# At what point did French and Spanish lose Intelligibility?



## JGreco

I've always wondered something that never seems to be discussed on this forum. Given that they are next door neighbors who have had influence between each other through out the centuries. Was there a point in history that French and Spanish were ever mutually intelligible? If so, at what point did the two languages diverge and why? What problems developed between the pronunciation of the two languages that dropped intelligibility so low? The reason I say this because I know many people mainly of Latin American origins who have no exposure to French and don't here it in their daily lives who say they understand Romanian more when heard the first time before they understand spoken French. In my own experience, while French is a beautiful Romance language it is the absolute hardest to understand. I want lots of discussion please.


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## Athaulf

JGreco said:


> I've always wondered something that never seems to be discussed on this forum. Given that they are next door neighbors who have had influence between each other through out the centuries. Was there a point in history that French and Spanish were ever mutually intelligible? If so, at what point did the two languages diverge and why?



Spanish and French are both descended from Vulgar Latin, so obviously, during their development into their preset forms, they must have passed through a period in which their mutual intelligibility fell from 100% to the present very low level. There is no fixed point at which the local vernacular dialects of Latin stopped being just "dialects" and became Spanish, French, Italian, etc. Each local Latin dialect slowly became more and more different in its own peculiar ways with each generation of speakers. 

Furthermore, the notions of standard Spanish, French, etc. as shared mother tongues of entire populations of large countries are a relatively modern development. Several centuries ago, in the lands that are nowadays Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy, you would find a continuum of dialects in which the inhabitants of each town and village understood their neighbors from the local region, but the differences slowly accumulated with distance. Thus, local dialects spoken several hundred kilometers apart could be mutually incomprehensible, but there would be few, if any sharp linguistic boundaries in the area between them (and these would have been introduced by extraordinary large population movements). Outside of the large urban centers, there are still remnants of this dialect continuum even nowadays. 

Unfortunately, very few details are known about the early centuries of development from Latin into Romance languages. The problem is that most of the preserved written records were works of educated authors, who used Classical Latin as the language of high culture long after the spoken language had greatly diverged from it, and the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire brought a general decline in the levels of literacy and literary output. We have plenty of written material in Classical and (very similar) Church Latin from ancient Roman writers and early medieval churchmen, but very few records of Vulgar Latin spoken by the common people through these historical periods.  

An interesting data point comes from the linguistic practices of the Catholic Church. Until the 8th century, Church Latin was still used for preaching to the common folk in churches throughout the Romance-speaking lands, with only some adaptations to the local pronunciation. However, by the early 800s, the vernacular had already diverged so far that church councils of that time, most notably in Tours in 813, prescribed the use of local vernaculars for preaching.



> What problems developed between the pronunciation of the two languages that dropped intelligibility so low?


There were no "problems". Language normally changes -- slowly, but steadily. If two populations speaking the same language lose contact, or maintain contact only through another, different language, their languages will slowly drift apart from each other. After a few centuries of such development, their languages may easily diverge to the point of losing nearly all intelligibility, and after a few thousand years, it may take an expert eye to even see any similarities that would point to their common origin.

Now, why individual Romance languages drifted apart in those exact particular directions, that's a hard and complicated question, to which  there will probably never be a definite and reliable answer, especially since there is so little documentary evidence about their early development.


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## josue_ernesto

This is all my opinion and should be taken as such

I know very little of history (at least to be a scholar) but in living in Spain for a time, More specifically in Cataluyna, I recognized that every area had their own language (or dialect).  Catalan, for example was spoke on both the french and spanish side of the border, but had small variants (catalan from Lleida, Girona, and perpignan were all simular, but due to distance, geography, ect. they all have different 'versions' of Catalan)  The further south I went (Valencia, Alicante, Murcia) Catalan changed to Valencian, which were very simular, but with more Spanish words.  It should be noted that Catalan is derived from Latin, like spanish and french.  In fact, many friends of mine see Catalan as French and Spanish mixed, with a few Italian words mixed in.

One other thing that should be pointed out is when the Catholic King and Queen were married, this act united Castilla Leon and Aragón.  From this union, Castellano (Spanish) was placed as the official language.  Before that, regional languages like Catalan, Aragonese, and Valenciano were how the people spoke and did business.  When this was explained to be by my spaniard friends, I compared it to the tribes that lived in Central and South America before the Spaniards came.  All thier languages were unique, but many had simularities.  The differences were caused by distances between tribes, geographic barriers, and lack of travel between the tribes.  At one point, all spoke the same language, but as time passed, languages changed to fit local customs and comforts.

I'm not sure if I'm helping here, but what I'm trying to say is, I think it is impossible to know when Spanish and French became intelligible, because there may have never been a point when they were.  They both derive from Vulger Latin, but when Rome finally lost its power in that part of the world, and due to the lack of communication between groups of people, differences began to emerge.  Even in Spain and France, there are 3 or 4 different regional languages (Spain has Castellano, Catalan, and Gallego which is Latin based, and Euskara).  Only until the establishment of centralized governments in these countries, was it made necessary to have one main language.  I have been told that all countries in Europe are simular in this aspect.

