# French: Franconian and Latin



## ireney

*Split off from **this thread**.*
*Frank*


I might be wrong, but I thought that French, minus the Latin and Greek influences, is, basically a "Germanic" language itself in its roots at least.

P.S. No, we aren't really ganging up on you, honest  It's just that purification is a touchy subject at best. And welcome to the forums.


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## Athaulf

ireney said:


> I might be wrong, but I thought that French, minus the Latin and Greek influences, is, basically a "Germanic" language itself in its roots at least.



No, this is totally incorrect. French is a Romance language, not a Germanic one. It developed from Latin, not Proto-Germanic. 

Saying "French minus the Latin influences" is akin to saying "Modern Greek minus the Ancient Greek influences".


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## ireney

Whoops! That's why it's bad to watch a movie and answer a thread! My apologies.


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## Fred_C

Athaulf said:


> No, this is totally incorrect. French is a Romance language, not a Germanic one. It developed from Latin, not Proto-Germanic.
> 
> Saying "French minus the Latin influences" is akin to saying "Modern Greek minus the Ancient Greek influences".


Hi,
No you are wrong.
The two major influences that contributed to build modern French are Latin and Franconian.

This fact about Franconian origins of French is not very well-known, for reasons that are not very politically correct : 
Being a Germanic language, Franconian must have somehow been banned from considerations about etymology, because people wanted to keep "purity" in mind with only Latin roots.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Fred_C said:


> The two major influences that contributed to build modern French are Latin and Franconian.
> This fact about Franconian origins of French is not very well-known, for reasons that are not very politically correct:
> Being a Germanic language, Franconian must have somehow been banned from considerations about etymology, because people wanted to keep "purity" in mind with only Latin roots.


Maybe I misunderstand your explanation (it's sounds a bit like a major conspiracy, but maybe my Dan-Brown-o-meter is too sensitive), but can you please elaborate on who exactly did the banning? Can you also explain why French is not to be considered a Romance (let's say 'post-Latin') language.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## berndf

Fred_C said:


> No you are wrong.
> The two major influences that contributed to build modern French are Latin and Franconian.
> 
> This fact about Franconian origins of French is not very well-known, for reasons that are not very politically correct :
> Being a Germanic language, Franconian must have somehow been banned from considerations about etymology, because people wanted to keep "purity" in mind with only Latin roots.


 
I think you are exaggerating here. Compared, say to Italian, one might argue that the Vulgar Latin heritage of French is less pure. I haven’t read any studies on the subject but if one counted the frequency of word of Germanic origin in ordinary French texts, I am sure one would arrive at very modest numbers; and certainly much more modest than the frequency of Romance words in Germanic languages.


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## Fred_C

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> Maybe I misunderstand your explanation (it's sounds a bit like a major conspiracy, but maybe my Dan-Brown-o-meter is too sensitive), but can you please elaborate on who exactly did the banning? Can you also explain why French is not to be considered a Romance (let's say 'post-Latin') language.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


 
Wow, please hold your horses.
I am not saying that French is not a Romance language, I am just saying that if you look into a serious etymological dictionary of French, you will see that the majority of words stem from Latin, but many words also stem from Old Franconian, and a few from Dutch.

But I have noticed that general trivia seems to ignore this fact.
(Perhaps I have been too strong in my statements, there is no conspiracy, but etymology is a subject where many people have false believes.)


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## Athaulf

Fred_C said:


> Hi,
> No you are wrong.



Rather, it seems like you don't understand the standard criteria used to classify languages into families. 



> The two major influences that contributed to build modern French are Latin and Franconian.
> This fact about Franconian origins of French is not very well-known, [...]


I was not talking about "major influences", but _what language French developed from_. The answer to that question is unambiguous and uncontroversial: Latin. 

I don't know how much borrowed Germanic vocabulary exists in French, but that's irrelevant for the classification of French as a Romance language. English has borrowed enormous amounts of French and Latin vocabulary, but it's still a Germanic language. If French borrows a bunch of words from, say, Finnish over the next hundred years, that won't make it a Finno-Ugric language.


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## Frank06

Hi,



Fred_C said:


> I am not saying that French is not a Romance language,


Okay, thanks. Then I misunderstood your post number 4.



> I am just saying that if you look into a serious etymological dictionary of French, you will see that the majority of words stem from Latin, but many words also stem from Old Franconian, and a few from Dutch.


Yes, and? . Nobody will deny that. 
I really fail to see a connection between the statement quoted above and your post #4 (reply to Athaulf's #2) which I only partially quoted. 
I mean, can you clearly tell us why you think that Athaulf, who is talking about language classification and who gives the standard, mainstream answer accepted by almost everybody, would be wrong (according to you)?



