# French phonetics - any connection with Celtic roots?



## Kirill V.

Hello, dear experts.

First of all, let me appologize if the question I am asking is naive. I know very little if anything in etymology and theories behind it, hopefully that excuses my ignorance.

The question is the following. I have always been somewhat surprised by the French phonetics. I mean, French does sound beautiful. However, some sounds have remarkable distinct features that seem to make them very different from other European languages. For example, that R consonnant... To pronounce it correctly, it seems one has to activate an organ that remains completely disactivated otherwise, i.e. before one starts studying French...

So I wonder where this phonetic specifics comes from?? I assume it might have something to do with the earlier Celtic language spoken by French people before Roman invasion. But then I wonder whether there are similar features in other Celtic languages (the ones that have survived till present - Irish, Welsh...). Do, for example, Irish people say "R" with the same French accent??

Any ideas / established theories on this?


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## Ben Jamin

kayve said:


> Hello, dear experts.
> 
> First of all, let me appologize if the question I am asking is naive. I know very little if anything in etymology and theories behind it, hopefully that excuses my ignorance.
> 
> The question is the following. I have always been somewhat surprised by the French phonetics. I mean, French does sound beautiful. However, some sounds have remarkable distinct features that seem to make them very different from other European languages. For example, that R consonnant... To pronounce it correctly, it seems one has to activate an organ that remains completely disactivated otherwise, i.e. before one starts studying French...
> 
> So I wonder where this phonetic specifics comes from?? I assume it might have something to do with the earlier Celtic language spoken by French people before Roman invasion. But then I wonder whether there are similar features in other Celtic languages (the ones that have survived until present - Irish, Welsh...). Do, for example, Irish people say "R" with the same French accent??
> 
> Any ideas / established theories on this?


An article about  "guttural R" states here (Guttural R - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) the folowing:
_It is not known when the guttural rhotic entered the French language, but it may have become commonplace in the mid or late eighteenth century. Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, written in the seventeenth century, has a professor describe the sound of /r/ as an alveolar trill.[citation needed]_
So, it would be far fetched to connect this feature to the old Gallic language.
It is also widely accepted that the guttural R spread from France to the countries further to the North, and still is spreading in Norway.


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## bragpipes

I know this may be simplistic, but we have living Celtic languages (in France and elsewhere) and neighboring Germanic languages.  Is it not more likely that the guttural R came from Germanic languages than Celtic ones that don't have it?


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## Ben Jamin

bragpipes said:


> I know this may be simplistic, but we have living Celtic languages (in France and elsewhere) and neighboring Germanic languages.  Is it not more likely that the guttural R came from Germanic languages than Celtic ones that don't have it?


The German Wikipedia says : "Noch zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts herrschte das alveolare R in den meisten Teilen Deutschlands vor."
(Until the beginning of the XX century the alveolar R was prevalent in the most parts of Germany). 
The uvular R is not used in Austria and very little in Switzerland.


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## Kirill V.

Ben Jamin said:


> An article about  "guttural R" states here (Guttural R - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) the folowing:
> _It is not known when the guttural rhotic entered the French language, but it may have become commonplace in the mid or late eighteenth century. Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, written in the seventeenth century, has a professor describe the sound of /r/ as an alveolar trill.[citation needed]_
> So, it would be far fetched to connect this feature to the old Gallic language.
> It is also widely accepted that the guttural R spread from France to the countries further to the North, and still is spreading in Norway.



I see, so this "guttural R" is a recent phenomenon, then... Good to know, thank you



bragpipes said:


> I know this may be simplistic, but we have living Celtic languages (in France and elsewhere) and neighboring Germanic languages.  Is it not more likely that the guttural R came from Germanic languages than Celtic ones that don't have it?



Yes,thanks, that was one of the things that I was wondering about - do the existing Celtic languages feature the same kind of prononciation? From your response I understand they don't


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## bragpipes

Ben Jamin said:


> The German Wikipedia says : "Noch zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts herrschte das alveolare R in den meisten Teilen Deutschlands vor."
> (Until the beginning of the XX century the alveolar R was prevalent in the most parts of Germany).
> The uvular R is not used in Austria and very little in Switzerland.



