# Colloquialism in French & Persian



## PersoLatin

Could it be that modern spoken French is a colloquial version of its written form? This is very simplistic but could explain the presence of unpronounced letters at the end of many words. Originally all letters were pronounced but were gradually dropped in conversation, but remained in the written form.

I see some parallels in Persian, where colloquial form drops letters at the end (as well as change some in the middle) of words, but the written form still reflects the official spoken form.


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## Ben Jamin

Calling a speech colloquial means that it differs from formal speech in any combination of the following features: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and phraseology. Formal speech usually originates in the written form, but is often read aloud, or may be used in formal conversation. Colloquial speech always originates being spoken, but may be written down. So you see, the two divisions: spoken/written and formal/colloquial  speech are independent from each other.
The written French does not reflect "the official spoken form", as the nobody in France pronounces the words exacly  as they are written, maybe except a few words. The French spelling reflects two things:
1. The origin of the word (etymology)
2. The historical pronunciation of the words.
That's why there are so many letters that are not pronounced or are pronounced according to complicated rules, not related to the phonetical value of each letter alone.


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## PersoLatin

Ben Jamin said:


> Calling a speech colloquial means that it differs from formal speech in any combination of the following features: *pronuncciation*, grammar, vocabulary and phraseology


I agree and of the four features you listed, I believe different pronunciation alone, qualifies French as a colloquial of its current written form, it is writen one way and pronounced a different way.



Ben Jamin said:


> The French spelling reflects two things:
> 1. The origin of the word (etymology)
> 2. The historical pronunciation of the words.


Agreed, that's the background for the current spelling.



Ben Jamin said:


> That's why there are so many letters that are not pronounced or are pronounced according to complicated rules, not related to the phonetical value of each letter alone.


Maybe those complicated rules were retrospectively created to justify the reason why people omitted the final letters.


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## Ben Jamin

PersoLatin said:


> Maybe those complicated rules were retrospectively created to justify the reason why people omitted the final letters.



What do you mean "retrospectively created"? In the very beginning of the history of the French language Frenchmen wrote still Latin. When they began to gradually adjust the written language to the actual pronunciation they still kept many of the non pronounced letters because they were there in the Latin spelling. Finally, the French words became so truncated, that there ocurred many words pronounced in a very similar way. As the written speech needs a higher degree of unambiguousness than the spoken word, the words with similar pronunciation retained historical spelling in order to be discerned from their phonetical siblings.


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## PersoLatin

^ I accept all of the above as the processes that have shaped the French language.



Ben Jamin said:


> Finally, the French words became so truncated, that there ocurred many words pronounced in a very similar way.


I'd say, colloquialism was behind becoming 'so truncated', as it constantly introduced changes and, in order to keep the spoken & written forms inline, adjustments have had to be made, retrospectively, enforcing the use of historical spellings, is one of those. But there's so much that can be done, hence the current misalignment between the spoken & written forms.


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## Ben Jamin

PersoLatin said:


> ^ I accept all of the above as the processes that have shaped the French language.
> 
> 
> I'd say, colloquialism was behind becoming 'so truncated', as it constantly introduced changes and, in order to keep the spoken & written forms inline, adjustments have had to be made, retrospectively, enforcing the use of historical spellings, is one of those. But there's so much that can be done, hence the current misalignment between the spoken & written forms.


Sorry, but I don't understand your point.


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## PersoLatin

Ben Jamin said:


> but I don't understand your point.


My point is, the French spelling/writing has always had to catch up with the way it is spoken (which I call colloquial) and it still hasn't caught up with it.


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## Ben Jamin

PersoLatin said:


> My point is, the French spelling/writing has always had to catch up with the way it is spoken (which I call colloquial) and it still hasn't caught up with it.


I don't think it will ever "catch up". Today's French spelling reflects pronunciation that is many hundred years old and etymologies that are even older. Can you give any example of this "catching up" that has happened on a larger scale recently?


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## J.F. de TROYES

PersoLatin said:


> .
> I see some parallels in Persian, where colloquial form drops letters at the end (as well as change some in the middle) of words, but the written form still reflects the official spoken form.




Could you give and comment some examples ?

