What makes French a Latin-Germanic mixed language

<,Ah oui ?! C'est surtout que tu en es bien incapable...
>>

Ah, Yes, You are right as USUAL! That is exactly the reason. You truly do know everything!

You're a credit to the Basque race!

Leasnam Thu Apr 02, 2009 5:54 pm GMT
<<"It looks strange,when 100000 of Franks conquer 12000000 of Gauls."

It's no less strange that 7,000 Frenchmen conquered all England within a couple of weeks in 1066... >>

One other thing separates the two events:

Franks into Gaul represented a mass migration of people (families, communities) due to loss of original Heimat and pressure from the east. The Norman Invasion was more political than sociological. Time period also makes a difference, Europe was less stable when the Franks conquered Gaul. Apples to oranges.
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Indeed, it is well documented that migrating people like the Goths, Lombards etc. migrated in masses. They left their home countries depopulated. If we assume that Franks, Lombards, Goths, Burgundii etc. consisted of only 100000 people each, Germania Major would have been populated by only about one or two million Germans.
Either Franks were much more numerous than 100000 (eventually to higher fertility and birth rates), or (what is more likely) the number of 12000000 Gallo-Romans is exagerated.

Estelle: "Le Français est une forme moderne du latin, tout comme les autres langues romanes. En aucun cas il n'est une langue inventée, ni créole mais une langue qui a été influencée que ce soit par les langues celtes ou germaniques. "

Here we are again with Asterix and Obelix: Celtic language has had no provable influence on modern French. The 19th century nationalistic equation French = Gallo-Romans = civilized Gaulois = Celtic people with Latin culture and language.
Science has proven that nobody knows what happened to the Gaulois language, culture and people. One thing is sure: they all three were entirely deleted from world history by Julius Caesar and his Romans......

"the English armies were already wearied from immediately beforehand defending their country against the King of Norway. With 15000 men and 300warships Harald was not able to seize the English throne.
Duke William has him to thank"

-- This is true. William was a political genius...

"Ahem, the Normans were not Frenchmen! They were Normans, not even close."

Crowds of impoverished knights and local baronets who took part to the invasion of England came from all over Bretagne, Maine, Picardy, Flanders and France (the Kingdom of France, that was actually a quite small realm at that time, not significantly more powerful than other provinces of which it was nominally suzerain). They were attracted by the prospect of becoming big lords in England if William's enterprise was to succeed.

But as a whole, they were French. It's not just by chance that:

<< During William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066 a "song about Roland" was sung to the Norman troops before they joined battle at Hastings:
"Then a song of Roland was begun, so that the man’s warlike example would arouse the fighters. Calling on God for aid, they joined battle.
Taillefer, who sang very well, rode on a swift horse before the Duke singing of Charlemagne and Roland and Oliver and the knights who died at Roncevaux."
This cannot be treated as evidence that Taillefer, William's jongleur, was the "author of the Song of Roland", as used to be argued, but it is evidence that he was one of the many poets who shared in the tradition. We cannot even be sure that the "song" sung by Taillefer was the same as, or drew from, the particular "Song of Roland" that we have in the manuscripts. Some traditional relationship is, however, likely, especially as the best manuscript is written in Anglo-Norman French and the Latinized name of its author or transcriber, called "Turoldus," is evidently of Norman origin ("Turold," a variant of Old Norse "Thorvald)."
In view of the long period of oral tradition during which the ambush at Roncevaux was transformed into the Song of Roland, there can be no surprise that even the earliest surviving version of the poem does not represent an accurate account of history. Roland becomes, in the poem, the nephew of Charlemagne, the Christian Basques become Muslim Saracens, and Charlemagne, rather than marching north to subdue the Saxons, returns to Spain and avenges the deaths of his knights. The Song of Roland marks a nascent French identity and sense of collective history traced back to the legendary Charlemagne. >>

The Song of Roland is a long anthem to "Sweet France" and its chivalry, but there was back then a strong distinction between the Country of France and the Kingdom of France. The emotional link to the country didn't imply any loyalty to the Crown of France. Hence the many wars in the Middle Ages.

<< the majority of linguists agree on is that in French the tendency to pro-drop is rather due to Frankish/Germanic languages >>

-- Chaque fois que je vois les mots "substrat", "superstrat", "influence", je zappe...

Tout ce qu'on peut dire est que des langues voisines (surtout si socialement mêlées) tendent à converger ponctuellement sur des solutions similaires, à condition d'être techniquement possibles (il faut qu'elles correspondent à des virtualités déjà contenues dans la langue concernées).