The guttural R seems to be more of a Northern phenomenon - North Germany and North France have it, South Germany and South France don't.   The Dutch have it, the Austrians don't.

I did not know that its spread was fairly recent.   How was Prussian German (to go far East) and Dutch pronounced before?


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## Kirill V.

Then maybe we all have to start learining how to pronounce it. It looks like the guttural R has been becoming increasingly fashionable in the IE area  Maybe people just like the way it sounds. So who knows - even we the Slavic speakers may borrow it at some point


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## bragpipes

kayve said:


> I see, so this "guttural R" is a recent phenomenon, then... Good to know, thank you
> 
> Yes,thanks, that was one of the things that I wondered - do existing Celtic languages feature the same kind of prononciation? So from your response I understand they don't



Celtic languages in Britain don't, so Scottish Gaelic and Irish don't.   

And Yiddish has it, so that might be a big clue.


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## bragpipes

kayve said:


> Then maybe we all have to start learining how to pronounce it. It looks like the guttural R has been becoming increasingly fashionable in the IE area  Maybe people just like the way it sounds. So who knows - maybe even we the Slavic speakers will borrow it at some point



The guttural R shouldn't be too difficult to pronounce.   It's just a different way of perceiving the R.  From an English perspective, it's closer to "x" ("Loch") than it is to the North American English "r".   Many English speakers can say it when mimicking French even though they oddly revert back to a more English "r" when speaking basic French.

And more oddly, French speakers don't say it when it's there in Arabic and say it when it's not.

So the Arabic word "gharíb" (strange, odd) - the gh stands for a guttural R and the R in there is not guttural.   But French speakers read the gh as g (as in spaghetti) and treat all Rs are guttural, regardless of the language of origin.  So it's a strange situation. 

I don't think the guttural R will catch up in Russia, unless Russia goes through another phase of Dutchophilia.


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## Kirill V.

bragpipes said:


> And more oddly, French speakers don't say it when it's there in Arabic and say it when it's not.
> 
> So the Arabic word "gharíb" (strange, odd) - the gh stands for a guttural R and the R in there is not guttural.   But French speakers read the gh as g (as in spaghetti) and treat all Rs are guttural, regardless of the language of origin.  So it's a strange situation.



 I see.
Certainly I am sure there must be French who can speak Arabic right, since they've been communicating with the Arabic world quite a lot. But it is true that for most people it is sometimes diffulut to get over the habits.

I graduated from a high school in Kiev (Ukraine). Kiev is generally a Russian speaking city, but many people speak Russian with a southern / Ukrainian accent. One of the features of that accent is the "soft g" (close to g in _agua_ in Spanish, if I am not mistaken), as opposed to the "hard g" in standard Russian. A classmate of mine had permanent problems with our English teacher, as he couldn't help pronouncing soft g when speaking English, and that sounded really really terrible even to our ignorant ears...
Imagine a guy saying soft g in _London is the capital of the *G*reat Britain..._


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## Ben Jamin

bragpipes said:


> The guttural R seems to be more of a Northern phenomenon - North Germany and North France have it, South Germany and South France don't.   The Dutch have it, the Austrians don't.


Not exactly, look at the map: rhotics_in_Europe
As you can see the regions of Germany adjacent to France got the uvular R first (dark magenta areas), the rest got it through schools in last 100 years (educated speakers - light magenta). Berlin got the pronunciation probably due to immigration from the West Germany and French Huguenots in the end of the XVII century.


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## Nino83

kayve said:


> So I wonder where this phonetic specifics comes from?? I assume it might have something to do with the earlier Celtic language spoken by French people before Roman invasion. But then I wonder whether there are similar features in other Celtic languages (the ones that have survived till present - Irish, Welsh...). Do, for example, Irish people say "R" with the same French accent??



The Celtic substratum was a common feature of all those Romance languages spoken north of the La Spezia-Rimini line. These languages share similar features (deletion of intervocalic voiced stops, lenition of double consonants, sonorization of voiceless intervocalic stops, the merger between /-kl-/ and /-lj-/, œ*il* (< oculum) = feu*ille* (< foliam), the merger between /ke,ki, kj/ and /tj/, *c*ent (< centum) = pla*c*e (< plateam)).  