I hope I helped...


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## josue_ernesto

I see Athaulf had a better explanation that I.

I just wanted to add this.  Think of the USA suddenly going back into the Dark Ages.  No telephone, no computers, no other forms of communication.  The Central Government falls and local governments take its place.  The only people you would speak to are those in your immediate area.  Now, you wouldn't see an immediate change in your language, but over, let's say, 3 generations, you would probably find that each geographical region will have at least small differences in thier version of English.

In fact, look at how those from California talk and compare how different it is from those from, let's say, Texas, or Florida, or New York.  We all speak English, but each area has developed its own coloquial language.


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## sokol

Especially in the case of French and Spanish another important factor comes into play: distance of the areas where the standard language is based, which is Castilia for Spanish and the Île de France for French.

If you take the closest dialects in the old dialect continuum from the Meuse down to Finisterre, that is Catalan and Provencale (especially the dialcets of Gascogne and Provence), then these dialects probably were still mutually intelligible in medieval times, or probably they still are nowadays: I can't judge that one as I know rather little of those languages.

So basically, the fact that French and Spanish look quite different is due to the fact that French (that is, the northern variety of it) is now the language of southern France too (as the number of Provencal speakers is very small nowadays, and still decreasing further). This language shift makes the distance between both languages look much greater as it once was.

(And anyway, even though one couldn't call modern French and modern Spanish mutually intelligible still the knowledge of French is of great help when learning Spanish - if you don't tend to mix the varieties. So there's still much similarity between both, despite the differencies.)


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## demalaga

I just tried to read some lines of "la chanson de Roland" (XI century) and found it impossible to understand although many words are recognisable to me.On the other hand "Cantar del mío Cid"(XIIcentury) I can understand much better.So no doubt were different languages.But if you knew a little madieval latin you could make yourself understood.THe example is Saint Vicent Ferrer, who preached thoughout all western Europe and everybody could understand him.(XV century)


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## sokol

demalaga said:


> I just tried to read some lines of "la chanson de Roland" (XI century) and found it impossible to understand (...)



This of course is in Old French ('Northern French').
Try Old Occitan, probably this would be easier for you; it seems that even an Occitan version of _la chanson de Roland _exists:
http://oc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cançon_de_Rotland#Lo_Rotland_occitan


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## Outsider

Here's another interesting document, the Oaths of Strasbourg. It's trilingual: medieval Latin, Old German, and Vulgar Latin.

What I found stunning when I looked closely at the Vulgar Latin version is how much it already feels like a Romance language--and yet leaves me at a loss trying to identify which one! It looks like all of them, and none of them at the same time! Although it was written in France, in many ways I find the language closer to Spanish, Italian, or even Portuguese, than to modern French. (Though I suppose the language that was transcribed might have been a _langue d'oc_ -- an ancestor of Catalan and Occitan --, rather than a _langue d'oïl_, the group where standard modern French emerged from.)


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> Here's another interesting document, the Oaths of Strasbourg. It's trilingual: medieval Latin, Old German, and Vulgar Latin.
> 
> What I found stunning when I looked closely at the Vulgar Latin version is how much it already feels like a Romance language--and yet leaves me at a loss trying to identify which one! It looks like all of them, and none of them at the same time! Although it was written in France, in many ways I find the language closer to Spanish, Italian, or even Portuguese, than to modern French. (Though I suppose the language that was transcribed might have been a _langue d'oc_ -- an ancestor of Catalan and Occitan --, rather than a _langue d'oïl_, the group where standard modern French emerged from.)



I think the Romance language of the Oaths was in fact some sort of a generic late Vulgar Latin that could still be reasonably well understood throughout the Western Romance areas, or at least their Frankish-ruled part. It was supposed to be understood, and even recited back, by a large army whose members were probably coming from a pretty wide area, and the document itself refers to it by the generic name "lingua romana". Personally, lots of it sounds very French to me -- _cist_, _il_, _avant_... -- but that's probably because my own French is next to nonexistent. 

I also find the choice of languages in the oaths a bit puzzling. Louis the German, the Eastern Frankish ruler and thus basically the first king of Germany, is speaking a Romance language, while Charles the Bald, the Western Frankish ruler and thus essentially the first king of France, is speaking a Germanic one.  Does anyone know what the mother tongue of Louis the Pious was? Mothers of his sons were definitely both Germanic.


