I’ve been watching a bit of British tv lately, which includes a good sprinkling of French.
It sounds very different from what Spanish and German I remember from school, and (in the case of Spanish) have heard on tv/radio). In particular, the focus on vowel sounds and subjugation of consonants, seems rather uncommon. It almost feels as if somebody, at some point in time, redesigned French to sound more snobbish and/or artistic.
Reading up on the evolution of the language just tells me what other groups influenced the language and culture, with explaining what bits came from where. Also, since I don’t speak the language of languages (e.g. diphthongs, glottal stops, rhotics, etc. ), I have no idea how the differences would be referred to.
Could somebody enlighten me about this apparent discrepancy? It could just be a misperception, but, if so, it’s oddly consistent.
The dialect of my area tends to shuffle stresses to the last syllable, so it sounds more like French than most other dialects of Spanish, simply on the stresses part (I was born some 40km from the French-Spanish border as the bird flies). Or maybe I should say “tended”: television has standardized those stresses a lot.
There are different phonetics involved, but again there will be some dialects that will be more similar than others. Spanish has a ton of roots from Arabic which French doesn’t. German and French are even more distant, etymologically speaking, than French and Spanish.
Do they sound different? Well… yes… but what were you expecting? How similar did you expect them to sound? Does any of them sound as similar to each other as to English, to your ears? To Chinese?
It does seem to me that Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Italian are all more similar to each other than they are to French. All the other Romance languages have a similar sort of sound, while French is way off by itself.
The deletion of final vowels where other Romance languages kept them—this changes the stress pattern when the stressed syllable was originally the next-to-last one, but when the original final vowel is gone, what remains is still stressed but is now the final syllable. Oxytonic means stressed on the final syllable. This is similar to how Persian developed oxytonic stress, by dropping the final vowels from its ancestor language. Although lately I see French pronunciation given in IPA without any stress marker at all, like Japanese, it sounds like oxytonic stress to non-French speakers.
French reduces vowels to schwa much more readily than any other Romance language.
I think that is the gist of it. The postvelar R could be replaced by a trilled alveolo-dental r like in most other Romance languages, and it would still sound recognizably French from the 3 features I listed.
I also think that Occitan bridges the way from French to Catalan and Piedmontese, while Catalan and Piedmontese in turn bridge the way to Castilian and Italian, respectively.
While I hear the difference, I can also hear the resemblance. Something about the way French speech is articulated or modulated, but you can hear the Romance connection in it beneath the differences. John Leguizamo exploited this connection when playing French or French-Canadian characters.
Sometimes I’ve faintly overheard Chinese(?) and thought the tone or melody sounded like French! (I’m fairly conversant in French, not at all in Chinese.)
Lemur caught exactly what I was trying to say: the other romance languages have noticeably similar sounds. French even LOOKS similar to those languages, but sounds completely different.
Johanna cited some great examples: the nasality of the language, and their love of schwa (which sounds like a cross between eww (i.e. disgust), and ooh (pleasant surprise) to my ear). Another example, now that I think of it, is a preference for soft consonants (l, s, d, m, etc.) over hard consonants (c/k, t, p, etc.).
The dropping of consonants, syllables, and more toward the end of words is the biggest distinction for me. Latin “Augustus” —> French “août,” pronounced “oo.” When did this hyper-erosion begin to outpace other Romance languages, and why? Influence of the Celtic (Gaulish) substrate? Doubtful. Influence of the Germanic (Frankish) partial substrate? Doubtful. Just pure chance? Perhaps, but unsatisfying.
To a degree, but not much. To go from Johanna’s list:
Nasal vowels aren’t really a feature of the other living Celtic languages except for Breton. Breton has more nasalized vowels than French, but is unlikely to have had much influence on the development of French itself. There is a tiny bit of evidence for nasalized vowels in the language that underlies both, Gaulish, if I recall correctly (late inscriptions with sometimes N, sometimes M, after a vowel—but remember that weakly articulated final nasals [Ms & Ns] was a feature of spoken Latin, too).
This pattern of loss of syllables and shifting stress is also seen in the development of the insular Celtic languages, as is the tendency for consonants to shift depending on their surrounding environment. (the T in Latin VITA becomes D in Spanish VIDA and nothing in French VI*A > VIE.)
The ancient and medieval Celtic languages, insofar as we can tell, don’t seem to have had many neutral vowels.
People ascribe a lot to Celtic because they don’t know anything about it, and it’s easy to project onto a blank screen.
To me there is no confusing French and Catalan, but sometimes it sounds like someone is inserting random “Frenchness” into Spanish.
They’re both rather nasal languages. Generally speaking, the French “n” is nasal, especially when later in a word, while Portuguese uses “~” above letters as in São Paulo (comes out sort of like sow-n with a nasal).
There are pretty much zero monolingual Breton speakers. Is there any evidence that these people don’t just have very strong French accents?
Breton is most closely related to Welsh and Cornish.
Or from an English speakers’ perspective, so few letters.
No monolingual speakers ≠ no first-language speakers. Most Breton speakers are native speakers, and the fact that they are also native French speakers doesn’t affect their accent in Breton as it would if they had learned Breton first.
Yes; I originally brought it up just to show that other languages could sound like French, even if they’re not related. [Breton has a lot of French vocabulary, but is otherwise from another language family.] Breton has sounds that French does not have (/x/, /γ/; /t∫/ & /dʒ/ in some dialects), phonological features that French does not have (voicing and de-voicing final consonants depending on the following word, sound changes [mutations] in the initial consonants] and a different word-stress pattern (penultimate stress in most dialects), and yet they still sound very similar when spoken.
Any influence is largely going to be one-way, just because of the relative size and power of the two languages and their political structures.