# Why is French so different from other Romance languages?



## JGreco

I've tried before to encourage discussion on this topic with no avail. I will try again now. I was wondering whether the difference in pronunciation in French was a result of language innovation or influence of the vulgar Latin spoken in the area of France by other languages? The reason I ask is because I find it fascinating that French pronunciation makes a monolingual speaker of a neighboring language such as Spanish not comprehend a French speaker even though they would be able to understand the written form of each language. I also find it intriguing that many Northern Italian language speakers find French when spoken slowly comprehensible. What caused French to innovate or change so rapidly? Was it Language influence (Germanic Substratum) or rapid language change?


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## sokol

Both Gaulic Vulgar Latin as well as Germanic influence certainly played a role for French developping "away" - especially in its phonetics - from other Romance languages: or at least, as far as I know there is a consensus on this in Romanistics (I'm no specialist here though ).

But don't forget that the language border looks much sharper than it actually is (or more precisely, was): because Provençal and Occitan are of course the (now almost-missing)-link between French on the one hand and Catalan/Spanish - Northern Italian dialects on the other hand.
Both Provençal and Occitan "look" and "sound" significantly "more Romance" than standard ("northern") French.


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## Kevin Beach

From a non-Romance viewpoint, I can sympathise with JGreco's thoughts. For those who, like me, have a smattering of Latin, it is possible to listen to Spanish and Italian speech without finding everything entirely alien. But everyday French speech is very difficult to understand, even after several years of schooling.

I had always understood that modern French pronunciation is comparatively recent, and not a product of the Dark Ages. I would go so far as to say that French speech of the late 20th and early 21st century sounds different from the more comprehensible examples in early sound recordings.

Common British English speech has changed noticeably in the past 100 years. Could the same be said of French? If so, might its qualities be more to do with the serendipitous effects of the past five hundred years than French's first five hundred?


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## brian

I have to confirm, from my own experience, what Kevin said about France French pronunciation being a rather modern thing.

I've lived in southern Louisiana all my life and grew up around Cajun French speakers since I was 5-6 years old (although unfortunately not consistently enough to have learned the langauge, and also because the older generation tends to speak English to the kids). Cajun French, just like Acadian French and other Canadian French dialects, has a phonology drastically different from that of France French. In Cajun French, for example, the _r_ is trilled similar to the _r_ in Spanish & Italian.

I never used to understand much Cajun French until after I learned Italian, and now I find it easier to understand Cajun French than France French; however, this obviously could be because I'm so used to the accent (after almost 20 years), and because CF contains many words and expressions similar to Italian that got lost/changed in France French over time.

But anyway, point being, I definitely think the phonology of modern France French is way more different from Italian & Spanish than it was just a few hundred years ago, before settlers left for Canada.


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## sokol

Actually French uvular "r" is not due to influence from Vulgar Latin or Germanic languages - both had an alveolar "r" as well, originally. 
We've discussed this in this thread already (and probably in some other threads, I'm not sure). This "r" sound certainly is a rather new development (but gues back to the 18th century).
Accadian settlers left France before.  (Quebecers though were influenced by later immigration too, right?)
(Also French dialects only were almost completely levelled out during and after the French Revolution.)

Further newer developments in French pronunciation - that is, speaking of late 20th century developments - already took place when French was very different from other Romance languages already: many endings lost (not in writing but in speech), and deep changes in phonetics and phonology (even if we leave out uvular "r").

That - the dropping of endings and changes in phonology - is what should be traced back to Vulgar Latin and, partly, Germanic influence.


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## brian

I think you're right, sokol. See here (last point under "Sociolinguistic status of selected phonological traits").

But I think some Quebec French dialects, as well as some non-Quebec Canadian French dialects (Acadian perhaps? Not sure about Newfoundland, etc.), and of course Cajun French, still have the trilled _r_.