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## vince

Maybe it was when the final syllable was lost in French, making making words like amo, amas, ama, aman, as well as singular and plural nouns and adjectives, all sound the same. This caused French to have to add mandatory subject pronouns.
Or maybe some smaller things like:
Maybe when "le" started to be used in France and "il / el" in Spain.
Maybe when French developed its demonstratives "ce / cet / cette" which seem quite different from "este / esta / esto "
Maybe when "c" changed to "ch" in many cases, or stressed "e" into "oi", then "oé", then "wa".
Maybe when past participles ato --> é , ito --> i --> uto -> u
Maybe when stare and essere merged into être in French
Maybe when French adopted words like "aussi" and "avec" instead of "también" and "con", or when Spanish preferred "poner" (pondre) over "meter" (mettre), or "tomar" over "prendre".

Or maybe it was more gradual, like adoption of eastern slang/colloquial forms (trovare instead of encontrare, acquistare instead of comprare, volere instead of querere, etc) or individual grammatical innovations (the word for "step" (paso) supplanting "no" as a negation in French, or "tenere" supplanting "habere" as "to have" in Spanish/Portuguese)

Whatever it is, it was probably a gradual process. It's remarkable that Italian and Spanish retain much more intelligibility than Spanish and French, so I suspect that there's huge phonetic component involved.


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## Imants

JGreco said:


> I've always wondered something that never seems to be discussed on this forum. Given that they are next door neighbors who have had influence between each other through out the centuries. Was there a point in history that French and Spanish were ever mutually intelligible? If so, at what point did the two languages diverge and why? What problems developed between the pronunciation of the two languages that dropped intelligibility so low? The reason I say this because I know many people mainly of Latin American origins who have no exposure to French and don't here it in their daily lives who say they understand Romanian more when heard the first time before they understand spoken French. In my own experience, while French is a beautiful Romance language it is the absolute hardest to understand. I want lots of discussion please.


Probably other respondents already mentioned this, but between French and Spanish there were historically Occitan, Catalan, and Aragonese. So Spanish and French have always been quite far apart.



vince said:


> Maybe it was when the final syllable was lost in French, making making words like amo, amas, ama, aman, as well as singular and plural nouns and adjectives, all sound the same. This caused French to have to add mandatory subject pronouns.
> Or maybe some smaller things like:
> Maybe when "le" started to be used in France and "il / el" in Spain.
> Maybe when French developed its demonstratives "ce / cet / cette" which seem quite different from "este / esta / esto "
> Maybe when "c" changed to "ch" in many cases, or stressed "e" into "oi", then "oé", then "wa".
> Maybe when past participles ato --> é , ito --> i --> uto -> u
> Maybe when stare and essere merged into être in French
> Maybe when French adopted words like "aussi" and "avec" instead of "también" and "con", or when Spanish preferred "poner" (pondre) over "meter" (mettre), or "tomar" over "prendre".
> 
> Or maybe it was more gradual, like adoption of eastern slang/colloquial forms (trovare instead of encontrare, acquistare instead of comprare, volere instead of querere, etc) or individual grammatical innovations (the word for "step" (paso) supplanting "no" as a negation in French, or "tenere" supplanting "habere" as "to have" in Spanish/Portuguese)
> 
> Whatever it is, it was probably a gradual process. It's remarkable that Italian and Spanish retain much more intelligibility than Spanish and French, so I suspect that there's huge phonetic component involved.


I also think that the phonetics play a huge role in the oral unintelligibilily of French.
If you compare Spanish, French, and Italian texts, French and Italian seem to be closer to each other, but in the oral communication, Spanish and Italian can understand each other much better.


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## josue_ernesto

One other thing to look at is the fact that Spanish is heavily influenced with Arabic words and frases, for example:

Ojala
Alba
Almario
Alma

French, though I don't speak it or never studied it, seems to have more germanic influences.


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## Athaulf

josue_ernesto said:


> One other thing to look at is the fact that Spanish is heavily influenced with Arabic words and frases, for example:
> 
> Ojala
> Alba
> Almario
> Alma



Um... actually, these words come straight from Latin, except _ojalá_, which is indeed of Arabic origin. 

Not every word starting with _al-_ is Arabic.


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## berndf

Athaulf said:


> I also find the choice of languages in the oaths a bit puzzling. Louis the German, the Eastern Frankish ruler and thus basically the first king of Germany, is speaking a Romance language, while Charles the Bald, the Western Frankish ruler and thus essentially the first king of France, is speaking a Germanic one.  Does anyone know what the mother tongue of Louis the Pious was? Mothers of his sons were definitely both Germanic.


 
This was on purpose. By using each other's language the two kings wanted to express their brotherhood.


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> I also find the choice of languages in the oaths a bit puzzling. Louis the German, the Eastern Frankish ruler and thus basically the first king of Germany, is speaking a Romance language, while Charles the Bald, the Western Frankish ruler and thus essentially the first king of France, is speaking a Germanic one.


The reason is rather simple, as explained on the German Wiki page: Louis the German spoke in Romance/Vulgar Latin so as Charles' followers would understand his oaths, and Charles the Bald spoke in Frankonian/German so as Louis followers would understand his oaths.

