What makes French a Latin-Germanic mixed language

Leasnam....

I think youre getting a bit carried away with this. This is a discussion forum, so there will be differing opinions expressed. What I can say about your comments on my comments is.... if you look at some of the harsh and degrading comments you've made to others on this forum, what gives you the right or the privilege of suddenly playing the "innocent and hurt and ever so offended" card?

You said it in your post, "you will hear things you may not like" Yeah, thats life. I read things on here I dont agree with. I respond. You read things you dont agree with, you respond. Thats a forum. I dont see why youre calling me out on that.

This discussion gets heated sometimes. If youre put off by what Ive said in the past, I'm sorry for that. I'm sure if I could sit down with you, we'd have a great little debate about things. I dont mean any offense.

On the matter of Sardinian, that is a very good point, that we have one romance language that is very uninfluenced by germanic languages, but who shares most grammatical features with other romance languages. That deserves to be discussed.

Ive studied linguistics (romance, especially French lingusitics) in my BA, MA and Ph.D....its what I do. Im open to all new theories or suggestions, as long as they are based on the facts that we know of. Id be more than happy to debate that on here. But what bothers me is when people get on here claiming things that arent right, and who are so stubborn that they wont pay any attention to anyone else.

If you can come up with a good argument that French or any romance language is germanisised, Id be very open to hearing it. Hey, you never know....you might win me over, and I'll teach it in my classes.

"Sardinian had very little germanic influence (so little that its not even considered important by the majority of linguists), but it still ressembles the other romance languages in so many ways."
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Yeah, but Sardinian is also distinct and has a lot of differences.

In the end, Sardinian and other romance languages are related, so of course there are so many similarities. However, the similarity doesnt take away from the influence of German on other languages.

Both need to be considered. Latin would have most like lost a majority of its morphological endings as evidenced in Sardinian, but in other areas of the Roman Empire it is clear there was a catalyst to this development.

This plays along with parallel coincidence too.

Oh, and I know no one is trying to re-classify French. It's a romance language. It was, it is, and it will always be!

And the French language needs no saving, I know that. But if you have a dog (I'm just guessing that you might), and people said it was a cat, and kept on bringing up all sorts of bits of info saying it was a cat, wouldnt you come to its defence? It's only human nature, and it gets a good debate going. Thats all!

I know that other Romance languages did have Germanic influences, thats clear from vocabulary borrowings and some phonetic features. We cant deny that! But when people go as far as to bring up morphology and morphologic innovation as proof of creolization, thats when we need to consider Sardinian. Parallel coincidence does exist, of course, but not any coincidence that goes so far as to create so many similarities so that they far outweigh the differences.

Oh and there are lots of people who think Korean and Japanese do share common roots, but thats for another forum with people who really know what they're talking about

<,This discussion gets heated sometimes. If youre put off by what Ive said in the past, I'm sorry for that. I'm sure if I could sit down with you, we'd have a great little debate about things. I dont mean any offense.
>>

Joshqc, those comments were not directed at you :)

I would be delighted to explore the Sardinian issue with you. It's something I have only cursory knowledge in, and this will afford me opportunity to explore it in greater detail.

Leasnam:

Oh..yeah..i re-read what you said! lol...see, this is what happens when youve just finished a term today with 4 linguistics classes and really bad students and a bottle of wine.....you misread things! ;)

Read up on Sardinian, its quite interesting. There arent many well written websites about it, but if you want, I can give you some links that arent half bad...si tu lis le français ou l'italien bien sûr.