En français, l'obligation d'accompagner les verbes d'un pronom est allée de pair avec l'abandon des di- ou triphtongues compliquées qui odentifiaient de façon audible la plupart des conjugaisons. La moindre innovation syntaxique a des conséquences en cascade sur toute la phonétique et la grammaire. Toute langue est un système.

Même chose pour la quasi-généralisation des pluriels en -s en anglais: le voisinage du français l'a sans doute encouragé, mais il fallait aussi que l'anglais s'y prête préalablement (le -s existe aussi pour de nombreux mots néerlandais ; sa généralisation en anglais a permis l'abandon de désinences pour les épithètes et ainsi consacré la disparition des genres grammaticaux).

De même, le français et ne néerlandais partagent la très faible aspiration des occlusives sourdes (sensiblement plus marquée qu'en espagnol ou italien, mais infiniment moins qu'en anglais ou allemand). Qui a "influencé" l'autre ? Personne. En néerlandais, ce phénomène est lié à une particularité structurelle de la langue, qui beaucoup plus que les autres langues germaniques tend à préserver les syllabes atones, alors qu'en français elle est corrélée à une tendance à l'élision plus marquée que dans les autres langues romanes. Cas typique de convergence.

"Mon grand-père ne parlait que gaulois, je vais imiter son accent...", "mon voisin parle germanique, il a un truc intéressant dans sa langue, je vais copier ça..." : foutaises, ça ne se passe jamais ainsi.

« Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. »

— Boileau






J'espère seulement que la clarté de l'exposé de PARISIEN touchera les tenants du romanogermanisme créolisant.

Parisien : "-- Chaque fois que je vois les mots "substrat", "superstrat", "influence", je zappe...
"

This is "nier l´évidence" - some examples:

Yeniche [yec] Also spoken in Austria, France, Netherlands, Switzerland. Alternate names: Jenisch, Yenishe, German Travellers. Dialects: German with a heavy cryptolectal lexical influsion from Rotwelsch, Yiddish, Romani, and Hebrew. Classification: Mixed Language, German-Yiddish-Romani-Rotwelsch

MIXED LANGUAGES (8)
CAKCHIQUEL-QUICHE MIXED LANGUAGE [CKZ] Guatemala
CAMTHO [CMT] South Africa
MBUGU [MHD] Tanzania
MEDIA LENGUA [MUE] Ecuador
MEDNYJ ALEUT [MUD] Russia
MICHIF [CRG] USA
WUTUNHUA [WUH] China
YENICHE [YEC] Germany

The Serbian Romani language (ISO 639-3/SIL code: rsb) is the mixed language of Serbian (a South Slavic language) and Romani (an Indo-Aryan language). It is spoken by the Romani people in Serbia. In October 2005 the first text on the grammar of the Romani language in Serbia was published by linguist Rajko Djuric, titled "Gramatika e Rromane čhibaki - Граматика ромског језика".



But it is also true that French is in many ways not a very "pure" RomanceLanguage. E.g. Latin doesn't have any particles, but French re-invented them. This follows a common pattern:
Empire A conquers country B
Natives in B want to speak like people from A, since this enhances their social status
So they start using words from language A
However, not being trained linguists, they miss the more subtle phenomenon called "grammar"
They end up speaking a pidgin-A, with all the words from A but with the grammar of B
This pattern has more recently been documented in interactions between French and some Native American language in Canada (ironically, French now took the role of A). The result was a mixed language consisting of mostly French words, except for the verbs, which were still all original American ones. The reason being that the original language B had very complex ways of inflecting verbs, and French verbs simply couldn't be used for that.

<<-- This is true. William was a political genius... >>

If you call attacking someone when they're on the ground then stealing their wallet "genius", yeah

Incorrigible Ouest,

Tous les dialectes que tu cites sont soit des pidgins (qui ne sont en principe jamais que langues auxiliaires, jamais langues principales de toute une population) ou des argots tziganes, utilisés à des fins cryptiques par des communautés restreintes.

Tu pourrais aussi ajouter le 'Chiac', un mixte franco-anglais utilisé dans certaines villes du Nouveau-Brunswick. Mais ses locuteurs maîtrisant parfaitement le français standard et généralement aussi l'anglais, ce langage est surtout une forme humoristique d'argot juvénile, et comme tel est très instable (analogie biologique : des espèces voisines mais distinctes peuvent parfois être interfécondes, mais leurs hybrides ne le sont pas).