The point was not the mother tongue of the two leaders, who seemingly had spoken both languages, but the languages understood by their followers - and as the oaths were important for them to have trust in the other, it seems that Louis and Charles have adopted this way to make sure of their loyalty.

On the German Wiki page there's also a translation of the oaths into modern French, and if you compare this to Vulgar Latin you really get the impression that the Vulgar Latin used in the oaths might just be a 'latinized' version of the Old French vernacular spoken at the time - but that's just a guess from me, I'm no specialist in Old French at all.

However, *if *this were the case then clearly the oaths would *not *be a good starting point for deciding when Spanish and French finally lost intelligibility.

And anyway I am too of the opinion that the main problems with intelligibility are due to the huge phonetical changes French adopted in later years, because as already mentioned Italian and Spanish are better intelligible mutually even though linguistically more distant, just because they're phonetically closer.


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## josue_ernesto

Athaulf said:


> Um... actually, these words come straight from Latin, except _ojalá_, which is indeed of Arabic origin.
> 
> Not every word starting with _al-_ is Arabic.


 

I stand corrected...sorry for my mistake

Here is a good article from wikipedia about the subject:

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


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## Nanon

sokol said:


> If you take the closest dialects in the old dialect continuum from the Meuse down to Finisterre, that is Catalan and Provencale (especially the dialcets of Gascogne and Provence), then these dialects probably were still mutually intelligible in medieval times, or probably they still are nowadays: I can't judge that one as I know rather little of those languages.



Occitan and Catalan seem to be mutually intelligible according to one of the few speakers of Occitan I know - he spoke Occitan in Barcelona and everybody was puzzled by his "Catalan dialect".


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## demalaga

Catalan and Occitan are very similar languages.In fact Ausias March (XV century) one of the most important poets said in some verse that the language he used was "lemosin" that is that language of Limoges in the occitan area.Catalan is sometimes refered to as Lemosin language by some other writers.


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## sokol

Nanon said:


> Occitan and Catalan seem to be mutually intelligible (...)





demalaga said:


> Catalan and Occitan are very similar languages. (...)



Well, there you are then - the missing link!
And if the French dialects betwen the Île de France and the Occitan region still were alive the difference between French and Spanish would be even more gradual, I would guess.


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## Aoyama

A lot has been said already.
The problem is also to know what does "Spanish" cover .
I guess it must be Castillan, but in comparing French with "Spanish", one must take into account the various dialects that have come into contacts in the South of France and in the Pyrenees region.
Catalan, on the Spanish side,  is must closer to French than Castillan and remains, nowadays, partially intelligible to French speakers (as French is to Catalan speakers, which is also spoken on the French side of the Pyrenees).
Then, Occitan (cited above), Provençal, Béarnais even Andorran (a variation of Catalan) all share some strong common roots.
Then the link with Vulgar Latin (including the various kinds of Latin dialects spoken by the troops sent to Iberia) should also be established, as well as the changes brought by the influence of Arabic which changed a lot of the common points and roots between French and Spanish (Castillan), not to speak of the South American contribution, later on.


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## Forero

Outsider said:


> Here's another interesting document, the Oaths of Strasbourg. It's trilingual: medieval Latin, Old German, and Vulgar Latin.
> 
> What I found stunning when I looked closely at the Vulgar Latin version is how much it already feels like a Romance language--and yet leaves me at a loss trying to identify which one! It looks like all of them, and none of them at the same time! Although it was written in France, in many ways I find the language closer to Spanish, Italian, or even Portuguese, than to modern French. (Though I suppose the language that was transcribed might have been a _langue d'oc_ -- an ancestor of Catalan and Occitan --, rather than a _langue d'oïl_, the group where standard modern French emerged from.)


The "Vulgar Latin" here is actually Old French.  Vowels of final syllables are missing just where they are missing in French, and nouns have two cases (characteristic of Old French and Old Provençal but not of Old Catalan or Old Castillian).  For example, _Deus_ as nominative, but _Deo_ otherwise.  _Meum_ has become _meon_, on the way to _mon_, _suum_ has become _son_, _homo_ has become _om_ (French _on_), _directum_ has become _dreit_, on the way to _droit_, and _ab ante_ has become _avant_.  The final-syllable vowels that remain may have already been _schwa_, judging from the inconsistent spelling of _fradra_/_fradre_ (_frère_) and _Karlo_/_Karle_ (now written with a silent _s_: _Charles_).


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## Outsider

I don't understand how anyone can state categorically: "this is Old French!" I see similarities with all Romance languages I'm familiar with in that text. _Fradre_, to give just one example, is at least as close to Portuguese _frade_ or Italian _fra(te)_ or early Romanian _fratre_ than to French _frère_. Naturally, it makes little sense to claim that the text is in proto-Portuguese or proto-Romanian, but in my view it could just as easily be in proto-Occitan, say, as in proto-French. My conclusion would be that at that time the Romance languages were still not as well differentiated as they later became.