> But I have noticed that general trivia seems to ignore this fact.
> (Perhaps I have been too strong in my statements, there is no conspiracy, but etymology is a subject where many people have false believes.)


What do you mean by "general trivia"? 

Furthermore, I don't understand the combination of these two statements:


> This fact about *Franconian origins of French* is not very well-known, for reasons that are not very politically correct: Being a Germanic language, *Franconian must have somehow been banned from considerations about etymology*, because people wanted to keep "purity" in mind with only Latin roots.


and


> I am just saying that if you look into a serious etymological dictionary of French, you will see that the majority of words stem from Latin, *but many words also stem from Old Franconian*, and a few from Dutch.


 
Now, you can't have it both ways: either they are 'banning' Franconian (though you never said who did the banning) or they are including it in etymological dictionaries. By the way, you wrote 'people' in the quote above. Who's this 'people'? 

And what do you mean by 'the *Franconian origins of French*'? That some Germanic speaking people(s) had an influence on French, mainly a lexical influence, as you seem to imply, since you refer to etymological dictionaries? If so, so what? 

I have the impression that you're equating or mixing up both _etymology_ and _genetic language classification_. Or I misunderstood once again what you wrote, but then I have to ask you to be even more clear and more specific .

A statement like "French is a Romance language" or "English is a Germanic language" or "Persian is an Indo-Iranian language" should be understood in its proper context. It classifies the languages on the basis of grammatical (e.g. morphological) traits, basic lexical (core) items, and historical descent etc. which it shares with other languages. 
The result of that classification is a _very basic, stripped, static _model (viz. a language family tree model). 

All in all, saying that language X belongs to language family B helps us to orientate ourselves a bit. But not a lot. Since this kind of classification, this family tree, tells us *nothing* at all about the influences (lexical or grammatical) on that language throughout its recorded history. For this we need further _descriptions_ (e.g. any serious book on the history of the French language). The last thing that comes into play is an etymological dictionary.

Compare it with a compass and a GPS: while your compass might indicate that you (for example in Paris) will have to go straight to the north to arrive at Brussels (very basic indication), your GPS (road description) will normally help you to evade bumping into the first building on that basic and imaginary line between Paris and Brussels as indicated by the compass.

Okay, it might not be the best comparison, but you know what I mean .


Groetjes,

Frank


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## Hulalessar

I know the French can be defensive about their language, but I am finding it diffcult to believe that the compilers of dictionaries create false etymologies to hide the Frankish origins of words. Anyway, I looked up _guerre_ in the _Dictionnaire de l'Académie_ and found:

Issu du francique _*werra, _« troubles, dispute »

So no political correctness there.

I have an old book (not sure how old, but certainly pre-war) entitled _Grammaire: Cours Supérieur,_ published by Larousse. It says that if one takes away learned borrowings from Latin and Greek and all late borrowings, there is left a core of 4200 words of "popular origin" and that of these 3800 come from Latin and the remainder from Germanic. That is a clear admission that nearly ten per cent of the core vocabulary of French is of Germanic origin.


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## Fred_C

Good morning.

I have just realised that I had not thoroughly read the post nb 2 by Athaulf.
I had not noticed that his reply : "_No, this is totally incorrect. French is a Romance language, not a Germanic one. It developed from Latin, not Proto-Germanic._", which I tried to debate, was actually a response to :
"_I might be wrong, but I thought that French, minus the Latin and Greek influences, is, basically a "Germanic" language itself in its roots at least_.".

This statement is wrong indeed, and Athaulf was right to say it.

My apologies.


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## cajzl

> And what do you mean by 'the *Franconian origins of French*'? That some Germanic speaking people(s) had an influence on French, mainly a lexical influence, as you seem to imply, since you refer to etymological dictionaries? If so, so what?


A possible interpretation:

By necessity some Germanic people were forced to learn and speak Latin (Vulgar Latin). But they were not able to learn and speak it correctly.

So they started to speak early French.

It doesn't mean that French is not the Romance language, but the main factor of its nascency is the French ancestors' impuissance to speak proper Latin. Otherwise French would sound more like Italian or Spanish.

Thus there are two parents of todays French:

1) Latin
2) the inability to master it by common Germanic (Gallic) people.


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## Hulalessar

cajzl said:


> A possible interpretation:
> 
> By necessity some Germanic people were forced to learn and speak Latin (Vulgar Latin). But they were not able to learn and speak it correctly.
> 
> So they started to speak early French.
> 
> It doesn't mean that French is not the Romance language, but the main factor of its nascency is the French ancestors' impuissance to speak proper Latin. Otherwise French would sound more like Italian or Spanish.