<<Oh..yeah..i re-read what you said! lol...see, this is what happens when youve just finished a term today with 4 linguistics classes and really bad students and a bottle of wine.....you misread things! ;)
>>

lol, No problem, man..I do it myself all the time hehe ;)

Talk to ya soon! :)

Sardu:

Youre right, there seem to be too many similarities between Sardinian and other romance languages to just be coincidence. Ok, I'm not a Sardinian expert, but this my little ol' theory:

Sardinian, because of its isolation from outside influences has retained a lot of vulgar latin phonology and morphology. Now..we have to consider that the romans didnt become a huge presence in Sardinia until the 200's... this, quite interestingly, coincides with most romance linguists' theories about when vulgar latin was growing further and further away from the written standard, before any major germanic migration. If one considers this, you can come to the following opinion:

Sardinian gives us a nice view on what vulgar latin might have been like in the 200's-400's, without any real germanic influence.

Though Sardinian has been influenced by Greek and lots of other languages, its base, its heart is still romance, very much so in fact. This sort of puts a spanner in the works when it comes to theories about creolisation of other romance languages (im not talking about germanic influences on vocabulary or some other phonetic changes). If, as some claim, that vulgar latin was highly creolised by germanic during the migration period, then why would Sardinian show the same morphologic changes that other romance langauges exhibit? That is a fundemental question.

I'm not denying that Frankish had its share of influence on French. Whenever I say "J'ai regardé le reportage sur la guerre en Iraq", there are two germanic words in that sentence. But, all the talk on here of declension loss and changes in word order, and the distance from Classical Latin are all due to germanic influence....I dont know...since Sardinian shows all those changes, and it shows them from the earliest texts we have in it. That's something to consider.

<<"J'ai regardé le reportage sur la guerre en Iraq",>>

Joshqc,

What do think about the Roamnce, and especially the French "avoir"/"etre" + pres. perfect formation?

Confer:
Present Tense
Latin - ambulo (I walk)
French - je marche (I walk)
Old English - ic gango (I walk)
English - I walk

Perfect Tense
Latin - ambulavi (I have walked)
French - j'ai marché (I have walked)
Old English - ic eom gegangen (I have walked)
English - I have walked

Note: Latin does not employ "habere" or "esse" as a modal for pres prefect.

However, most Romance languages show present perfect tenses which are formed analogous to Medieval germanic languages.

Old English used either "habban" or "beon" + ge- + past participle to form present perfect tense, as did other germanic languages.

The forerunner of this form can be seen in Gothic, where Gothic uses simply the perfective prefix ga- + past indicative as in

Ik gagga (I walk)
Ik gaiddja (I fully walked => I have walked)
*Ik im gagaggans (=I am gone, but not yet pres perfect tense. Gothic also uses a passive present tense "ik gaggada" = I have walked)

In Gothic, it is unattested that the "habban"/"sin" + ga- + past participle made it to use as the present perfect, but it appears it was well on its way.

Forward in time a few centuries...

The original sense of Old English "ic eom gegangen" or "ic habbo gemacod" (I have made) was literally one of being or one of possession, i.e. "I am gone" and "I possess a full making" => "I have made".

We see such a clear evolution of this form in all Germanic languages, but not in Latin.

Then after the Germanic Migrations we see it appear in Romance.

It is not attested in other branches of the Indo-European family, so it was not bequeathed from PIE.

So far, these are just fact. I do not need to add what can be concluded from these facts. But I am interested in your view of these.

<<French - j'ai marché (I have walked) >>

French 'je suis allé' and 'j'ai marché' look like a calques of "I am gone", "I have marched" using the Latin words 'ego sum ambulatus' and 'ego habeo marcatus' respectively, even though marcher is from Frank

The passé composé can trace its history to Classical Latin, though its meaning was passive. Look at an example from Cicero:

In ea provincia pecunias magnas collocatas habent.

Translated into French, this would read: "ils ont de grandes sommes d'argent placées dans cette province". We see a passive tense. Over time (and there are many attestations of this in less formal Latin texts, and especially in informal correspondance), this passive voice started to take on an active voice. So that eventually, something like "collocatas habent" would take on the meaning of "ils ont placé"

In many verbs that refer back to the subject or verbs that are intransitive, there was a tendancy to use the verb "to be" as an auxiliary. This is a remnant of the passive voice in Latin, that came to take on an active voice.