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## Forero

Outsider said:


> I don't understand how anyone can state categorically: "this is Old French!" I see similarities with all Romance languages I'm familiar with in that text. _Fradre_, to give just one example, is at least as close to Portuguese _frade_ or Italian _fra(te)_ or early Romanian _fratre_ than to French _frère_. Naturally, it makes little sense to claim that the text is in proto-Portuguese or proto-Romanian, but in my view it could just as easily be in proto-Occitan, say, as in proto-French. My conclusion would be that at that time the Romance languages were still not as well differentiated as they later became.


My source (Mario Pei's _The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages_) is categorical in calling this Old French, and saying that this shows that French was the first Romance language to differentiate.  In some of the particulars, however, Pei uses a few "maybe"s.

I can see his point that it is no longer Latin, Vulgar or otherwise, but I see your point that it may be undifferentiated French/Occitan.

But would a speaker of Vulgar Latin or Proto-Iberian Romance find this oath intelligible?  I would guess a lot more so than the _Chanson de Roland_.

Is _La__ cantilène de sainte Eulalie_ Spanish-intelligible?


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## Outsider

Forero said:


> Is _La__ cantilène de sainte Eulalie_ Spanish-intelligible?


It would probably be best to ask a native Spanish speaker.


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## Littlehoshi

Outsider said:


> It would probably be best to ask a native Spanish speaker.



I can understand some thing of my knowledge of French and other some from the Latin but for Spanish really nothing.


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## Athaulf

Forero said:


> My source (Mario Pei's _The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages_) is categorical in calling this Old French, and saying that this shows that French was the first Romance language to differentiate.



The problem I see with such a statement is that the adjective "French" itself makes no sense whatsoever when applied to such a distant past. Who exactly were these "Frenchmen" speaking this "Old French" in mid-9th century, and where did they live? Projecting modern ethnic categories so far into the past is never a good idea, unless one's goal is to promote a nationalist agenda by giving it a fictional historical basis. Unfortunately, the propaganda of some nationalists has been so successful that even impartial authors have adopted their absurd terminology, which is likely the case here.



Outsider said:


> I don't understand how anyone can state categorically: "this is Old French!" I see similarities with all Romance languages I'm familiar with in that text. _[...]_ Naturally, it makes little sense to claim that the text is in proto-Portuguese or proto-Romanian, but in my view it could just as easily be in proto-Occitan, say, as in proto-French. My conclusion would be that at that time the Romance languages were still not as well differentiated as they later became.



In principle, it would be conceivable for someone to find some examples of sound changes in the language of the Oaths relative to Latin that predate the mid-9th century, but which have remained specific to certain Romance dialects attested later. This would be a valid argument that the Oaths dialect might be Proto-X, but definitely not Proto-Y, where X and Y are some Romance dialects attested much later, perhaps even those that later served as bases for standardized languages. 

Of course, the language sample in the Oaths is very small, and even the exact pronunciation of the letters is uncertain, which might well render any such finding impossible. Still, for all I know, perhaps someone has argued along these lines that the Oaths language has to be the ancestor of some _langue d'oïl_ dialect; I have no expertise in this area whatsoever.


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## Aoyama

Very interesting, but I think that we are losing track here.
The initial thread is about French and Spanish ...


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## Athaulf

Aoyama said:


> Very interesting, but I think that we are losing track here.
> The initial thread is about French and Spanish ...



On the contrary, I'd say that we are on the right track. To give a really meaningful response to the question in the thread title, we must first ask what exactly we mean by "French" and "Spanish". Today, there is at least one answer: these languages are whatever _L'Académie française _and _Real Academia Española_ say they are. But if we want to project these notions more than a few centuries into the past, before the foundation of these institutions and before the emergence of modern nation-states, the question is moot. And here we get to the trap that nationalist ideologues from the last two centuries would very much like us to fall into: assuming that it makes sense to project these modern notions of ethnicities and their national languages into the distant, semi-mythical early medieval ages. If we want to understand how these modern languages really formed, there is no other way but to lead the discussion into this direction.

Of course, this doesn't apply only to Romance languages, but also to any other family of modern standardized languages.


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## Aoyama

Right.
I did, modestly, contribute a bit to that debate concerning Spanish, in my post #20...


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## Grosvenor1

Some posts have touched on this, but French as we now think of it was not spoken on territory adjoining Spanish-speaking territory until relatively recently anyway. Historically, Occitan and dialects of it adjoined Catalan (to which it is close as a language) and perhaps Aragonese. 

French _is_ different from other Romance languages in lots of ways - some think it is because of a Gaulish substratum, others think it might be due to Germanic influence. The difference seems to have set in quite early, but it is hard to establish a date, or even a century.


