pronunciation of "oi" as [we]. Louis XIV still pronouces "Le roi, c'est moi" as _"Le roué, c'est moué"_. Some variants of Québec French kept this feature.



sokol said:


> Your metioning of, in a previously Occitan region, the _e muet_ still being pronounced in everyday speech however could mean two things:
> - either this is interference from Occitan, meaning: when Occitan speakers switched to French they transferred some Occitan pronunciation to their French pronunciation
> - or this is a sign of_ e muet _being pronounced only, say, two or three centuries ago.



Both, I would say. Many interferences from Occitan are present in contemporary "français méridional" (marseillais, toulousain...)

Anyway I was just trying to address the initial question that is still the title of the thread. There were major changes in the XVII-XVIII-XIX centuries, due to a centralising policy aimed at unifying the kingdom (this started even before the French revolution), the prohibition of local languages, the consolidation of the orthography, etc. But if we compare modern _standard _French with what it was *100 years ago*, I would say (again, this is not based on thorough linguistic research) that a native speaker would notice rather slight differences. 

This is valid for standard French, i.e. the language all French speakers are supposed to share. If we talk about "français des banlieues", changes are happening at a faster pace, intonation and pronunciation are rather specific, and loanwords are integrated very quickly.


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## maybe4ever

I have always heard that the French academy has played a big hand in the French Language, and this is why literature from the 19th century doesn't seem as dated in French, as it would in English.

But I do notice when I read Balzac, I occasionally have to look up a word that isn't on wordreference and it will usually be labelled vieilli by CNRTL, as was the case with amouracher.  This may be due to it's pejorative meaning though.

I seem to find more dated word when I read an 19th century English novel than a French one.


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## Nanon

maybe4ever said:


> But I do notice when I read Balzac, I occasionally have to look up a word that isn't on wordreference and it will usually be labelled vieilli by CNRTL, as was the case with amouracher.



Oh my God! I thought I had grown old all of a sudden. I checked the TLFI and I had a shock :


> *AMOURACHER*, verbe trans.
> *I. *_Emploi trans., *vieilli*.  _Conduire quelqu'un à éprouver une grande passion, souvent déraisonnable. (...)
> "Mon cher enfant, dit madame Granson à son fils (...) Si les filles voulaient dire la vérité, mon Dieu, mon enfant, tu serais bien étonné de savoir ce qui les amourache*."
> *H. DE BALZAC, _La Vieille fille, _1836, p. 296.


But then I read further and I found out that only the transitive use of the verb was dated, not the (standard) pronominal use.
That was a big relief . I know that sometimes I may sound posh - but I will start worrying if I sound *dated*!


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## coppergirl

On another point, I was under the impression that the imperfect subjunctive doesn't tend to get used so much anymore.  Any ideas on this from the natives?


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## Nanon

You are right, Coppergirl, the imperfect subjunctive is not used anymore in speech, except in a high register and/or in a couple of crystallised expressions.
The subjunctive imperfect is still prescribed for a literary use, but in many cases, the tense concordance is not respected and only the subjunctive present is used, like in speech.

As far as I can judge, the "death" of the imperfect subjunctive started more than 100 years ago (sorry -- just trying to keep in track ).


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## coppergirl

Hi Nanon!

I expect you are correct and the death of the imperfect subjunctive happened early than 100 years ago, but it is interesting all the same because the Italians are still very fond of their imperfect subjunctive. 

All the same, I had noticed it and wondered whether it was just me or whether the French thought this too!  Thanks for the inside info!


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## james.

So, in French, what tense would you use to express "If I had continued with my education, I would have more success now?" This imperfect subjunctive is necessary in Spanish I know, if you want to express this sentiment. "Si _hubiera seguido_ con mi educación, tendría más éxito ahora." (Kind of an awkward sentence but I'm not good with examples.) 

Also, I would like to opine that the apparent archaisms of 19th Century British literature are, as has been pointed out regarding French, more a matter of style or register. There are no major verb forms  that  have fallen out of use (maybe some confusion has arisen over words like "lest" which require subjunctive), and, despite some changes in vocabulary, most words encountered in works by, say, Thomas Hardy, will be encountered in a standard dictionary. At least in America, I think this perceived greater discrepancy between current and past forms lies more in the extreme anti-intellectualism that grips the culture here. Very few people read contemporary academic or intense literary or philosophical texts these days, and I think that, upon beginning to read English in this higher literary register, one would find that the problem of comprehension lies in a lack of knowledge of the language and its essential vocabulary rather than any obsolescence of significant portions of the grammar or syntax. Also, I am reading the Old Testament in the King James Version, and have found it very beautiful and completely comprehensible, though certainly archaic. It is more easily understood than Shakespeare, because there is no attempt to stick to a specific prosody. Just my two cents on the French-English language change comparison.


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## Outsider

james. said:


> So, in French, what tense would you use to express "If I had continued with my education, I would have more success now?" This imperfect subjunctive is necessary in Spanish I know, if you want to express this sentiment. "Si _hubiera seguido_ con mi educación, tendría más éxito ahora." (Kind of an awkward sentence but I'm not good with examples.)


In Spanish:

if + imperfect subjunctive* (+ then) + conditional**​
*forms I or II
**with the understanding that the imperfect subjunctive form I can "stand in" for the conditional

In French:

if + imperfect *indicative* + conditional​I don't think using the imperfect _subjunctive_ here is acceptable even in the most formal written French imaginable.


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## Nanon

Outsider said:


> I don't think using the imperfect _subjunctive_ here is acceptable even in the most formal written French imaginable.


 
It _was_ acceptable, in very formal and archaic forms:



> Eh Dieu! si* j'eusse étudié*
> Du temps de ma jeunesse folle...
> _François Villon (XV century)_


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## Grop

sokol said:


> - either this is interference from Occitan, meaning: when Occitan speakers switched to French they transferred some Occitan pronunciation to their French pronunciation



I think so (which does not imply the other idea is not true). Occitan dialects have stressed an unstressed syllabs (like English, and unlike standard, non-southern French). Final 'e's that we pronounce in the South generally follow a stressed syllab (it is therefore part of a stressed word), and I think this feature was inherited from Oc.

Concerning the main question, I think it didn't change that much. Even if it did, an educated French speaker is supposed to have seen enough old litterature to understand everything (at least from classical XIXth century writers). Of course there are words that we no longer use, but grammar is almost the same. Written French by Victor Hugo is of course much different from modern spoken French, but his dialogs are not *very* different from our (correct) spoken French.

(XVIII century dialogs by Voltaire - which is really easy to understand - sound really litterary, but maybe it is just a matter of style).


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