So something like "je suis retourné" initially had the passive meaning of "I am returned", and eventually took on the sense of "I have returned". This is a process that was happrening in Latin relatively early (though there is debate about how early).

Some argue that this change from passive to active is analogous to a similar shift in germanic languages. Thats debatable. Some evidence points in that direction, while some evidence points to an internal shift in vulgar latin. Both sides can come up with good points, but I tend to side with the following belief:

Since the shift from the passive voice was happening in spoken Latin, and the verb "habere" was used with most of these verbs in the passive voice, the verbs in vulgar latin/proto-romance tended to keep the passive auxiliaries that they were most accustomed to. Verbs that were intrasitive or reflexive already used "esse" and continued to during the shift in meaning.

I do have to say though, that this certain area of verbal morphology isnt my strongest point. Im bascially regurgitating what I learned in lectures in grad school and read in the texts we used.

Joshqc:
When someone says something like, "vulgar latin was germanicised by troops in the roman army when they conquered Gaul", they're not taking into account the fact that there werent many germanic peoples in the Roman army at this time. They probably learned or heard somewhere that at one time there were Germanic peoples in Roman legions, but they never really bothered to study the historical facts.

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Please learn that Caesars wouldn´t have been able to conquer Gaul if he hadn´t be supported by Germanic cavalry and auxiliary troops. You can find information related to this point in historic science books and everywhere on the web, for example:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Battle-of-Alesia-52-BC

The Battle of Alesia
"Accurately predicting Caesar's intent, Vercingetorix withdrew his army of 80,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry into the fortress town of Alesia (Alise-Ste.-Reine), near the source of the Seine River. He also sent a cavalry force north to harass and delay the Romans. They engaged Caesar's Germanic auxiliary cavalry at Vingeanne; the Gauls had the worst of it, losing some 3,000 men, but they bought Vercingetorix time to herd all the region's cattle into Alesia.

The town sat atop an oval mesa-like hill, Mount Auxois. The flat top fell off on steep sides, virtually impossible to climb. The city walls were almost an extension of the mountainside. Running east to west above and below the town were the Oze and Ozerain rivers. Vercingetorix had a trench dug on either side of the hill running north-south between the rivers, making an approach to the city almost as difficult as an assault. With his 95,000 soldiers, Vercingetorix was sure Caesar could not possibly harm him.

Caesar's army consisted of 40,000 Roman legionnaires, about 5,000 Germanic cavalry, and about 15,000 auxiliary troops of one type or another. He began the siege sometime in July 52-BC...."

just a message : « It is clear that if romance languages were Germanic-latin mixes that were born from a "creolization" with heavy germanic contacts, then it should necessary still existing today quite a lot of languages or dialects that would continue to be very similar to classical latin, in the regions that had few to no germanic contacts. »

Exactement. Mais ceci n'est qu'une réfutation extralinguistique des "arguments" extralinguistiques habituels des bicentristes (ou bipolaires créolomanes → "latin" + "germanique").

Le problème avec eux, c'est qu'on attend toujours leurs arguments "linguistiques".





Leasnam : « Those who want to discuss whether French is Latin-German have every right to do so without being harassed by those who disagree. »

Non mais tu rêves ! Tu crois qu'on va écouter sagement les divagations de deux ou trois anglophones maternels — qui ne connaissent rien ni au français, ni à l'ancien français, ni aux langues romanes (actuelles et anciennes), ni au latin, ni aux langues germaniques (contemporaines ou médiévales), ni à la linguistique. Si tu veux une discussion publique, il faut accepter la contradiction ; sinon il faut faire autre chose. Surtout quand on prétend pérorer sur le français sans en connaître un mot !...