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

Athaulf said:


> Spanish and French are both descended from Vulgar Latin, so obviously, during their development into their preset forms, they must have passed through a period in which their mutual intelligibility fell from 100% to the present very low level. There is no fixed point at which the local vernacular dialects of Latin stopped being just "dialects" and became Spanish, French, Italian, etc. Each local Latin dialect slowly became more and more different in its own peculiar ways with each generation of speakers.
> 
> *Furthermore, the notions of standard Spanish, French, etc. as shared mother tongues of entire populations of large countries are a relatively modern development. Several centuries ago, in the lands that are nowadays Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy, you would find a continuum of dialects* in which the inhabitants of each town and village understood their neighbors from the local region, but the differences slowly accumulated with distance. Thus, local dialects spoken several hundred kilometers apart could be mutually incomprehensible, but there would be few, if any sharp linguistic boundaries in the area between them (and these would have been introduced by extraordinary large population movements). Outside of the large urban centers, there are still remnants of this dialect continuum even nowadays.
> 
> Unfortunately, very few details are known about the early centuries of development from Latin into Romance languages. The problem is that most of the preserved written records were works of educated authors, who used Classical Latin as the language of high culture long after the spoken language had greatly diverged from it, and the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire brought a general decline in the levels of literacy and literary output. We have plenty of written material in Classical and (very similar) Church Latin from ancient Roman writers and early medieval churchmen, but very few records of Vulgar Latin spoken by the common people through these historical periods.
> 
> An interesting data point comes from the linguistic practices of the Catholic Church. Until the 8th century, Church Latin was still used for preaching to the common folk in churches throughout the Romance-speaking lands, with only some adaptations to the local pronunciation. However, by the early 800s, the vernacular had already diverged so far that church councils of that time, most notably in Tours in 813, prescribed the use of local vernaculars for preaching.
> 
> There were no "problems". Language normally changes -- slowly, but steadily. If two populations speaking the same language lose contact, or maintain contact only through another, different language, their languages will slowly drift apart from each other. After a few centuries of such development, their languages may easily diverge to the point of losing nearly all intelligibility, and after a few thousand years, it may take an expert eye to even see any similarities that would point to their common origin.
> 
> Now, why individual Romance languages drifted apart in those exact particular directions, that's a hard and complicated question, to which  there will probably never be a definite and reliable answer, especially since there is so little documentary evidence about their early development.



So true, especially with French - even in WW2 French officers bemoaned that soliders didn't understand them - nevermind Dutch speakers from French-Flanders, German speakers from Elsass-Lothringen nor fighting-men from the Basque land - other Romance speaking conscripts did not understand Imperial Parisian French not so long ago.


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

Outsider said:


> Here's another interesting document, the Oaths of Strasbourg. It's trilingual: medieval Latin, Old German, and Vulgar Latin.
> 
> What I found stunning when I looked closely at the Vulgar Latin version is how much it already feels like a Romance language--and yet leaves me at a loss trying to identify which one! It looks like all of them, and none of them at the same time! Although it *was written in France*, in many ways I find the language closer to Spanish, Italian, or even Portuguese, than to modern French. (Though I suppose the language that was transcribed might have been a _langue d'oc_ -- an ancestor of Catalan and Occitan --, rather than a _langue d'oïl_, the group where standard modern French emerged from.)



Was Strasburg somehow in France at the time(?) - did France even exist at the time(?) - or did you mean _written in French_?


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

vince said:


> *Maybe it was when the final syllable was lost in French*, making making words like amo, amas, ama, aman, as well as singular and plural nouns and adjectives, all sound the same. This caused French to have to add mandatory subject pronouns.
> Or maybe some smaller things like:
> Maybe when "le" started to be used in France and "il / el" in Spain.
> Maybe when French developed its demonstratives "ce / cet / cette" which seem quite different from "este / esta / esto "
> Maybe when "c" changed to "ch" in many cases, or stressed "e" into "oi", then "oé", then "wa".
> Maybe when past participles ato --> é , ito --> i --> uto -> u
> Maybe when stare and essere merged into être in French
> Maybe when French adopted words like "aussi" and "avec" instead of "también" and "con", or when Spanish preferred "poner" (pondre) over "meter" (mettre), or "tomar" over "prendre".
> 
> Or maybe it was more gradual, like adoption of eastern slang/colloquial forms (trovare instead of encontrare, acquistare instead of comprare, volere instead of querere, etc) or individual grammatical innovations (the word for "step" (paso) supplanting "no" as a negation in French, or "tenere" supplanting "habere" as "to have" in Spanish/Portuguese)
> 
> Whatever it is, it was probably a gradual process. *It's remarkable that Italian and Spanish retain much more intelligibility than Spanish and French*, so I suspect that there's huge phonetic component involved.



Yes, reckon stuff like loss of certain endings in French - whenever that happened(?) - but nevertheless, lets not forget the remarkable unintelligibility between Parisian French and most French folk within the ever enlarging borders of France. I think the intelligibility of French within France and it's unintelligbility with Spanish are both recent happenings. Even Parisian French today has strong intelligbility with other Romance languages like Occitan.


