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Are you boys still fighting about this? Good lord!
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I would say testosterone has no limits, but I've been known to drag things out too...
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LAA - Juaquin en la caja! : « Basically anyone who was literate spoke Norman-French as his primary language, and thus, the majority of literary vocabulary became French. After speaking French fell out of favor after three centuries or so among the nobility and scholars, the thousands of French loan words remained part of English vocabulary, because these words were so commonplace. »
En gros, oui. Mais la situation était probablement légèrement plus complexe.
1/ « Norman French » ne veut *RIEN* dire. Les Outremanchais vétérofrancophones parlaient des *VARIANTES* de l'ancien français : variantes en diachronie (1066 = pas pareil que 1453), variantes en diatopie (issues des Îles britanniques mais aussi du continent : langue de la cour de France, langue normanno-picarde, oïl occidental etc), variantes nées des nécessités sociologiques (registre littéraire/vernaculaire, langue juridique, langue commerciale, langue diplomatique, langue poétique etc).
2/ C'est sans doute le bilinguisme ou la diglossie poussés à leur paroxysme — tant chez certains individus (voir Chaucer) qu'au niveau démographique en général (la francophonie s'est déversée depuis la sphère royale et aristocratique vers le menu peuple via l'Église, les lettrés, les fonctionnaires et autres commerçants) — qui sont à l'origine de la disparition de l'ancien français d'Outremanche et à son absorption (c'est une image bien sûr) au sein du moyen-anglais.
3/ Comme LAA - Juaquin en la caja! l'a indiqué avec justesse, le trésor lexical vétérofrançais ne s'est pas envolé comme par magie sous prétexte que ceux qui l'utilisaient outre Manche ont fini par concentrer leurs efforts sur une langue unique (leur langue maternelle qui plus est) plutôt que sur deux.
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"Très belle image ! "
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Should that not be "Très bel image"?
"Image" is masculine, not feminine.
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Should that not be "Très bel image"?
"Image" is masculine, not feminine.
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Adam,
No, it should not ; in french ''image'' is feminine, so it is : très belle image
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pauline, who cares? French is the language of chauvinistic peasants
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I agree. Mainly because I'm British so I'm not too friendly with the Frenchies.
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Re: "pauline, who cares? French is the language of chauvinistic peasants"
--- Guest
No. Quite the contrary. France has always been a progressive country to a greater or lesser degree in spite of their terrible revolution (1789-1794), which was ironic, for a progressive country. France was producing many geniuses throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
For centuries, a knowledge of the French language was a mark of culture and civilization in the Western World even for non-French people e.g. : Catherine The Great, Frederick The Great, Mozart, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin etc.
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Re : ''pauline, who cares? French is the language of chauvinistic peasants''
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Guest,
It's not very nice to say such things ; I don't criticise your language. Where are you from?
Als U vlaams bent, dan ben ik gewoon niet meer verbaasd, of eerlijk gezegd ook niet geinteresseerd in wat U schrijft.
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Also, everyone's always forgetting that french is spoken in many countries, not only in France!!!!!!!
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Ignore Guest Pauline. Trolls just want to be fed, and so they say inflammatory things to get someone riled.
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Well, the closest language to English is Frisian, Dutch and then Low German dialects but due to separate linguistic evolution on British Isles + French influence on English vocabulary it´s no longer mutually intelligible with any German language neither with with Romance language. I am not sure if an English speaker could understand Frisian or Dutch even in the simplest things. It´s possible that reading multilingual service instructions he would rather grasp a basic point of Spanish, Italian or French text then German, Dutch of Sweedish but most likely he wouldn´t understand neither one of those. So, English is basically a Western-German language with strong Romance influence on vocabulary.
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I tend to think that, due to their "linguistic isolation" -absence of real "sister" language- (and aslo physical isolation) most english speakers have diffuculties to understand the ties between countries where the linguistic realtion is very close.
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>>Als U vlaams bent, dan ben ik gewoon niet meer verbaasd, of eerlijk gezegd ook niet geinteresseerd in wat U schrijft. <<
Lol... Walloon are we?
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<< Well, the closest language to English is Frisian, Dutch and then Low German dialects but due to separate linguistic evolution on British Isles + French influence on English vocabulary it´s no longer mutually intelligible with any German language neither with with Romance language.>>
English is mutually intelligible to a degree with another Germanic language. English and Scots are very similar, but then again, you always get the same question 'Isn't Scots a dialect of English?' but written down at least, it shows as much similarity with English as Portuguese does with Spanish but would you call Portuguese a dialect of Spanish?
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>>Als U vlaams bent, dan ben ik gewoon niet meer verbaasd, of eerlijk gezegd ook niet geinteresseerd in wat U schrijft. <<
Lol... Walloon are we?
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Yes ;)
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