# Germanic traces in modern French



## dihydrogen monoxide

Are there any Germanic linguistic traces left in modern French? Since French was erstwhile a Germanic language?


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## Kevin Beach

Was it? Although Frankish was a Germanic language and may have influenced the deviation of French from Latin, I was under the impression that French as we know it now is a descendant of Latin, not German.


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## aleCcowaN

English-German-French-Italian-Spanish

uncle-Onkel-oncle-zio-tío
aunt-Tante-tante-zia-tía

Check all the terms for family and relatives, but it seems Germanic to me.

war-Krieg-guerre-guerra-guerra

all, but German, from Germanic Werra.

stripe-Streifen-rayure-striscia-raya

Italian and Spanish have also a lot of word from Germanic languages.

I'm sure you'll manage to find at least 1,000 words in French from ancient or modern Germanic languages:

starboard-Steuerbord-tribord-tribordo-estribor

all from Netherlander.


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## avok

As far as I know, French has always been a Latin language! But of course, some influence from Germanic languages might have been there.


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## sokol

French of course always was and is a Romance language (as long as their was a French language, that is; thing is that the Franconians of course played their role in separating the Vulgar Latin dialects of Gaul from the rest of the former Roman Empire, linguistically).

Nevertheless there do exist quite a number of Frankish loans (that is, loans of Franconian words) - even very basic words, one being 'blanc' = 'white' (in German this nowadays is 'blank' = 'shiny', nevertheless the origin is Germanic).

And I am sure there are a great many more. Easiest way to find many is to look up all dictionary entries under 'h' and there only the 'h's that do not cause liaison. Words like 'hareng' = 'herring' fall under this category and is one of the very obvious Germanic loans (while 'handicap' certainly isn't as it is a later English loan).

Most important however is to keep in mind that it is not 'the French' who once spoke a 'Germanic' language but rather the _Franconians _who did that - and who later switched to French (them being only a minority in France). Quite some of their words - the Germanic Franconian dialect - survived in French, but overall it is not that much.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

sokol said:


> French of course always was and is a Romance language (as long as their was a French language, that is; thing is that the Franconians of course played their role in separating the Vulgar Latin dialects of Gaul from the rest of the former Roman Empire, linguistically).
> 
> Nevertheless there do exist quite a number of Frankish loans (that is, loans of Franconian words) - even very basic words, one being 'blanc' = 'white' (in German this nowadays is 'blank' = 'shiny', nevertheless the origin is Germanic).
> 
> And I am sure there are a great many more. Easiest way to find many is to look up all dictionary entries under 'h' and there only the 'h's that do not cause liaison. Words like 'hareng' = 'herring' fall under this category and is one of the very obvious Germanic loans (while 'handicap' certainly isn't as it is a later English loan).
> 
> Most important however is to keep in mind that it is not 'the French' who once spoke a 'Germanic' language but rather the _Franconians _who did that - and who later switched to French (them being only a minority in France). Quite some of their words - the Germanic Franconian dialect - survived in French, but overall it is not that much.


 
Can we see some Germanic traces in modern's French grammar or only in morphology and words?


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## sokol

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Can we see some Germanic traces in modern's French grammar or only in morphology and words?


I'm not sure, I haven't put much thought on that, ever.

But I would say not much, or that Germanic influence mainly only occured insofar as it had probably weakened some typical Romance structures so that they are now no more part of modern French (such as passé simple for example).


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## dihydrogen monoxide

sokol said:


> I'm not sure, I haven't put much thought on that, ever.
> 
> But I would say not much, or that Germanic influence mainly only occured insofar as it had probably weakened some typical Romance structures so that they are now no more part of modern French (such as passé simple for example).


 
Then what does French use now instead of passé simple? I think it is still in use.


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## Athaulf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Can we see some Germanic traces in modern's French grammar or only in morphology and words?



That's a very tricky question. Unlike borrowing of vocabulary, where it's usually clear what word was borrowed from where, it's far more difficult to prove (or even convincingly argue) grammatical influences between languages. This is especially true because European IE languages aren't that different from each other grammatically, so in principle, it's always possible to argue that they are simply evolving in similar directions more or less independently.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Well, I thought that languages were classified amongst other things judging by their grammar. Just look at this example, if we were to take only English words, we would say, it's a Romance language, but if we were to take grammar it is Germanic language. The same goes with Romanian.


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## avok

I guess, I read somewhere in the forum that the use of "personal pronouns" (je, tu, il etc)  in French (without dropping them) is due to Germanic influence. The other Romance languages drop personal pronouns whereas Germanic languages like English / German use it. (e.g. "I" say.)


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## Athaulf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Well, I thought that languages were classified amongst other things judging by their grammar.



No. Languages are classified according to their descent from a common ancestor. Analysis of grammar is relevant only to the extent that it can provide arguments for common ancestry. 



> Just look at this example, if we were to take only English words, we would say, it's a Romance language, but if we were to take grammar it is Germanic language.


First, it's not true that the English vocabulary can be meaningfully described as "Romance". Sure, the abstruse Latin vocabulary accounts for a large part of huge dictionaries, and Latin/Romance words are quite prominent in writing, but the everyday spoken language is still overwhelmingly Germanic. But we've had a long discussion about this issue already.