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

Grosvenor1 said:


> Some posts have touched on this, but French as we now think of it was not spoken on territory adjoining Spanish-speaking territory until relatively recently anyway. Historically, Occitan and dialects of it adjoined Catalan (to which it is close as a language) and perhaps Aragonese.
> 
> *French is different from other Romance languages in lots of ways - some think it is because of a Gaulish substratum, others think it might be due to Germanic influence. The difference seems to have set in quite early, but it is hard to establish a date,* or even a century.



Whatever the whyfors, standard French has only recently been a part of most French people's lives. Another thing is recent sound change/change accent - think I heard something about the French accent and pronunciation not sounding the same less than hundred years ago! Anyway, big chunks of both Spain and France have shared selfsame languages longer than not and still do in the likes of Catalan and Basque and so on.


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## djmc

Catalan is still spoken in south eastern France. It shades into  Provençal and Occitan. Occitan was spoken as far north as Berry until  the nineteenth century. One can still hear all three in southern France. It was only in the 20th century that there was a strong impetus that all Frenchmen should speak standard French. In south western France the accent is still very different from that in the north. I would think there is still a continuum between Standard French - Occitan - Provençal - Catalan - Castilian. Obviously not everyone speaking one will understand another and some are far more comprehending of strange ways of speaking or writing but I feel that most people coming from the northern side of the Pyrenees will understand those who come from the valley in the south, and vice versa.


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

djmc said:


> Catalan is still spoken in *south eastern France*. It shades into  Provençal and Occitan. Occitan was spoken as far north as Berry until  the nineteenth century. One can still hear all three in southern France. It was only in the 20th century that there was a strong impetus that all Frenchmen should speak standard French. In south western France the accent is still very different from that in the north. I would think there is still a continuum between Standard French - *Occitan - Provençal - Catalan - Castilian*. Obviously not everyone speaking one will understand another and some are far more comprehending of strange ways of speaking or writing but I feel that most people coming from the northern side of the Pyrenees will understand those who come from the valley in the south, and vice versa.



Southwestern France.

Also bear in mind that the northern borders of France are newfangled too, and that noone would expect: Occitan - Provençal - Catalan - Castilian to go on and form an erstwhile continuum with: 

the Dutch speakers starting north of the Somme 
the historical enclave Old English and Middle English speakers amongst the Dutch speakers starting north of the Somme 
the German speakers of Elsass-Lothringen 
the Breton speakers

Even though the aforesaid regions are recent holdings by France, it could be said that the resulting Romance-speaking rump of northern France would of had an utter *un*intelligibility to folk to the north, east, and west - way moreso than any alledged unintelligibility Northern France has with (let me say _Sub-Loireian_ France or even Southern France.


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## Kevin Beach

There must be several reasons why differences evolved between not only Spanish and French but between the Romance languages in general.

In relation to the areas closest to Italy, Latin was only one of a number of similar Italic languages in the region before Rome began to expand its rule into Italy and Gaul. The Roman conquerors would have imposed Latin, but it would have been melded into the local Italic language in each place, thus given differences that rolled on through the centuries and produced some of the differences that appeared in the daughter languages.

Outside the Italic areas, Latin was always laid upon a substratum of the existing language, in whatever area it landed. That language would influence how Latin was spoken, not just in accent, but in vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Spain had the Germanic Visigoth language. France had the Celtic and the Germanic Frankish languages.

The language of Cicero, Virgil and Caesar was never the language of the people. It was a much higher register than the streetspeak heard in Rome and its provinces, which is generally known as Vulgar Latin. The daughter languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, not from the language of the Classics.

Rome became very cosmopolitan, because of people migrating throughout the empire. Provinces found themselves hosting citizens and subject peoples from far, far away. They would often have influenced the speech wherever they went, just as African, Asian and Caribbean immigrants are influencing the speech of many young people in some British cities today. 

Once Rome vanished as the colonial power, countless other influences would have changed the language over the centuries, to the point where Latin speech in one old colony would be unintelligible elsewhere. This phenomenon occurs in every language which develops in isolated pockets. As a corollary, in Britain many people in the south find it impossible to understand the accents of Glasgow and North-eastern England, even though the speakers are talking in modern English and not in the related Scots or Northumbrian languages.

Finally, remember that we are talking of a time long before our age of voice recordings and mass audio communication. Very few people travelled beyond their owen villages, let alone to different countries. They would not hear any other examples of Latin to compare their own versions with. Local changes would creep in unnoticed until neighbouring regions could no longer understand each other. All of this would have happened long before the time of the written records that people are trying to compare on this thread. Spoken language always evolves before its written version appears.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Athaulf said:


> I think the Romance language of the Oaths was in fact some sort of a generic late Vulgar Latin that could still be reasonably well understood throughout the Western Romance areas, or at least their Frankish-ruled part. It was supposed to be understood, and even recited back, by a large army whose members were probably coming from a pretty wide area, and the document itself refers to it by the generic name "lingua romana". Personally, lots of it sounds very French to me -- _cist_, _il_, _avant_... -- but that's probably because my own French is next to nonexistent..