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## berndf

You also have dialects within France itself that trill the "r", notably _Bourguignon_. I think this is relatively minor difference to other Romance languages anyway. In my view the most important idiosyncrasies of French are:
- Almost total insignificance of stress, both word and sentence stress. E.g. for a French person the English adjective _arith_*me*_tic_ and the noun _a_*rith*_metic_ sound the same.
- Extensive use of nasals.
- Much more radical simplification of endings than in other Romance languages.


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## brian

The point about stress is important, but regarding nasals (and the vowel phonology of French in general), isn't Portuguese arguably just as rich? It has an extensive vowel phonology as well as a large number of nasalized vowels.


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## Forero

Some notable characteristics of French compared with Italian and Spanish:


French _u_ sounds like _ü_.
The stressed _o_ of Latin, Italian, and Spanish often becomes in French _ou_ (sounds like _u_) or _eu _(sounds like _ö_).
The stressed _a_ of Latin, Italian, and Spanish is often _é_ or è in French unless a consonant followed in the same Latin syllable.
Latin stressed long _e_ and stressed short _i_ when not followed by a consonant in the same Latin syllable tend to be _oi_ ("wa" or "oé") in French.
Final unstressed vowels disappear in French, except for the _e_ "muet", usually from Latin _a_.  Thus final syllables, even with grammatical significance, tend to disappear in French.  French requires subject pronouns to make up for the lack of distinctive personal verb endings.
Many consonants have disappeared from French, sometimes written, sometimes not.  Modern French often has _cha_ or _che_ for _ca_.
Final consonants sometimes reappear before a vowel in the same phrase.
Pronunciation is not always expressed in spelling.  The same word, spelled the same way, sometimes has a different meaning depending on pronunciation (e.g. _plus_).
I think most of the vowel changes began in Old French, but the consonant changes were more extensive later.  For example, Old French _pret_ (= _prato_/_prado_), _piedre_ (= _pietra_/_piedra_), _pedre_ (= _padre_), and _peire_ (= _pera_) have become, respectively, Modern French _pré_, _pierre_, _père_, and _poire_; Old French _vide_ (= _vita_/_vida_) is just _vie_ in Modern French. [Source: _The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages_, by Mario Pei.]


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## HUMBERT0

brian8733 said:


> The point about stress is important, but regarding nasals (and the vowel phonology of French in general), isn't Portuguese arguably just as rich? It has an extensive vowel phonology as well as a large number of nasalized vowels.


 Could Celtic have had an impact on vowel phonology in early and subsequent development of Vulgar Latin in those regions, like some say Old Basque had in Castilian language?


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## JGreco

But in terms of Portuguese even with its richness a monolingual Castellano speaker  can still get the gist of what they are saying as a conversation goes on due to the similarities in common word origins and grammar. That does not occur at all between French and Spanish (though a lot of hand signaling will occur).I wish some native French speakers would respond to the topic so we can here their opinions.


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## Forero

I don't believe knowing Portuguese would put a person any closer to understanding French than knowing Spanish.  Richness of phonemes does not help when the use of the phonemes is contrary or haphazard.

Concerning stress, M. Pei's book says that French must have been highly stressed to lose so much of each word after the stressed syllable.  In effect, stress no longer has meaning in French because every word of more than one syllable is now stressed on the last syllable (not counting _e muet_), any vowels following the stress having been lost.


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## Hulalessar

JGreco said:


> But in terms of Portuguese even with its richness a monolingual Castellano speaker can still get the gist of what they are saying as a conversation goes on due to the similarities in common word origins and grammar.


 
Whilst it is true that a Spanish speaker is likely to be able to make more sense of spoken Portuguese than French, following _spoken_ Portuguese if you only speak Spanish is not that easy; following a written text is a different matter. The Portuguese have a much easier time understanding Spanish because it sounds like Portuguese "spoken as it is written". Most Spaniards can follow Italian more easily then Portuguese.