 
I think it is more the case that the Franks were the ruling elite and eventually adopted French for convenience as much as for any other reason. Frankish simply influenced French. Modern French is not the descendant of some form of badly spoken early French. 



cajzl said:


> Thus there are two parents of todays French:
> 
> 1) Latin
> 2) the inability to master it by common Germanic (Gallic) people.


 
I would rather say:

1. Latin
2. A superstratum of Frankish
3. A substratum of Gaulish, though there are arguments about that.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Hulalessar said:


> I think it is more the case that the Franks were the ruling elite


And from most of what I read about the Franks...
They did neither come straight out of the bushes nor out of the blue. Quite a big deal of the ruling elite of most Germanic confederations were educated in a Roman (Latin) environment, a tradition that went on for _many_ centuries, spanning the period before and after the so-called fall of the (Western) Roman empire.



cajzl said:


> A possible interpretation:
> By necessity some Germanic people were forced to learn and speak Latin (Vulgar Latin). But they were not able to learn and speak it correctly.


Which necessity?
Why wouldn't they have been able to learn Latin or Vulgar Latin?
Why do you think that French is bad Latin? 
Can you give us good, solid reasons why French would be the result of anybody's inability to learn Latin?



> It doesn't mean that French is not the Romance language, but the main factor of its nascency is the French ancestors' impuissance to speak proper Latin. Otherwise French would sound more like Italian or Spanish.


Italian and Spanish? Why would they want to speak two other variants of 'bad Latin'? Or do you consider those to be less bad Latin? If so, why?
Were people in Italy and Spain smarter? They had higher marks on their LSL tests?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## ireney

Oh dear!  That's what you get when you mean to write A, you  think at the same time B, and you manage to write C! To keep things simple, just insert an "old" in my first post and you get the following: 

I might be wrong, but I thought that Old French, minus the Latin and Greek influences, is, basically a "Germanic" language itself in its roots at least.

Still wrong (heavily influenced yes, but romance language still) but closer to what I had in mind (too late and wrong thread to explain) . Sorry for the whole mess!


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## JGreco

I think many people in this forum are trying to understand in terms of pronunciation why French differed so greatly from most (except Romanian) of the other Romance languages. How do you get two neighbor Romance languages such as French and Spanish become so different with pronunciation that they would become completely unintelligible to each other in monolingual terms.


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## Ayazid

JGreco said:


> I think many people in this forum are trying to understand in terms of pronunciation why French differed so greatly from most (except Romanian) of the other Romance languages. How do you get two neighbor Romance languages such as French and Spanish become so different with pronunciation that they would become completely unintelligible to each other in monolingual terms.



But French and Spanish were not neighbour languages (neither French and Italian) until relatively recent times. There used to be a wide linguistic continuum of various Romance dialects and languages (various dialects of Occitan, Catalan, Aragonese) which ceased to exist mainly because of the discrimination policy of the French state towards local "patois" during 19th and 20th centuries. I also had the opportunity to hear Romanian and it sounds nothing like French. I think that among major Romance languages, French is most similar to European Portuguese.


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## Outsider

JGreco said:


> I think many people in this forum are trying to understand in terms of pronunciation why French differed so greatly from most (except Romanian) of the other Romance languages. How do you get two neighbor Romance languages such as French and Spanish become so different with pronunciation that they would become completely unintelligible to each other in monolingual terms.


But is it so different, really?

I think that's an illusion, due to the fact that most people think only of the best-known Romance languages: French, Spanish, and Italian -- with Romanian a special case to the side. When you just look at these, yes, French does stand out.

But if you do that you are forgetting about all the other Romance languages: Portuguese -- which apparently does not sound so stereotypically "Latin", even though Portugal certainly did not have much greater Germanic influences than Spain! Catalan -- which bridges Spanish with French, and also with Italian, in so many ways. And the many non-standard Italian dialects, which I presume don't always sound so stereotypically "Latin" as standard Italian, either. Rheto-Romance...

Then you should remember that equating Spanish with Spain, and French with France, and saying "There's a gap in here!" is a bit fallacious. For a large part of its history, French was the speech of _northern_ France around Paris. In the south, various _langues d'oc_ were spoken, intermediate, if you will, between French and Catalan on one side, Italian on the other. What do all _these_ languages sound like?


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## Athaulf

cajzl said:


> A possible interpretation:
> 
> By necessity some Germanic people were forced to learn and speak Latin (Vulgar Latin). But they were not able to learn and speak it correctly.
> 
> So they started to speak early French.
> 
> It doesn't mean that French is not the Romance language, but the main factor of its nascency is the French ancestors' impuissance to speak proper Latin. Otherwise French would sound more like Italian or Spanish.
> 
> Thus there are two parents of todays French:
> 
> 1) Latin
> 2) the inability to master it by common Germanic (Gallic) people.




