French one of the most touched languages by English?!

Frances   Fri Aug 12, 2005 1:17 pm GMT
"I often say that English is an "inbetween" language,but even though the vocabulary is enormously latin inflicted,the most basic grammer is Germanic.*The only reason why English people can read a French text better than a German one is that huge latinisation of English"

That in some way is the beauty of English. At least you'll understand one word in a sentence from either a romance or germanic language.

I don't know how you could split on the basis of a large latin vocab. If the grammar still follows a Germanic pattern, then it simply is a Germanic language. Like you said, a heavily Germanised Latin language will still be Latin.
bernard   Fri Aug 12, 2005 5:51 pm GMT
English is not a "in beetween language". It is a just a germanic one. Being a germanic language doen't means necessary to be guttural or harsh. If our anglophones friends don't like being associated to germanic languages because when we say "germanic" they think "ugly languages" they are wrong.
Actually, as a romance speaker I don't think that our languages are necessary always softer and melodic than other languages.
Spanish can be a very hard souding language (especially the sound "j" wich makes think about arabic sounds), Portuguese sometimes sounds like a slavic language, in french the sound "r" is quite gutural.
Only Italian seem to be a trully soft and melodic language (my opinion, because theis subject is very personnal)
British Israelism writer   Sat Aug 13, 2005 1:20 am GMT
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Travis   Sat Aug 13, 2005 1:37 am GMT
My answer to the above post is simply "oh puhleez".
Sander   Sat Aug 13, 2005 6:13 am GMT
And my answer to the post avove Travis' is , you're nuts.
Bruno   Wed Sep 21, 2005 12:19 pm GMT
I'm French so i can have an idea on the question.

French language is touched by English language, it's obvious. English is EVERYWHERE, it's unevitable !

The english words are taking all the languages ...

But we use english words only for new technologies, we say an e-mail, etc etc. But we still say "ordinateur".

For the first one who said that French people say overcraft more than aéroglisseur. You're wrong. Ok we say " Weekend" but there wasn't a word for it in french.

We pick the english words for what we need, for words that we don't have.

And i think that Italian language is the most touched by english, definitively.
Candy   Wed Sep 21, 2005 12:33 pm GMT
<<English is not a "in beetween language". It is a just a germanic one.>>

More than 50% of it comes from Latin or French, bernard.
Sander   Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:10 pm GMT
Well candy, about 70% comes from the romance languages BUT! this is not equally divided over the language.Vocabulary is extremely romantic, but the grammatical core is Germanic. But if you'd let someone with no knowledge about germanic and Romance languages divide them into groups... I'm pretty sure English would be placed with the other romance languages.
Easterner   Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:45 pm GMT
To me, English is an obviously Germanic language that has contented itself with borrowing words from Latin for being to lazy to coin new words for itself. :)

Joke aside, I think English is not the only language that has borrowed a large amount of words from another language. Many Asian languages have been heavy borrowers (Vietnamese comes to my mind, which took many words from Chinese and other neighbouring tongues), and so have some European ones like Hungarian (loanwords from Turkic, Iranian, Slavic languages) or Finnish (loanwords from Baltic and Swedish), or Serbian (many loanwords from Greek, Turkish, French and German).

However, the use of loanwords is not equally common at all levels of English. I don't have exact statistics, but I suppose that more than 60 per cent of words in everyday talk are of Germanic (Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian) origin, while Latin or Romance vocabulary is more prominent at more learned or formal levels. By the way, I have always regarded the mixed nature of English as a strength rather than a weakness, because this feature enables it to convey many subtle shades of meaning.

On the other hand, even if French has taken many loanwords from English, I don't think it has been affected by them to the same extent as English has by Normand and French in the 11th-14th century. To me, it seems the Romance influence in English has been very thorough, to the extent that often Romance words actually supplanted words of Germanic origin, or at least the borrowing resulted in a more restricted usage of native Germanic words (I believe "flower" and "bloom" are good examples of this).
greg   Wed Sep 21, 2005 7:10 pm GMT
L'affirmation selon laquelle le vocabulaire de l'anglais de tous les jours est plutôt germanique que romano-latin est vraie mais ne concerne que la langue parlée ou écrite utilisée dans la vie quotidienne. L'influence franco-latine prend toute son étendue dès qu'on se rapproche de l'abstraction. C'est un clin d'œil historique : un rappel de l'absorption de l'ancien français d'outre-Manche par le moyen-anglais tardif. Un mouvement du haut vers le bas.
JJM   Wed Sep 21, 2005 9:14 pm GMT
"My answer to the above post is simply 'oh puhleez'."

Indeed. You're right on the money there.
Easterner   Thu Sep 22, 2005 9:17 am GMT
greg,

As I see, what you are essentially saying is that the antecedent of Modern English (Middle English as it had evolved by the 12th century) is a blend of a Germanic and a Romance dialect, or the absorption of the features of the latter into the former. I can agree with this basically. However, it is interesting to note that English was probably more influenced by the language of Ile-de-France than by the Norman dialect, during the Angevin kings, when it was the offical language of the English court. And as I know, most Latin words oozed into the language during tha later Middle Ages or the Renaissance. And I wonder to what extent the Hundred Years' War might have influenced this process, when England was ruling a large part of present-day French territory. The French-English contacts in the Middle Ages (even if the two kingdoms were long-time rivals) might explain why English has been remarkably more open to a Latin influence than have been other Germanic languages.
JJM   Thu Sep 22, 2005 11:14 am GMT
Let's get this straight: English is a Germanic language. It's not vocabulary that defines this, it's grammatical structure.

And English clearly has a Germanic grammatical structure, not a Romance one.
Damian   Thu Sep 22, 2005 11:26 am GMT
How is it that when you see SF films on the SF channels or dvds involving aliens landing on planet Earth and emerging from their spacecraft.... they all speak English? And with an American accent.
Guest   Thu Sep 22, 2005 12:03 pm GMT
Because other accents just aren't as cool and other nationalities make crappy SF not worth showing. (My impression as a non-American.)