Impossible d'imaginer que des phénomènes similaires aient pu se dérouler sur l'espace d'intercompréhension d'oïl. D'une part parce que son étendue lui donnait une extrême inertie. Et parce que le français a très vite été spontanément normé : c'est frappant comme (à part quelques provincialismes qu'on détecte ça et là), dès le 13e siècle, c'est la même langue qu'on écrit de Londres à Aoste et de La Rochelle à Liège.

"Empire A conquers country B
Natives in B want to speak like people from A, since this enhances their social status
So they start using words from language A
However, not being trained linguists, they miss the more subtle phenomenon called "grammar"

-- Ouis, les anglais d'Irlande et d'Ecosse sont des mixtes anglo-celtes, et les cochons font des nids dans les arbres...

<<<<<<Impossible d'imaginer que des phénomènes similaires aient pu se dérouler sur l'espace d'intercompréhension d'oïl. D'une part parce que son étendue lui donnait une extrême inertie. Et parce que le français a très vite été spontanément normé : c'est frappant comme (à part quelques provincialismes qu'on détecte ça et là), dès le 13e siècle, c'est la même langue qu'on écrit de Londres à Aoste et de La Rochelle à Liège.>>>>>>>>

First of all, what happened to Latin during the migration period is indeed quite singular, as the migration of entire populations is. If you immagination is not sufficient, it does not alter the facts.
Second, the whole former Roman empire has been for hundredth of years after the migration period divided into many different dialects. The distribution of the dialects correspond exactly to the limits of former Germanic realms (Franco-Provencal in Burgundy, Langue d´Oil in Neustria, Lombard in Lombardy etc.). So the influence of the language of Germanic settlers on Romance seems obvious. The "spontanous" normation of the dialects dès le 13e siècle dissimulates the former chaos of dialects the was generated by the Germanic population in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

I pose a question.....

So why then did occur that French pronunciation become so different that it became unintelligible with the other Romance languages with the exception of Langue D'Oc (also Catalan). Was it the Frankish or Gaulish substratum that occurred there or just innovation? I know they say the same thing between Portuguese and Spanish but they still can understand each other at first instance of communication somewhat but that does not occur with French. It is just like the old question about English pronunciation being so different and away from the other Germanic languages and the same seems to occur with French. I have a background in Portuguese, Spanish, with some Italian and of course I can read French, but understanding pronunciation is another story. Other than the true scientific terms, my background in my native English, and familiarity with Spanish and Portuguese French is unintelligible to me in spoken form.

So why then did occur that French pronunciation become so different that it became

If French is spoken slowly an educated Italian can understand lots of words

"If French is spoken slowly an educated Italian can understand lots of words"
But every time I have come in contact with a French person they really haven't spoken slowly enough for me to understand. I guess that would be true about Italian since they share many common everyday words that Spanish and Portuguese do not share with French. I guess it seems strange that neighbors (Spain and France) speak languages that are incomprehensible in spoken form yet Comprehensible in written form. It would like to know how much crazy innovations or influences produced a language which such a different spoken range.

"unintelligible with the other Romance languages with the exception of Langue D'Oc (also Catalan)"

-- Même les langues d'oc (et a fortiori le catalan) ne sont pas compréhensibles pour un Français d'oïl, à moins d'un minimum de préparation.

"Was it the Frankish or Gaulish substratum that occurred there or just innovation?"

-- Il y a eu sans doute une sorte de relation symbiotique initiale entre les domaines d'oïl et francique-néerlandais (moins avec l'allemand), dont témoigne l'existence de toute une série d'entités historiques bilingues le long de leur frontière (Flandre, Brabant, Principauté de Liège, Luxembourg, Lorraine), mais en fait on n'en sait rien.

La vraie réponse réside sûrement dans la théorie du chaos et l'effet papillon...

Suppose que Portugal et Grèce échangent leurs places sur la carte d'Europe : on ne manquerait pas d'expliquer la coloration curieusement slave du portugais par le voisinage de la Bulgarie, et la tonalité vaguement similaire du grec et du castillan par l'existence d'une longue frontière commune !

D'où ma méfiance de principe devant les explications basées sur des "substrats", des "influences".

Was it the Frankish or Gaulish substratum that occurred there or just innovation?
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Since Gaulish language (and peoples?) were completely erased from the cultural landscape in France by the Romans and since pure Latin was spoken in France before the Germanic invasions, there canot be any substratum of Gaulish language in modern French.....

By "France" I mean the French territory of today