It's right that many consonants are no more pronounced in French at the end of words and among them  key grammatical markers as the -s , the main plural marker  or the -t , the verbal ending of the 3rd persons. These alterations can be traced back at least to the 11th century ( cantat > chantet > il/elle chante = he/she sings ) . At those times they could sound as a loose pronunciation and considered colloquial by scholars. But nowadays they can't be called anymore that way, as French has said for several centuries nothing else but  /ilʃɑ̃t /.
Ben Jamin clearly explains the  reasons why there is  a big gap between written and spoken French. A spelling specific to the new language was hard to become fixed, because it  was necessarily based on the Latin alphabet and occasionally the Greek one, while phonetically old French has departed from Latin more than any other western Romance language. Moreover many reform attempts coming from writers and later the French Academy did'nt really succeed because of the scholars' elitism and traditionalism.
Seen from a quite different point of view, that is in a synchronique prospect, speech registers and regional accents also explain the gap between the spoken and written French. But I think it is the same , more or less, for all written languages. So the sentence _Je ne le sais pas _( I don't know him)  is usually pronounced /ʒənəlsepa/ , but one can hear/ʒənələsepa/ , fitting the written form, in some areas of Southern France and in a very lax way :
/(s)ʒepa/ where _ne _and _le_ are dropped.









ə

e /


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## PersoLatin

J.F. de TROYES said:


> Could you give and comment some examples ?


The best example is ast (is) which is equivalent to the French 'est'. Colloquially, in Tehran, ast becomes é which is how est is pronounced in French, e.g. the formal 'in bad ast' (this is bad), becomes 'in bad é', colloquially.

Other examples:
formal > colloquial:
1) agar beravi > agé beri  (if you go)

2) man hastam > man am (I am)
In the above, hast is dropped & only am is pronounced, colloquially.

3) ânhâ hastand > unân (they are)
ân > un (that), hâ > â, hastand > an, putting them together unân.
hâ is the plural marker, formally, 'h' is fully pronounced, but colloquially, the h is dropped completely.

For all we know, the French contraction of est to é, happened for the same reasons that the Persian contracted ast to é, but the Persian one was never written, nor it seems is the French one, as the representation of é is est.


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## Nawaq

J.F. de TROYES said:


> So the sentence _Je ne le sais pas _( I don't know him)  is usually pronounced /ʒənəlsepa/ , but one can hear/ʒənələsepa/ , fitting the written form, in some areas of Southern France and in a very lax way :
> /(s)ʒepa/ where _ne _and _le_ are dropped.



Salut,

I don't want to nitpick but, you say _je ne le sais pas_ is "usually" said /ʒənəlsepa/, but I think that "usually", it's mostly spoken, by pretty much everyone /ʒənsepa/, and even more common in casual, everyday speech when you're not at work /ʒəsepa/, which can become like you know /sepa/, /ʒsepa/, /ʃepa/, /ʃpa/. 

If I'm off-topic, I am sorry.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Nawaq said:


> Salut,
> 
> I don't want to nitpick but, you say _je ne le sais pas_ is "usually" said /ʒənəlsepa/, but I think that "usually", it's mostly spoken, by pretty much everyone /ʒənsepa/, and even more common in casual, everyday speech when you're not at work /ʒəsepa/, which can become like you know /sepa/, /ʒsepa/, /ʃepa/, /ʃpa/.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You're right. Thanks for the correction. It's not always easy to write down the colloquial spoken forms.
Click to expand...


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## J.F. de TROYES

PersoLatin said:


> The best example is ast (is) which is equivalent to the French 'est'. Colloquially, in Tehran, ast becomes é which is how est is pronounced in French, e.g. the formal 'in bad ast' (this is bad), becomes 'in bad é', colloquially.
> 
> For all we know, the French contraction of est to é, happened for the same reasons that the Persian contracted ast to é, but the Persian one was never written, nor it seems is the French one, as the representation of é is est.



Thanks for the examples. So at the present time the formal pronunciation is_ ast_  and the colloquial one is  _é ;_ if so, it's different in French where
 the verb est is always pronounced _è_ or _é_


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## Ben Jamin

J.F. de TROYES said:


> Thanks for the examples. So at the present time the formal pronunciation is_ ast_  and the colloquial one is  _é ;_ if so, it's different in French where
> the verb est is always pronounced _è_ or _é_


Is it true that the French pronunciation stabilized at approximately today's form somewhere under the reign of Louis XVI?