A nice sounding theory, except that it has some major discrepancies with facts.  Obviously, modern French sounds more remote from Latin than Spanish, let alone Italian. However, it's entirely unjustified to assume that the situation was similar one thousand or fifteen hundred years ago. 

To take one example, did you know that Old French kept a system of two cases (nominative and oblique) long after they had completely disappeared from the dialects that are the ancestors of modern Spanish and Italian? So, these supposedly Latin-challenged inhabitants of what's today France actually kept some morphological features of Latin longer than the inhabitants of Rome itself. Similarly, many other issues in which modern French has dramatically diverged from Latin changed only in recent centuries, and don't at all reflect the state of Gallic vs. Italian or Iberian Romance dialects in the Late Antiquity.


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## Corsicum

JGreco said:


> I think many people in this forum are trying to understand in terms of pronunciation why French differed so greatly from most (except Romanian) of the other Romance languages. How do you get two neighbor Romance languages such as French and Spanish become so different with pronunciation that they would become completely unintelligible to each other in monolingual terms.


…. Still relativity :
*English* : The winemaking is the art of making wine. It is a chemical decomposition or fermentation.
*German* : Die Weinbereitung ist die Kunst, den Wein. Es ist eine chemische Zersetzung oder Fermentierung
*French* :La vinification est l’art de faire du vin. C’est une décomposition chimique ou fermentation .
*Italian* : La vinificazione è l'arte di fare il vino. Si tratta di una decomposizione chimica o fermentazione.
*Spanish** :* La vinificación es el arte de hacer vino. Es un producto químico de descomposición o de fermentación .


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## robbie_SWE

Corsicum said:


> …. Still relativity :
> *English* : The winemaking is the art of making wine. It is a chemical decomposition or fermentation.
> *German* : Die Weinbereitung ist die Kunst, den Wein. Es ist eine chemische Zersetzung oder Fermentierung
> *French* :La vinification est l’art de faire du vin. C’est une décomposition chimique ou fermentation .
> *Italian* : La vinificazione è l'arte di fare il vino. Si tratta di una decomposizione chimica o fermentazione.
> *Spanish** :* La vinificación es el arte de hacer vino. Es un producto químico de descomposición o de fermentación .


 
*Romanian*: Vinificarea/Vinificaţiea este arta de a face vin. Este un proces chimic de descompunere sau fermentare/fermentaţie.

Couldn't help myself! 

 robbie


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## Dekka

There are different meanings to explain the different pronounciation of French if we compare it to Spanish or Italian for example.

1° The Germanic influences of the "langues d'oïl" of which Modern French is a part.

2° If we have a look on "Historical Gammar", Spanish, Italian an Portuguese words evolved from "accusative case" of Latin words meanwhile French and Romanian evolved from "nominative case" of the same words...


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## berndf

Dekka said:


> 2° If we have a look on "Historical Gammar", Spanish, Italian an Portuguese words evolved from "accusative case" of Latin words meanwhile French and Romanian evolved from "nominative case" of the same words...


Is that so? Old French has maintained distinct nominative and oblique forms longer than other Romance languages. But the surviving ones when the distinction has eventually lost were generally the oblique ones (here are a few examples). In Latin 3rd declensions nouns and adjectives where nominative singular often had a different stem than declined forms, French, like Italian or Spanish, has the oblique form (e.g. nominative _ars_, oblique stem _art-_, French: _art_). Did I misunderstand something?


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## Hulalessar

Corsicum said:


> *French* :La vinification est l’art de faire du vin. C’est une décomposition chimique ou fermentation .
> *Italian* : La vinificazione è l'arte di fare il vino. Si tratta di una decomposizione chimica o fermentazione.
> *Spanish** :* La vinificación es el arte de hacer vino. Es un producto químico de descomposición o de fermentación .


 
These examples are all very well, but there is a danger of being seduced by writing. The long words in French may well be picked up by an Italian or Spaniard in speech, but the short words are something else.

Take _art. _The "t" is not pronounced and the "r" is a sound not found in Spanish or Italian. As for _vin_, there is no "n" sound and the vowel is not pronounced as an "i" but as a nasalised "e".  There is a strong possibilty that neither word would be picked up by an Italian or Spanish listener.

_Art_ and _vin_ go a long way to show how far French has moved away from Latin compared to Spanish and Italian.  I should be very surprised if a Spaniard or Italian knowing no French can get very far in a conversation with a Frenchman knowing no Spanish or Italian. On the other hand, it is well known that a Spaniard and an Italian get on quite well, even if there are some misunderstandings.