As the other members said, the uvular "R" is a recent phenomenon and it was proper of the Oïl languages (influenced by Old Frankish), Low Franconian languages, Danish and some German languages/dialects.


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## Kirill V.

Nino83 said:


> The Celtic substratum was a common feature of all those Romance languages spoken north of the La Spezia-Rimini line. These languages share similar features (deletion of intervocalic voiced stops, lenition of double consonants, sonorization of voiceless intervocalic stops, the merger between /-kl-/ and /-lj-/, œ*il* (< oculum) = feu*ille* (< foliam), the merger between /ke,ki, kj/ and /tj/, *c*ent (< centum) = pla*c*e (< plateam)).
> 
> As the other members said, the uvular "R" is a recent phenomenon and it was proper of the Oïl languages (influenced by Old Frankish), Low Franconian languages, Danish and some German languages/dialects.



Thank you! So Celtic legacy does have impact, it is only that the guttural R is not part of it. Good to know, thanks!


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## berndf

bragpipes said:


> The guttural R seems to be more of a Northern phenomenon - North Germany and North France have it, South Germany and South France don't. The Dutch have it, the Austrians don't.


No it is not. Low German does not have it, nor does standard Dutch, only some dialects of Dutch have it, mainly in the south and centre, but Danish, that is strongly Low German influenced, has it again. The whole thing is an import from French and it spread throughout the German dialect continuum (and too a much, much lesser degree through the Dutch dialect continuum) in a rather chaotic manner and if you want to define something like a core region then it would be something like the Mosel and the centre Rhine valleys.

In Austrian it is particularly chaotic. Rural dialects ("g'schert") have the alveolar, "posh" Viennese ("Schönbrunner Deutsch") has the uvular _r_ and most people speak various mixtures of those sociolects. If even happens within families that some members use the uvular and other the alveolar r even if they have lived in the same region all their lives.


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## bragpipes

I stand corrected.   I did not know its distribution was that patchy.   Is it spreading or gaining ground (no territorial pun intended)?


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## berndf

bragpipes said:


> Is it spreading or gaining ground (no territorial pun intended)?


Definitely. Accents are generally converging, even in Austria there now exists a non-negligible percentage of younger speakers who speak such a neutral German you can hardly identify them as Austrians at all; a phenomenon virtually unknown 30 years ago (accept for professional actors). Only Switzerland is different.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> Definitely. Accents are generally converging, even in Austria there now exists a non-negligible percentage of younger speakers who speak such a neutral German you can hardly identify them as Austrians at all; a phenomenon virtually unknown 30 years ago (accept for professional actors). Only Switzerland is different.


What percentage of people still use dialects as their daily speech in Germany and Austria nowadays? (I assume that they are diglossic, at least most of them).


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> What percentage of people still use dialects as their daily speech in Germany and Austria nowadays? (I assume that they are diglossic, at least most of them).


It is complicated as there are several layers of influence, not clear-cut diglossia. I think it is getting too far for this thread which is actually about French.


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## hadronic

bragpipes said:


> And more oddly, French speakers don't say it when it's there in Arabic and say it when it's not.
> 
> So the Arabic word "gharíb" (strange, odd) - the gh stands for a guttural R and the R in there is not guttural.   But French speakers read the gh as g (as in spaghetti) and treat all Rs are guttural, regardless of the language of origin.  So it's a strange situation.



That's because no one ever heard the actual word, we've only seen it written, and we spell out what we see. Same for kh-, except that awareness of its actual pronunciation as [x] (or at least as [R], the closest sound in French inventory) is growing among the population. I remember the singer Khaled in the 90s started being called /kalèd/, after some years all media turned to say /ralèd/.

Now, Arabic gh and French R are not the same sound: gh is an uvular _fricative_ while R is an uvular _approximant_ in most context and in most people's speech (R can sometimes switch to fricative under certain phonological context).


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