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## PersoLatin

J.F. de TROYES said:


> So at the present time the formal pronunciation is_ ast_ and the colloquial one is _é ;_ if so, it's different in French where
> the verb est is always pronounced _è_ or _é_


I'm certainly aware of this difference, the point I am trying to raise in this thread, is that, it is plausible that at some very distant past, the French language ditched its formal speech (est, fully pronounced) and replaced it with its, then, colloquial (é), as this happened a long time ago, there's no memory of it, or maybe there is. Whatever the historical & etymological facts say, there's a difference between spoken & written French, in words which are naturally easy to contract, & therefore be colloquialised.

If Persian ditches its formal spoken language (ast, fully pronounced), tomorrow, and allows the colloquial (é) to take its place, it will become the same as French. Then they have to write manuals explaining that 'beravi' is pronounced as 'beri' and the presence of extra, unpronounced 'av', is historical.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Ben Jamin said:


> Is it true that the French pronunciation stabilized at approximately today's form somewhere under the reign of Louis XVI?



I think it is getting very similar to the to-day's pronunciation as soon as the 17th century. This is mostly due to the leading part played by the grammarians and the State in unifying  the language of the kingdom. Vaugelas'_Remarques sur la langue française_ (1647) pass jugements on all sides of the language, explaining what has to be said and what has to be rejected. The French Academy is founded by Richelieu who gives it the charge of writing a dictionary and a grammar (1635 ) . In the meantime two other dictionaries are published by Richelet and Furetière . These scholars and many others, close to the court, tackle to everything deviates from the ruling elite's language as the people's and the Provinces'. So many 'natural' phonetic alterations will be stopped under their prestigious influence and the pronunciation used in the court and the upper middle class living in Paris will gain ground, but, to tell the truth,  very slowly. This  standard pronunciation becomes commonplace more in the regions close to Paris than the remote ones, more in the cities than in the countryside. Other languages are still alive, mainly Occitan and Breton. An inquiry carried out by the abbot Grégoire during the years 1790 reveals that only 11,5 % people masters standard French in the kingdom an d 46% have a poor grasp of the language. Even if these data are sometimes considered overrated, they show how long it will be for French to become widespread. Making the school compulsory and free of charge in the late 19th c. was a decisive factor in bringing French and its standard pronunciation into a common use ( and consequently in weakening the regional languages).
The main difference between the pronunciation of the 17th century's elite and to-day is the consonant that was rolled [r] and generally changed during the 18th.c. into a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ]. Some people also used to pronounce the grapheme /oi / as [wɛ]  and _fils_ was always said_ fi_.



PersoLatin said:


> I'm certainly aware of this difference, the point I am trying to raise in this thread, is that, it is plausible that at some very distant past, the French language ditched its formal speech (est, fully pronounced) and replaced it with its, then, colloquial (é), as this happened a long time ago, there's no memory of it, or maybe there is.
> .



Changing the pronunciation from _e-s-t_ to _è _is not due to a standard form replaced by a colloquialism , but to a progressive phonetic alteration. In the Romance languages the only Sardinian has maintened the form_ est_ pronounced the same way as in Classical Latin ; the others have lost the T (Spanish  _es _) or the S and the T (Italian _è_ ). The final T already tended to be weakened or even dropped in the Imperial Latin. As far as I know, I can't answer your question : either the French form _est_ is an etymological spelling and both consonants or the final one was never pronounced or the T was maintained as an ending distinguishing the singular 3rd person. Etymologycally_  être_ comes from _*essere>estre_ and _est_ probably from _esset_ or _esse_. Anyhow I think this form was already pronounced as to-day in the early Middle-Age.


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## PersoLatin

J.F. de TROYES said:


> Changing the pronunciation from _e-s-t_ to _è _is not due to a standard form replaced by a *colloquialism* , but to a *progressive phonetic alteration.*


You see these processes as different & ditinct from one another, I see no well defined line separating them, especially when comparing ast>é and est>é, two words that mean the same and are cognates, and have gone through the same stages, in my view.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Actually phonetic changes in Persian and French from ast/est to /è /look close to each other, but not identical, _ast_ being different from _est_. Your above examples showing contracted forms are rather similar to the colloquial pronunciation of some sentences in French, but this kind of speaking is governed by phonetic rules specific to each language.


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## PersoLatin

In fact, the colloquial for 'ast' has another form i.e. /a, which is probably older & is found in regional accents, where /é is more prevalent in mainstream Persian.


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