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## Athaulf

Corsicum said:


> …. Still relativity :
> *English* : The winemaking is the art of making wine. It is a chemical decomposition or fermentation.
> *German* : Die Weinbereitung ist die Kunst, den Wein. Es ist eine chemische Zersetzung oder Fermentierung
> *French* :La vinification est l’art de faire du vin. C’est une décomposition chimique ou fermentation .
> *Italian* : La vinificazione è l'arte di fare il vino. Si tratta di una decomposizione chimica o fermentazione.
> *Spanish** :* La vinificación es el arte de hacer vino. Es un producto químico de descomposición o de fermentación .



However, examples like this prove absolutely nothing, except that almost any European language has a bunch of words borrowed from Classical Latin and Greek. In fact, Latin words like "decomposition" are in an important sense alien even to modern Romance languages, since they were borrowed from Classical Latin in relatively recent times. They aren't part of their actual lexical heritage from Latin. 



Dekka said:


> There are different meanings to explain the different pronounciation of French if we compare it to Spanish or Italian for example.
> 
> 1° The Germanic influences of the "langues d'oïl" of which Modern French is a part.



But what reason is there to think that Germanic influences were more important in French than in Spanish or Italian? The Romance-speaking populations of today's Spain and Italy were also ruled by Germanic kingdoms for centuries (Visigoths in Spain, and Ostrogoths and later Langobards in Italy). Furthermore, just like northern France, various regions of Italy have also bordered with regions populated by Germanic speakers, often even being ruled by the same political entities, with the Romance and Germanic populations mixing and interacting heavily. Why didn't these other Romance dialects develop in the same direction as French?

Generally, one should always be suspicious of attempts to "explain" linguistic phenomena by "obvious" historical and geographical connections.



> 2° If we have a look on "Historical Gammar", Spanish, Italian an Portuguese words evolved from "accusative case" of Latin words meanwhile French and Romanian evolved from "nominative case" of the same words...


That's not true, as Berndf has already explained above.


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## Athaulf

ireney said:


> OI might be wrong, but I thought that Old French, minus the Latin and Greek influences, is, basically a "Germanic" language itself in its roots at least.
> 
> Still wrong (heavily influenced yes, but romance language still) but closer to what I had in mind (too late and wrong thread to explain) .



In fact, there aren't that many uncontroversial  Germanic influences in French. For example, look at Table 1 in this paper and you'll see that there are relatively few French words borrowed from ancient Germanic languages -- merely 694 out of 9,485 entries in a French dictionary of borrowings analyzed by the author. (The author apparently uses the name "Old German" to refer to all early medieval Germanic languages, including Old Norse.) In comparison, the same table lists 442 words originating from Arabic and 236 from Celtic languages -- smaller, but still the same order of magnitude.

In any case, when it comes to vocabulary, which is the clearest and most straightforward indicator, the Germanic influences on French are entirely minuscule in comparison with its Romance vocabulary base. In fact, the old Germanic influences are swamped even by modern English borrowings (2,613 items listed in the above table!), and you probably wouldn't call modern French an "Anglo" (or whatever) language. 



> Sorry for the whole mess!


No need to apologize, of course.


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## ireney

I am afraid I am going to cloud the issue further, but in my second post I was referring to Old French which I personally can hardly read (not that I am proficient in French of any era, I'm sorry to say).
Anyway, my original post was the culmination of a number of mistakes and mix-ups I have only myself to blame for so I do think an apology is needed from my part.


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## Athaulf

ireney said:


> I am afraid I am going to cloud the issue further, but in my second post I was referring to Old French which I personally can hardly read (not that I am proficient in French of any era, I'm sorry to say).



According to "The Vocabulary of Modern French" by Hilary Wise:_The lexis of Old French contained about a thousand words from Germanic, of which many, especially relating to feudal society, have disappeared. Between three and four hundred remain, with perhaps one hundred and fifty in general use. _​This is more or less consistent with the figures from another reference the I quoted in the above post. Still, even a thousand lexical items isn't _that_ much. You'll find similar levels of borrowing from various sources in just about any language. 

As for the author's claims about other changes between Latin and Old/Modern French that were supposedly caused by Germanic influences, I'd say that however plausible such theories might sound, they can hardly ever be conclusively proven. In most such cases, one can find examples of languages where similar changes happened without any apparent analogous influence from abroad, as well as languages in which nothing similar happened despite similar foreign influences. Thus, it seems to me that a high level of skepticism is warranted unless the influences are entirely obvious, as in the case of lexical borrowing.

But in any case, even if we assume the strongest possible level of Germanic influences on either Old or Modern French, it's still far from anything that would be sufficient to call French "Germanic" in any way. I mean, just about any language on the planet bears marks of similar influences from languages other than its ancestor.


