Evolution of French

[Otto Kretschmer]

It is often said that the differences between modern French and other Romance languages are due to Germanic influence yet, if my udnerstanding is correct, Old French ca 1000-1100 stil kept majority of word endings and was pronounced very closely to how it was written. The differences between French and Occitan were much smaller than today.

What (if anything specific) prompted the phonological changes later on? By 1000 AD vast majority of Germanic speakers in France have long since become assimilated.

[Pabappa]

it could be a house-of-cards situation .... Germanic didnt make French what it is today, but it put French into an unstable situation roughly a millennium ago where a lot of inflections were defective, important posttonic vowels were scrunched together into schwas, etc .... such that further rapid evolution in an independent direction was inevitable. This is just a hunch though .... I'm assuming, for example, that Occitan has also evolved rapidly over the past thousand years and does not resemble Old French, and likewise for Limousine and any other dialect that was once the main language of some part of France. Also, it's worth noting that the Germanic languages that most strongly influenced French may have been different in many ways from those Germanic languages that are alive today.

I think the house-of-cards dynamic is a great thing to play with in conlangs. But we have other examples in the wild ... Slavic was once just another Balto-Slavic language, the third sibling of Lithuanian and Latvian ... but it lost all its coda consonants, and that set into motion a whole flood of other changes that never occurred in the other two Balto-Slavic languages.

Proto-Celtic was, similarly, a near-twin of Latin in Biblical times, but it lenited a whole bunch of consonants, which in turn led to further rapid evolution in both Brythonic and Goidelic, leading to the present situation where Irish and Welsh (at least to a layman) barely resemble each other, and both are far from anything like the rest of Indo-European.

I'd nominate English as another example, though oddly enough, I dont know a whole lot about the history my own native language .... Scots, for example, is fairly close to modern English, and it seems difficult to attribute the parallel changes in Scots and English to Norman French influence since Scotland (as far as I know) remained always out of reach of the Norman-speaking ruling class of medieval England.


edit: i guess Slavic is not the sibling of Latv & Lith..... but rather of Latv+Lith & Old Prussian ... .but my point remains that Slavic underwent one radical change that the others did not, and that one change kicked into motion a bunch of others, all of which happened within a few hundred years, after which Slavic settled down and became what it is today .... stable and conservative enough that people from Russia can at least get by in Serbia, Poland, etc, and likewise in the other directions.

[Nortaneous]

I'd nominate English as another example, though oddly enough, I dont know a whole lot about the history my own native language .... Scots, for example, is fairly close to modern English, and it seems difficult to attribute the parallel changes in Scots and English to Norman French influence since Scotland (as far as I know) remained always out of reach of the Norman-speaking ruling class of medieval England.

West Germanic in general had the merger of /iː uː/ into /ij uw/ causing stress in the vowel system, but in English this was reinforced by loss of /x/ and absence of centralizing diphthongs like MHG <ie üe uo> or Middle Dutch <ie oe>.

It is often said that the differences between modern French and other Romance languages are due to Germanic influence yet, if my udnerstanding is correct, Old French ca 1000-1100 stil kept majority of word endings and was pronounced very closely to how it was written. The differences between French and Occitan were much smaller than today.

What (if anything specific) prompted the phonological changes later on? By 1000 AD vast majority of Germanic speakers in France have long since become assimilated.

Stress and vowels. Getting rid of coda consonants is easy; developing massive vowel splits and a strong stress accent (which was later lost, much like in Latin which had extensive reduction of unstressed vowels) is harder.

[Linguoboy]

It is often said that the differences between modern French and other Romance languages are due to Germanic influence yet, if my udnerstanding is correct, Old French ca 1000-1100 stil kept majority of word endings and was pronounced very closely to how it was written. The differences between French and Occitan were much smaller than today.

I don't know how familiar you are with Occitan, but keep in mind that modern varieties tend to be written in conservative compromise orthographies which conceal not only the differences between dialects but between Occitan and other Romance varieties. For instance, Limousin (Périgord) chantas "you sing", pronounced ['sɔ̃nta:], or escòla [ej'kolɔ].

[Otto Kretschmer]

It is often said that the differences between modern French and other Romance languages are due to Germanic influence yet, if my udnerstanding is correct, Old French ca 1000-1100 stil kept majority of word endings and was pronounced very closely to how it was written. The differences between French and Occitan were much smaller than today.

I don't know how familiar you are with Occitan, but keep in mind that modern varieties tend to be written in conservative compromise orthographies which conceal not only the differences between dialects but between Occitan and other Romance varieties. For instance, Limousin (Périgord) chantas "you sing", pronounced ['sɔ̃nta:], or escòla [ej'kolɔ].

Still if you compared Old Occitan and Old French of 1200 AD, the differences would be much smaller than today. Both would barely be considered separate languages.