Leasnam : « To the French people, the French language doesn't need you to rescue it. It is not a Lady for you to save. Do something more constructive with your lives. Go help a homeless person. Visit your grandmother. »

Quel naïveté ! Quelle bêtise ! Dès que ça coince niveau arguments, on se réfugie derrière des raisonnements de cour d'école. Mais pense d'abord à ta propre grand-mère, Leasnam ! Elle doit avoir honte de ta sottise.

Et laisse la langue française en paix — ou alors apprends-en les rudiments. Tu te rendras moins ridicule.





Leasnam : « But it [LE SARDE] in no way nullifies all of the overwhelming clues that point to germanization. »

Tu as tout à fait raison : ce qui anéantit le délire sur la "germanisation", ce n'est pas le sarde, mais l'absence totale de preuve de "germanisation".





Leasnam : « It seems that all you can do is offer up what-ifs, and how-comes and what-about-this in your defenses. »

Tu manques pas d'air : c'est l'hôpital qui se fout de la charité. Joshqc prend au moins la peine d'examiner une hypothèse basée sur une réalité linguistique quand tu te contentes de débiter des âneries basées sur une littérature de seconde main à laquelle te condamne ton monolinguisme germanique.





gguest : « French 'je suis allé' and 'j'ai marché' look like a calques of "I am gone", "I have marched" using the Latin words 'ego sum ambulatus' and 'ego habeo marcatus' respectively, even though marcher is from Frank ».

Billevesées sur toute la ligne. Les temps composés sont une réalité romane et Fr <marcher> n'est pas germanique. C'est plutôt l'inverse : Al <marschieren>, Né <marcheren>, Da <marchere>, Su <marschera>, An <to march> ← MA <marchen>, Sc <mairch>, No <marsjere>, Is <marsera> etc.

<<Well, the issue here is not that this has to be a new "theory" or "law"...it is a discussion topic, and no one should feel threatened to openly discuss something just because some do not agree with it.

Those who want to discuss whether French is Latin-German have every right to do so without being harassed by those who disagree. That's is just uncouth and base.>>

I haven't seen the "harassment" you speak of, but I agree with what you say.

<<If you don't agree, say so and move on. Be civil.

Some here act like they are afraid that we are discussing this topic, as if something's gonna fall out of the bag...

For those who say that the French are trying to sweep away their Germanicness and erase it from history, this is a compelling indicator of that. I 'm beginning to believe it.>>

See, what you're doing here, is accusing people of having ulterior motives for arguing their position, that is not conducive to debate either.

Ouest - .......5000 germanic soldiers compared to over 40 000 roman legions is what I would call "there werent many germanic soldiers in the roman army".

If there were 20 000 germanic soldiers, now that would be quite a different story.

à Greg - .... c'est ça le problème. Y en a ici qui se contentent de débattre des origines du français sans pouvoir le parler et sans comprendre la complexité de son évolution du bas latin. Et ils se fâchent quand on souligne que leurs propos sont erronés. Ça m'étonne pas du tout que la majorité des défenseurs du français soient francophones. On connaît notre langue! Ce qui me choque le plus, c'est les non-francophones qui pontifient sur la soi-disant "créolisation" du français en citant quelques exemples lexicaux et quelques innovations phonétiques qui sont parfois attribuées aux tribus germanophones qui se sont établis en Gaule. Si on se laissait croire que certaines influences lexicales et phonétiques constituent une créolisation du français, on serait obligé de considérer la plupart des langues germaniques (surtout l'anglais) comme des créoles.

Chose certaine, il n'y a pas assez de preuve pour dire que le français est créolisé. C'est une langue issue du bas latin, comme toute autre langue romane.

Dans n'importe quel domaine d'études ou de recherche, y en a qui veulent se faire remarquer par leurs propos naïfs et sans fondement. C'est la réalité et faut l'accepter. L'important (concernant ce forum), c'est d'être capable de distinguer entre ce qui est vrai (qui peut être prouvé) et ce qui est basé sur des hypothèses qui ne prennent pas en considération la longue évolution du français.