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## trance0

Corsicum said:


> …. Still relativity :
> *English* : The winemaking is the art of making wine. It is a chemical decomposition or fermentation.
> *German* : Die Weinbereitung ist die Kunst den Wein der Weinherstellung (or: ..., wie den Wein herzustellen.). Es ist eine chemische Zersetzung oder Fermentierung
> *French* :La vinification est l’art de faire du vin. C’est une décomposition chimique ou fermentation .
> *Italian* : La vinificazione è l'arte di fare il vino. Si tratta di una decomposizione chimica o fermentazione.
> *Spanish** :* La vinificación es el arte de hacer vino. Es un producto químico de descomposición o de fermentación .



The German version was grammatically wrong.


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## Outsider

Corsicum said:


> …. Still relativity :
> *English* : The winemaking is the art of making wine. It is a chemical decomposition or fermentation.
> *German* : Die Weinbereitung ist die Kunst, den Wein. Es ist eine chemische Zersetzung oder Fermentierung
> *French* :La vinification est l’art de faire du vin. C’est une décomposition chimique ou fermentation .
> *Italian* : La vinificazione è l'arte di fare il vino. Si tratta di una decomposizione chimica o fermentazione.
> *Spanish** :* La vinificación es el arte de hacer vino. Es un producto químico de descomposición o de fermentación .





Athaulf said:


> However, examples like this prove absolutely nothing, except that almost any European language has a bunch of words borrowed from Classical Latin and Greek. In fact, Latin words like "decomposition" are in an important sense alien even to modern Romance languages, since they were borrowed from Classical Latin in relatively recent times. They aren't part of their actual lexical heritage from Latin.


Agreed, Athaulf. Such 'fancy' words as "decomposition" and "fermentation" (and German has plenty of words like these, too...) are more a part of a common western European technical background, than genuinely Romance influences.



Athaulf said:


> But what reason is there to think that Germanic influences were more important in French than in Spanish or Italian? The Romance-speaking populations of today's Spain and Italy were also ruled by Germanic kingdoms for centuries (Visigoths in Spain, and Ostrogoths and later Langobards in Italy). Furthermore, just like northern France, various regions of Italy have also bordered with regions populated by Germanic speakers, often even being ruled by the same political entities, with the Romance and Germanic populations mixing and interacting heavily. Why didn't these other Romance dialects develop in the same direction as French?


Well, there are a couple of reasons that make a greater Germanic influence on French plausible. France, especially northern France, seems to have been culturally more Germanized than Spain or Italy, after the breakup of the Roman Empire. It was more fragmented politically (which could have fostered linguistic regionalisms), and it bordered with German-speaking regions.


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## Hulalessar

Outsider said:


> Well, there are a couple of reasons that make a greater Germanic influence on French plausible. France, especially northern France, seems to have been culturally more Germanized than Spain or Italy, after the breakup of the Roman Empire. It was more fragmented politically (which could have fostered linguistic regionalisms), and it bordered with German-speaking regions.


 
The Goths established states in Italy and Spain after the fall of the Roman Empire.


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## Outsider

Hulalessar said:


> The Goths established states in Italy and Spain after the fall of the Roman Empire.


The Goths were a small minority. They soon abandoned their original language for Romance, and after the first migrations of the 5th century there was no further influx of Germanic peoples into Iberia. By contrast, the area of France has had continuous interactions with Germany since the Middle Ages. Charlemagne even joined France and parts of Germany under a single crown, and you have states like Belgium and Switzerland today, which are part French-speaking and part German-speaking.


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## federicoft

I can't really say whether the changes between French and Spanish/Italian/Portuguese phonology are caused by Germanic influences or not (although I'm persuaded those differences are mainly due to different substrata preceiding the Roman conquest rather than latter influences). 

However, it is probably interesting to point out that Nothern Italian dialects (which are actually languages in their own right rather than dialects of Standard Italian) show a great phonological similarity with French, even more so than Oc languages, let alone Standard Italian (i.e. Tuscan).

As a matter of fact, Northern Italy has had extensive interaction with the Germanic world, arguabily more than any other part of Romance Europe but Northern and Eastern France (and French-speaking parts of Belgium and Switzerland), since it was part of the Frankish Empire and later of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries and experienced a number of Germanic invasions.

E.g. you can hear two samples of Eastern Lombard language here and here.