[Talskubilos]

Still if you compared Old Occitan and Old French of 1200 AD, the differences would be much smaller than today. Both would barely be considered separate languages.

Nothing of the kind. Catalan was another story though.

[Richard W]

I'd nominate English as another example, though oddly enough, I dont know a whole lot about the history my own native language .... Scots, for example, is fairly close to modern English, and it seems difficult to attribute the parallel changes in Scots and English to Norman French influence since Scotland (as far as I know) remained always out of reach of the Norman-speaking ruling class of medieval England.

Not really. The children of Malcolm III were backed by and intermarried with the family of William the Conqueror. Bruce, Balliol and Stewart are all Norman families (sort of... technically Stewart is Breton).

[Ares Land]

It is often said that the differences between modern French and other Romance languages are due to Germanic influence yet, if my udnerstanding is correct, Old French ca 1000-1100 stil kept majority of word endings and was pronounced very closely to how it was written. The differences between French and Occitan were much smaller than today.

What (if anything specific) prompted the phonological changes later on? By 1000 AD vast majority of Germanic speakers in France have long since become assimilated.

Germanic influence on French includes a whole lot of loanwords (even pretty basic vocabulary; the influence did run deep) the borrowing of /w/ and /h/ in Old French (erased by later sound change.)
Anything else (esp. phonological) is tentative and hypothetical.

The development Nortaneous mentioned: a strong word stress, with subsequent vowel breaking and loss of posttonic vowels (tela > teile > toile,compare Occ. tela) is sometimes attributed to Frankish. That's entirely hypothetical, though.
Interestingly Old French syntax was influenced by Germanic. It looks like it had V2 word order, for instance.

Basically, it's not clear if the distinctive phonological evolution of French can be attributed to Germanic before 1000AD. After 1000AD there's no particular factor that seems to prompt further sound changes (except a tendancy towards consistent word-final stress.)

[Emily]

french never evolved, it was always like that

[Nortaneous]

The development Nortaneous mentioned: a strong word stress, with subsequent vowel breaking and loss of posttonic vowels (tela > teile > toile,compare Occ. tela) is sometimes attributed to Frankish. That's entirely hypothetical, though.

It's hypothetical, sure, but if you've ever heard an Anglophone speak Spanish...

[alice]

The development Nortaneous mentioned: a strong word stress, with subsequent vowel breaking and loss of posttonic vowels (tela > teile > toile,compare Occ. tela) is sometimes attributed to Frankish. That's entirely hypothetical, though.

It's hypothetical, sure, but if you've ever heard an Anglophone speak Spanish...

"Don-dey es-tah la ca-sa de pe-pey", for example, as someone once humurously put it to me.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

"Don-dey es-tah la ca-sa de pe-pey", for example, as someone once humurously put it to me.

It really isn't very far off something that could evolve into French.

[Otto Kretschmer]

"Don-dey es-tah la ca-sa de pe-pey", for example, as someone once humurously put it to me.

It really isn't very far off something that could evolve into French.

Phonology of Spanish and English are very different - the r sound, the usage of schwa and tendency to use diphtongs in place of monophtongs are things that give people away when they speak Spanish. Polish speakers have hardly any accent when speaking Spanish.

IIRC Frankish phonology was not significantly different from that of Vulgar Latin except for different phonotactics.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Is it well-attested enough for us to be at all sure of that?

[Travis B.]

What we do know about early West Germanic is that it had a strong root-initial stress accent, and it was already undergoing loss and reduction of post-tonic syllables (look at reconstructed Proto-Germanic and compare it to Old English and just see how strong the tendency to lose or reduce post-tonic syllables was.) This was not the case for early Romance.

[Linguoboy]

Polish speakers have hardly any accent when speaking Spanish.

I don't know how to break this to you, but Catalan-speakers in Spain are colloquially known as "polacos" due in part to their distinctive accents when speaking Spanish.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

It might bear asking which variety of Spanish.

[Linguoboy]

It might bear asking which variety of Spanish.

Do any of them have flat postalveolar affricates or sibilants?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I don't know, but it's such a widespread language, I wouldn't be THAT surprised.

[Ares Land]

Everyone's got an accent speaking a foreign language.

IIRC Frankish phonology was not significantly different from that of Vulgar Latin except for different phonotactics.

There were differences; notably, distinctive vowel length, with a tendency to diphthongization these, and a lot more fricatives.
E.g. bruodher 'brother'.

It's worth mentioning that Occitan also lost post-tonic vowels except /a/, just like Old French. (The loss of final /a/, reduced to schwa is a much later development.) Otto Kretschmer is right to point out that ca 1000, there doesn't seem to be that much difference between Old French and Old Occitan.

Getting back to Frankish influence, it's debated on the grounds that there weren't that many Germanic-speakers, and that they were quick to adopt Vulgar Latin. I really don't know how valid the arguments on each side are!