Part of the problem here is the difficulty in classifying Romance languages. Traditional classifications tend, at least in part, to be geographically based. This can be unsatisfactory. If you include Catalan in Ibero-Romance and Occitan in Gallo-Romance you have the awkward fact that Catalan and Occitan are more closely related to each other than Catalan is to Spanish or Occitan to French. A more satisfactory approach, though perhaps less scientific since it ignores genetic relatedness, is to gather all the languages in a circle. You place Latin in the middle and each modern language nearer or further to the centre according to how far it has travelled away from Latin. If you do that then Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Occitan are going to be nearer to the centre than French, Rumanian and Portuguese. That French, Rumanian and Portuguese are on or near the circumference and also geographically on the edges of the Romance speaking area in Europe is perhaps not coincidental.

Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Occitan are spoken on the shores of the Mediterranean. At the time these languages were becoming differentiated travel by sea was much easier than travel by land. Ports are cosmopolitan and the traffic to and fro would tend to put a brake on language change. This does not of course explain everything. Castillian Spanish with its (possibly) Aquitanian sub-stratum developed in Northern Spain and moved southwards, but against that Castillian has been influenced by other Romance languages to the East and North.

That Rumanian went its own way is easily explained by its being cut off from the rest of the Romance speaking world and the influence of Slavic. That Portuguese has become more differentiated is less easy to explain because there are no natural barriers or non-Romance buffers between Portuguese speaking areas and Spanish speaking areas.

There are many theories as to why French is the real maverick of the Romance languages. They include a Celtic sub-stratum and the influence of Germanic. Although there is a dialect continuum as you move from what is now Northern France/Belgium to what is now the South of France, with the varieties at the extremes being rather sharply differentiated and an intermediate zone between the "langue d'oc" and the "langue d'oïl", there were natural barriers in some areas. These were not necessarily geographical, but took shape in the form of forests. In former times, forests were greater barriers to travel, especially for commerce, than water.

So, the peculiarites, if such we may call them, of modern French may be attributable in part to Celtic and Germanic and in part to its semi-isolation from the rest of the Romance speaking world.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> There are many theories as to why French is the real maverick of the Romance languages. They include a Celtic sub-stratum and the influence of Germanic. Although there is a dialect continuum as you move from what is now Northern France/Belgium to what is now the South of France, with the varieties at the extremes being rather sharply differentiated and an intermediate zone between the "langue d'oc" and the "langue d'oïl"...


Historically, the Occitan ("langue d'oc") languages formed a dialect continuum with Catalan in the South West and Piemontese and Ligurian in the East and not with French. Occitan should not be confused with the modern French dialects of southern France.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> Historically, the Occitan ("langue d'oc") languages formed a dialect continuum with Catalan in the South West and Piemontese and Ligurian in the East and not with French. Occitan should not be confused with the modern French dialects of southern France.


 
When I wrote: "Although there is a dialect continuum" I was going to expand to explain that I was not talking about southern varieties of French, but decided my post was already long enough. Wish I had now!

There is (quite apart from Franco-Provençal which is distinct from the langue d'oc and the langue d'oïl but shares features with both) an intermediate zone between the _parlers_ of the langue d'oc and the _parlers_ of the langue d'oïl and there is no sharp line between the two.

Romance languages do not divide so neatly as, say, Germanic does into Western and Northern sub-divisions.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> There is (quite apart from Franco-Provençal which is distinct from the langue d'oc and the langue d'oïl but shares features with both) an intermediate zone between the _parlers_ of the langue d'oc and the _parlers_ of the langue d'oïl and there is no sharp line between the two.


You must be thinking of the _Limousin_ and _Auvergne_ dialects and I agree with you. What I wanted to stress with my previous post was not so much that Occitan do no form a continuum with French but rather that it does form a continuum with Catalan and Northern Italian languages and is much less "maverickish" than French.

And, yes, Franco-Provencal (or Arpitan as they prefer to call it these days) is a genuinely different dialect group. But this language is almost entirely gone. I have been living in the area for 20 year now and still haven't met a single native speaker.


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## Montesacro

berndf said:


> And, yes, Franco-Provencal (or Arpitan as they prefer to call it these days) is a genuinely different dialect group. But this language is almost entirely gone. I have been living in the area for 20 year now and still haven't met a single native speaker.