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## Tristano

Please take a look at the following book:

*Boyd*-*Bowman*, Peter, From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts, Georgetown University Press, Washington D.C. (1980)


Sound changes from Latin to Romance follow predictable and regular patterns based on many factors. Even the most "dramatic" change in sound from Latin to modern French generally follows a discernable rule based upon a specific phonological context. Sound change is not haphazard, and not bizarre. But it is _interesting._

Tristano

*English* : Winemaking is the art of making wine. It is a chemical decomposition or fermentation.
*German* : Die Weinbereitung ist die Kunst, den Wein. Es ist eine chemische Zersetzung oder Fermentierung
*French* :La vinification est l’art de faire du vin. C’est une décomposition chimique ou fermentation .
*Italian* : La vinificazione è l'arte di fare il vino. Si tratta di una decomposizione chimica o fermentazione.
*Spanish** :* La vinificación es el arte de hacer vino. Es un producto químico de descomposición o de fermentación .[/quote]


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> Well, there are a couple of reasons that make a greater Germanic influence on French plausible. France, especially northern France, seems to have been culturally more Germanized than Spain or Italy, after the breakup of the Roman Empire. It was more fragmented politically (which could have fostered linguistic regionalisms), and it bordered with German-speaking regions.



However, the problem is that we still have to make a large (and, in my opinion, unjustified) logical step from these historical facts to a conclusion that linguistic peculiarities of French were caused by Germanic influences. I'm not denying that this is a _possible_ explanation; I just think that we can't know if it's true. 

As I've already written many times, people often propose theories explaining language change by foreign influences that sound wonderfully plausible, reasonable, and intellectually attractive, and many pages can be filled with accurate historical and linguistic claims _suggesting_ that they might be true, but at the end of the day, a cool-headed analysis won't find any real evidence for them. Of course, this doesn't apply to clear cases such as blatant borrowing of vocabulary or morphology. But when it comes to less obvious influences in phonetics, phonology, and grammar, I think that much more skepticism is appropriate. 

In the particular case of French vs. the rest of Western Romance languages, I would say that a crucial data point would be the characteristics of various Romance dialects spoken around the modern border of Italy with Austria and Switzerland. I really don't see how historical Germanic influences on them could have been anything but greater than on French, so if they don't share certain characteristics of French that are supposed to be due to Germanic influences, then this theory seems to be quite vacuous. Of course, one can always speculate further and explain the differences away by pointing out different historical circumstances, differences between the Germanic languages in question, etc., but you'll probably agree that this would be way too much speculation and special pleading.


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## Joannes

Athaulf said:


> But what reason is there to think that Germanic influences were more important in French than in Spanish or Italian? The Romance-speaking populations of today's Spain and Italy were also ruled by Germanic kingdoms for centuries (Visigoths in Spain, and Ostrogoths and later Langobards in Italy).


The fact that Germanic lexical borrowing did not happen in the time of Visigoth or Ostrogoth rule but that words of Germanic origin were rather imported by the French? One can assume that syntactic influence will be greater if lexical influence is too, although even that depends on historical details. I agree with you that it is hard to be sure of syntactic influence and we should go about this on a case by case basis, but there are quite some areal correspondences to be found in the heart of Europe, (a rather unfamiliar example of which is in the name of the _oïl_-language: in French 'yes' used to be marked for person by means of an enclitic personal pronoun (*o-je*, *o-tu*, *o-il* etc.) - this existed in earlier stages of all West-Germanic languages (and to this very day in some Belgian Dutch dialects still) and is nowhere else to be found (perhaps in Corsican *ié*, but that's doubtful)). I think we _can_ assume a more important Germanic share in French than in Italian or Spanish.


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## Hulalessar

Joannes said:


> (a rather unfamiliar example of which is in the name of the _oïl_-language: in French 'yes' used to be marked for person by means of an enclitic personal pronoun (*o-je*, *o-tu*, *o-il* etc.)


 
I thought _oïl_ came from Latin _hoc ille._


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> I thought _oïl_ came from Latin _hoc ille._


I thought so as well. Though, it is not necessarily a contradiction to what Joannes wrote (interesting, I never heard this before) because _il_ is derived from _ille_.


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## Outsider

Joannes said:


> The fact that Germanic lexical borrowing did not happen in the time of Visigoth or Ostrogoth rule but that words of Germanic origin were rather imported by the French?


I believe there _were_ Germanic borrowings into the Iberian languages during Gothic rule. Perhaps not as many as into French, though.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Outsider said:


> I believe there _were_ Germanic borrowings into the Iberian languages during Gothic rule. Perhaps not as many as into French, though.


Agreed! 
A quick glance at _Ferreiro's Gramática histórica _galega, to take just one of the Iberian languages, shows quite a fair amount of Germanic words which date from the period of the Goths (and Suebi/Suevi).

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Tristano

Hulalessar said:


> I thought _oïl_ came from Latin _hoc ille._



Yes, I believe this to be so.

Tristano


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## Tristano

Outsider said:


> Agreed, Athaulf. Such 'fancy' words as "decomposition" and "fermentation" (and German has plenty of words like these, too...) are more a part of a common western European technical background, than genuinely Romance influences.



Agreed. Let's not confuse learned words like "decomposition" and "fermentation" with words of popular tradition.  