"Cist" is halfway between "ce, cet" (modern French) and Latin "ecce iste". I think it's still closer to Latin than to modern French, because the final consonants were pronounced. The first to disappear was the preconsonantic s, followed by the final t when the next word began whith a consonant, too. The final "t" of "cet" has been retained only because of the liaison phenomenon.


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## fdb

Kevin Beach said:


> Outside the Italic areas, Latin was always laid upon a substratum of the existing language, in whatever area it landed. That language would influence how Latin was spoken, not just in accent, but in vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Spain had the Germanic Visigoth language. France had the Celtic and the Germanic Frankish languages.



Visigothic and Frankish arrived much later than Latin. Are you sure you know the difference between a substratum and a superstratum?


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## Kevin Beach

fdb said:


> Visigothic and Frankish arrived much later than Latin. Are you sure you know the difference between a substratum and a superstratum?



They did. I do. I miswrote! Thank you.


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## mataripis

There is a big difference between  le splash and el espero.


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## Penyafort

JGreco said:


> I've always wondered something that never seems to be discussed on this forum. Given that they are *next door neighbors* who have had influence between each other through out the centuries.



They have not been direct neighbors for most of their history. Along the road from Castile to the Francian region, people would find the Aragonese language (Western, Central and Eastern), the Catalan language (Western and Eastern), the Occitan language (Southern and Northern) and even remnants of a southern Oil dialect in the Berry region. This is called a continuum.



JGreco said:


> Was there a point in history that French and Spanish were ever mutually intelligible? If so, at what point did the two languages diverge and why?



There is no point in history when they have been mutually intelligible. That could be said of Spanish and Portuguese, Catalan and Occitan, maybe French and Occitan. But not of French and Spanish, unless we go back to a point in which they hadn't been born.

What's more: in terms of vocabulary, if we don't count Romanian, the divergence between French and Spanish is likely the highest among the Romance languages.


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## Nino83

Penyafort said:


> What's more: in terms of vocabulary, if we don't count Romanian, the divergence between French and Spanish is likely the highest among the Romance languages.



I think too that the major difference is phonetic. 

càsa -> chez, péra -> poir [wa], sólo -> seul [œ], duro -> dur [y], córte -> court , plus nasal vowels, loss of voiceless stops between vowels (for example: vita, vida, vie), loss of final vowels (except /a/, reduced to schwa), loss of some final consonants. 

While it is said that lexical similarity is equal to 82% between Spanish and Italian and 75% between Spanish and French (it is not a great difference).


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## Angelo di fuoco

The correspondence "casa-> chez" is rather artificial, since the Spanish word is a noun and the French one a preposition. Casa has maison as its lexical equivalent. Chez has no real equivalent in Spanish - or several equivalents, depending on context.


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## Nino83

Ok. 
I'll change the example with: mare --> mar --> mer


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## killerbee256

I am very late to this party, but if I had to put date on when someone from Castile could no longer understand someone from ile de france in their native tongues, I would put it around the 9th or early 10 century. I think at that point the phonic differences that you all are talking about had become to great.


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## Hulalessar

Nino83 said:


> While it is said that lexical similarity is equal to 82% between Spanish and Italian and 75% between Spanish and French (it is not a great difference).



But what precisely is meant by "lexical similarity"? Are two words lexically similar if they both have the same meaning and come from the same Latin word and you can recognise the fact when it is pointed out, but the pronunciations are sufficiently different that the connection is not immediately obvious. What about words that look the same in writing but sound quite different - are they counted as lexically similar? What about when two words have the same etymology but different meanings? How different does the meaning have to be before you can say there is no lexical similarity?


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## Nino83

I really don't know. 
One has to ask Ethnologue what they mean. 



Hulalessar said:


> What about words that look the same in writing but sound quite different - are they counted as lexically similar?



This is why for an Italian spoken French is more difficult to understand than spoken Spanish (even if "lexical similarity" is higher between Italian and French, 89%). 

The question is not clear (is the topic of this thread the degree of intelligibility between spoken languages or between written ones?).


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## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> But what precisely is meant by "lexical similarity"? Are two words lexically similar if they both have the same meaning and come from the same Latin word and you can recognise the fact when it is pointed out, but the pronunciations are sufficiently different that the connection is not immediately obvious.



I would support this interpretation, but it is uncertain how easily you should recognize the word to call it lexically similar.



Hulalessar said:


> What about words that look the same in writing but sound *quite *different - are they counted as lexically similar?


I would call them cognates. 



Hulalessar said:


> What about when two words have the same etymology but different meanings? How different does the meaning have to be before you can say there is no lexical similarity?


I would not call them lexically similar if the meaning is different.


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