 
You should go to Valle d'Aosta then.
I'm sure you know where it is but maybe other foreros don't: it is a small alpine region in north-western Italy bordering with Savoie (France) and Valais (Switzerland).
About 150,000 people live there; probably half of them still speak the local patois, which is a form of Franco-Provencal.

One more thing to add: in Apulia (south-eastern Italy) there are two small villages named Faeto and Celle San Vito.
Well, they speak a very curious variant of Franco-Provencal heavily influenced by the surrounding dialects (which are not very far from Neapolitan).
Probably their ancestors came from Savoie and settled there in the 13th century on their way back from Palestine (or maybe they didn't even reach the Holy Land because they decided that a crusade was after all not what they were looking for ).


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## berndf

Montesacro said:


> You should go to Valle d'Aosta then.
> I'm sure you know where it is but maybe other foreros don't: it is a small alpine region in north-western Italy bordering with Savoie (France) and Valais (Switzerland).
> About 150,000 people live there; probably half of them still speak the local patois, which is a form of Franco-Provencal.


That is what I have been told too. Most active Arpitan speakers are supposed to live there. It is about 1 1/2h from where I am living to _Courmayeur_, the closest town in _Val d'Aoste_ as they call it on my side of the Mt. Blanc. If you don't have local connections to villagers there all you ever hear these days is French or Italian. 



> One more thing to add: in Apulia (south-eastern Italy) there are two small villages named Faeto and Celle San Vito.
> Well, they speak a very curious variant of Franco-Provencal heavily influenced by the surrounding dialects (which are not very far from Neapolitan).
> Probably their ancestors came from Savoie and settled there in the 13th century on their way back from Palestine (or maybe they didn't even reach the Holy Land because they decided that a crusade was after all not what they were looking for ).


How very interesting!


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## dinji

Hulalessar said:


> A more satisfactory approach, though perhaps less scientific since it ignores genetic relatedness, is to gather all the languages in a circle. You place Latin in the middle and each modern language nearer or further to the centre according to how far it has travelled away from Latin. If you do that then Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Occitan are going to be nearer to the centre than French, Rumanian and Portuguese. That French, Rumanian and Portuguese are on or near the circumference and also geographically on the edges of the Romance speaking area in Europe is perhaps not coincidental.


I have encountered a convincing argument for placing all languages with a primarely Gallic substrate into one group - a belt if you wish - from Northern Italy (Gallia Cisalpina) through Langue d'oc and Catalonia as well as Aragonese and Asturian to Galician and Portuguese. Castilian stands out from this continuum in some respects, especially phonologically, because the substrate is Basque. French also really stands out because its superstrate is Frankish. Having learned both Catalan and Portuguese I find the argument also intuitively convincing. Not only the sibilants are similar, also the stress patterns and intonation strikes me as quite similar.


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## Forero

Besides the sibilants and affricates being unusual in Castilian and Basque, I don't see much similarity since they are unusual in different ways.  The Portuguese _s_ and _z_ are just as unusual to my ear.

What is a superstrate?


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## dinji

Forero said:


> What is a superstrate?


 
A *superstratum* or *superstrate* (plural: _superstrata_ or _superstrates_) is the counterpart to a substratum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstrate#Superstratum

The Frankonian influence on Romance in former Gaul is probably not the most typical case. Old Frankonian was certainly the language of power but Latin still must have retained many other top functions, such as in education, spiritual life etc. Thus Frankonian must have been a mix of a superstratum and an adstratum, but by no means a substratum though.


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## HUMBERT0

dinji said:


> I have encountered a convincing argument for placing all languages with a primarely Gallic substrate into one group - a belt if you wish - from Northern Italy (Gallia Cisalpina) through Langue d'oc and Catalonia as well as Aragonese and Asturian to Galician and Portuguese.


I don't know..., Catalan or Aragonese had an Iberian substrate as far as I know, as they are on the Mediterranean, and have always had more contact with the Mediterranean peoples; the interior of the peninsula had a Celtic (Celtiberian) substrate and the northeast Aquitanian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages


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