Tristano


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## Joannes

Hulalessar said:


> I thought _oïl_ came from Latin _hoc ille._


That's correct



berndf said:


> I thought so as well. Though, it is not necessarily a contradiction to what Joannes wrote (interesting, I never heard this before) because _il_ is derived from _ille_.


Exactly.



Outsider said:


> I believe there _were_ Germanic borrowings into the Iberian languages during Gothic rule. Perhaps not as many as into French, though.


(Yeah, half of the time I say "not", I mean "barely", that's just me - sorry.)
There were of course, but not quite many. If you take the Germanic share of vocabulary in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese (and that's not too impressive an amount), a surprisingly low percentage of words was borrowed during Goths' rule (*rico* is probably one of the most frequent ones) - many more were already borrowed in Latin beforehand (*guerra*, *guardar*, *fresco*) or later on in the Middle Ages through French (*blanco* (and Catalan *blau*), *jardín*, etc.). The _Camino de Santiago_ would have been of great importance in this. Of course there are words of which we are not sure when exactly they were borrowed (e.g. *sala*, *arenga* could be borrowed from the Goths or the French).

Given that, and given that the share of Germanic words in French vocabulary is even much greater still than in the Iberian languages - I think that is an indication that interlingual influences in syntax between Germanic languages and French _is_ more plausible than with other Romance languages.


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## Corsicum

Apologies for my mistakes.
*Thanks for “..this paper Henriette Walte..”. and explanations*.
*Example Table 4, one of the 103 verbs : rôtir (to roast) :*
*From German *: raustjan _– (… not from latin : rustare )._ 
*German *:  braten
*Béarnais(Fr.)* : rostir, tostar - *French* : rôtir - *Provençal* : resti, rasti .
*English* : roast 1297, from O.Fr. rostir_ -(Ref. :Online etymology dictionary) . _
*Breton* : rostan - *Catalan *: rostir, torrar
*Italian* : arrostire - *Corsican* : rustì, abbrustulì (_From German __raustjan Ref. INFCOR_) - *Sicilian* : arrùstiri - *Sardinian* : arrustìu - *Bolognan* : arustir - *Napolitan* : abbrustulì - *Piedmontais : *rusti
*(“Not from **German” : **Spanish*_ : asar - *Portuguese* : a__ssadeiras – Basque : __erre)_
Is it right ? .


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## Pedro y La Torre

Here is an interesting excerpt on this (for those who can read French) from Wikipedia*:



> L'influence du germanique sur le français et sur les autres langues d'oïl porterait surtout sur la prononciation (phonèmes; eu, u, è, e, par exemple) et l'orthographe (ex: 'haut', du latin _altus_ influencé par le francique _hoh_), qui en découle et moins sur la grammaire ou le vocabulaire. C'est cette influence germanique qui distingue les langues d'oïl de la langue d'oc. Le picard et le wallon sont les langues latines les plus germanisées, alors que le français officiel, lui, a eu tendance par les principaux érudits qu'étaient alors les membres du clergé, à épurer son vocabulaire vers la fin du Moyen Âge[..], pour le rapprocher du latin.


 
*Moderator note:*
*Quote shortened. Please follow the provided link for full text. Long quote (in excess of four lines) from external sources are not allowed by forum rules.*

There was a good show on _Arte_ not too long ago explaining the origins of the French, their culture and how due to the 19th century need to emphasize their differences from the enemy Prussians (later Germans), the Gaulish/Roman aspects of French culture were underlined to the detriment of the not inconsiderable Germanic heritage. Whether this has filtered through into the linguistic debate, I'm unsure. From what many say here, perhaps not.


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## ericmonteux

Pour répondre à ta question .

Le français est considéré comme la plus germanique des langues romane quoique le wallon l'est encore plus.
On considére qu'environ 15 % du vocabulaire de la langue française vient du francisque. Cette germanisation du latin vulgaire de la Gaule est plus importante que l'influence du Gaulois.
Cela est du à deux facteurs : l'implantation de plus d'un million de germains en France au IVième siècle et que le Nord et l'Est de la France étaient déjà naturellement peuplé de peuple germanique avant l'arrivé des Romains.
le francisque : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francique_(langue_morte)
les Francs : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francs


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## Outsider

Wikipedia said:
			
		

> L'influence du germanique sur le français et sur les autres langues d'oïl porterait surtout sur la prononciation (phonèmes; eu, u, è, e, par exemple) [...]


Le son "è" se trouve aussi dans le portugais, le catalan et l'italien.



			
				Wikipedia said:
			
		

> [...] et l'orthographe (ex: 'haut', du latin altus influencé par le francique hoh) [...]


Cela n'est pas une influence vraiment linguistique.


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