Second, the issue of Latin/Romance borrowings is irrelevant for classifying English as Germanic. The important thing is only that historically, there has existed an unbroken chain of native speakers from Proto-Germanic to modern English. It doesn't matter how much of the original Germanic vocabulary was replaced by borrowings and how much the grammar has changed and diverged from other Germanic languages.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

avok said:


> I guess, I read somewhere in the forum that the use of "personal pronouns" (je, tu, il etc) in French (without dropping them) is due to Germanic influence. The other Romance languages drop personal pronouns whereas Germanic languages like English / German use it. (e.g. "I" say.)


 
English can also drop pronouns but this is rather colloquial. Black vernacular English tends to drop pronouns.


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## Ayazid

aleCcowaN said:


> English-German-French-Italian-Spanish
> 
> uncle-Onkel-oncle-zio-tío
> aunt-Tante-tante-zia-tía
> 
> Check all the terms for family and relatives, but it seems Germanic to me.



A small ethymological side-note: The words _uncle _and _aunt_ are actually of Latin origin :



> c.1290, from O.Fr. oncle, from L. avunculus "mother's brother," lit. "little grandfather," dim. of avus "grandfather," from PIE root *awo- "grandfather, adult male relative other than one's father" (cf. Arm. hav "grandfather," Lith. avynas "maternal uncle," O.C.S. uji "uncle," Welsh ewythr "uncle"). Replaced O.E. eam (usually maternal; paternal uncle was fædera), which represents the Gmc. form of the root (cf. Du. oom, O.H.G. oheim "maternal uncle," Ger. Ohm "uncle"). Also from Fr. are Ger., Dan., Swed. onkel.





> 1297, from Anglo-Fr. aunte, from O.Fr. ante, from L. amita "paternal aunt" dim. of *amma a baby-talk or non-I.E. word for "mother" (cf. Gk. amma "mother," O.N. amma "grandmother," M.Ir. ammait "old hag," Heb. em, Arabic umm "mother").


http://www.etymonline.com


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## aleCcowaN

Ayazid said:


> A small ethymological side-note: The words _uncle _and _aunt_ are actually of Latin origin :
> 
> http://www.etymonline.com


Holly Molly!! Thank you for that info!

About English, I keep in mind the title of a chapter in a book on philology I have: "English and its Germanic relatives".

It seems to me that Old French tightened the Germanic foundation until all exploded. There were numerous casualties including almost all the Germanic case system, almost all the Old French subjunctive, verb conjugations and almost all the rest (genre in articles and nouns, genre and number in adjectives, etc.). The phyrric winner was English 0.1 beta, later enriched with complicated and multisyllabic words from Latin and more, but mainly, extremely flexible and creative to fill in the blanks. [Besides kinda simplistic, I know this is irreverent and almost grotesque, but I'm sure I'm not SO far from what really happened]


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## berndf

Imperative doesn't have a subject pronoun in Germanic languages either. Only the 1st plural imperative doesn't exist in Germanic languages.

Apart from the nominative pronoun issue, I do not see much Germanic influence on French grammar or morphology. The main influence would be on vocabulary. This influence would not only come from Franconian (which is not only the main source of Dutch but also one of the sources of High German) but also from Old Norse via Norman French.

Phonology: I can't prove it but I wouldn't be surprised it the loss of the the distinction between long and short consonants which is still very significant in other romance languages were due to Germanic influence.


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## sokol

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Then what does French use now instead of passé simple? I think it is still in use.



Yes, of course it is still used, but in the north of France only in very formal speech I think - or at least not at all in informal speech; written this is different, of course, passé simple still is written.

And instead of passé simple you use passé composé, of course - it is not so different only to have one 'simple' past tense, it's the same in Slovenian (well, with the difference of aspect there of course) and more significantly in colloquial Austrian where there is no 'Präteritum' at and only 'Perfekt' exists (except for the form of >Präteritum< 'ich war' which however is completely identical in meaning to Perfekt 'ich bin gewesen').


Also I do think that avok has a point with the use of pronouns in French when in other Romance languages this is only done for emphasis: this really could point to Germanic influence.
But overall I go with Bernd - I don't think that there was huge Germanic influence on grammar, mostly the influence should be lexical, and phonological (plus phonetical) too wouldn't be unlikely even though I haven't put much thought in that direction either, so far.

Further, concerning the importance of grammatical features and similarity I have written my opinion on that one in another thread which just might become interesting if we keep our discipline there.


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## fhgh75

avok said:


> I guess, I read somewhere in the forum that the use of "personal pronouns" (je, tu, il etc) in French (without dropping them) is due to Germanic influence. The other Romance languages drop personal pronouns whereas Germanic languages like English / German use it. (e.g. "I" say.)


 
Hi, could a celtic substratum be one of the reasons for the use of personal pronouns in French? I live in northern Italy and the dialects we speak down here are actually gallo-romance languages, thus closer to French than Italian, which belongs to the Italic branch of the Romance languages. I read somewhere that the use of personal pronouns (together with all the other grammatical and phonological features) in Northern Italian dialects is due to the Celtic substratum, which influenced French in the same way.


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## Nanon

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Then what does French use now instead of passé simple? I think it is still in use.





sokol said:


> Yes, of course it is still used, but in the north of France only in very formal speech I think - or at least not at all in informal speech; written this is different, of course, passé simple still is written.
> 
> And instead of passé simple you use passé composé, of course (...)



True about passé composé, also about formal and mostly written registers, but I don't think the use of passé simple characterises Northern France. In fact, Occitan would have provided a good substrate for passé simple.

We have had several conversations about the death (?) of passé simple - see this one here in EOL, _inter alia_.


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