Here’s an account of the erosion of consonants in Medieval French: Medieval France: An Encyclopedia - William W. Kibler - Google Books.
The 12th century was when the change occurred most, influenced by a shift from “word stress” to “group stress” in how sentences were enunciated.
That would do it.
Really? Portuguese sounds more like French than Spanish to me, even though the written form is very much like Spanish. And let’s not forget Romanian. That’s a Romance language, too.
But yeah, certain dialects of Italian sound quite similar to Spanish, and are pretty intelligible to a Spanish speaker. With French, youi have to strain much more to comprehend.
I’m very surprised that other posters think that Portuguese sounds like Spanish or Italian. To my ear, European Portuguese sounds more like Russian. Romanian also sounds very Slavic to me.
I’m Spanish, and to me Portuguese does sound a lot like Spanish… some dialects are even co-intelligible. Phonetic frecuencies are different, and some people are incomprehensible even when saying words I happen to know, but this second bit applies to people speaking Spanish too - when you encounter one of them in isolation, it’s not possible to tell if it’s a matter of dialect or of the individual.
When Portuguese speakers speak English, the accent does sound somewhat similar to a Russian accent.
I guess it depends on which “Spanish” one is talking about. Certainly Portuguese and Galician are going to sound similar. But to my ear, it sounds quite different from Castilian.
I’ve been watching a couple of Portuguese soap operas on YT recently, and the pronunciation drives me crazy, because I can pretty well understand Spanish but Portuguese is completely incomprehensible to me. It’s really interesting that the people in these soap operas drop final vowels. Even when using a word that’s the same in Spanish - say, amigo, for friend, the Portuguese pronounce it as amig’, and *amigos *is amizh.
To me, it sounds like Spanish with a slavic accent. It sounds like I should be able to understand it, if I listened closely enough, but I can’t.
To me, neither Brazilian nor European Portuguese sound like Spanish at all.
Well Portuguese sounds very different from Spanish to me, but I can understand most of it. There’s even a word for it: Portugnol. I studied French when I was a kid, and after 3 years, I could understand as much I can understand Portuguese now. I’ve never studied Portuguese.
“Spanish” as in “the language”, not as in “any of the languages spoken among Spaniards”. With my apologies to Galegos, Galego and Portuguese are one language separated by politics and the river Miño*.
Mighty Girl, Portuñol or Portunhol is not the ability to understand both languages when you speak one: it’s the hybrid of both that you get when two monolingual speakers of each are having a conversation. Same as Itañolo/Itagnolo.
The main reason is that up until the 13th century or so (well, up until much later than that really, but I’ll get back to it) there were really two French linguistic zones : the “tongues of Oïl” were spoken in the north and the “tongues of Oc” (also called “occitan”) in the south. Occitan is *much *closer to Spanish & Italian in its sonorities and vocabulary, while the tongue of oïl was closer to northern languages like Flemish, Walloon, Norman…
Inside those two great ensembles, each region had its own dialect, often based/related to one of the two but not necessarily (Breton would be one example of a regional dialect that has fuck all to do with either, it’s not a Romance language at all. Basque is another).
Both cultural zones disliked each other, couldn’t really understand each other without going back to formal(ish) Latin as a lingua franca, and accused the other of not speaking right. In the 13th century, these oppositions - which were not only linguistic - they were also economic, military, political, cultural… - came to a head, notably with the Albigensian crusade, and the tongue of oïl was officially imposed as the administrative language (specifically those oïl dialects spoken in and around Île de France, which is to say where the King’s centre of power was), coupled with a push to simply eradicate occitan, as a language and culture both.
This second project took a lot more time. Indeed, there still are occitan speakers today, even though the modern state in its time also implemented strong measures to quash regional languages throughout the 18th-20th centuries - in this day and age, speaking occitan is sort of a “rebellious”, regionalist, de-centralist statement, much like speaking Breton is. And of course modern French was influenced by occitan/southern dialects along the way.
But generally speaking that’s the gist of the story : modern French is “weird”, because it’s by and large a Romance language influenced by Northern languages/people instead of Mediterranean ones. So you’ve got a lot of nasal sounds, diphtongs (e.g. “OU” isn’t pronounced “the o sound followed by the u sound”, but sort of like the oo in boot), weaker consonants (e.g. S is pronounced either /s/ (strong) or /z/ (weak) depending on the letters that follow it) etc… and the evolution path of Latin words is usually different than the one observed in Italian, Spanish etc…
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité pour les consonants.
Portuñol is also a hybrid language spoken along the Brazil-Paraguay border.
Breton is not a Continental Celtic language, which means it isn’t descended from Gaulish. It is Brythonic Insular Celtic and was brought from Great Britain to Less Britain sometime between the 6th and 9th centuries AD. British Celts fleeing the Anglos and Saxons. The Gaulish language finished dying out in the 6th century. There was no overlap between Gaulish and Breton, though the latter one got going just as the former one gave out.
I’d like to post a thread along these lines about how Chuvashsounds so different from the other Turkic languages. (Examples from Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Altai). The whole Turkic family shares that same lilt in their speech, except for Chuvash, which comes out with a different rhythm and feel altogether.
In this case it isn’t influence from surrounding languages of a different group that made Chuvash different. Chuvash descends from a branch of Turkic called r-Turkic) of which it is the only surviving member, and all the others are on the other branch (called z-Turkic). The Chuvash people are descended from the early Volga Bulgar state. They are neighbors of Tatarstan, which as the Khanate of Kazan was the successor to the Golden Horde that had wiped out the ancient Volga Bulgar state. Now the Volga Tatars are a mixture of Kıpçak Turks from Siberia with the earlier Bulgar inhabitants. The Chuvash are the Bulgar remnant still speaking a descendant of the Bulgar language. Some linguists have disagreed about where to classify Chuvash. The consensus is that it’s the other side of Turkic. Some have classified it as a separate branch of the Altaic languages, and some have made it out to be the missing link between Hungarian and Mongolian.
But, like French, Chuvash is also full of reduced vowels. Most Turkic languages have no vowel reduction. Those that do, like Uyghur and Uzbek, only have it in allophones. Chuvash is the only one where the reduced vowels are independent phonemes and are written with special letters of the alphabet. Anyhow, like Hungarian and Mongolian, it makes an interesting sound to listen to even if you don’t understand a word.
You are incorrect about the dates: there was, indeed, some overlap between Breton and Gaulish, although Breton is indisputably Insular and not Continental Celtic. How much overlap there was, and whether it was significant, is debated, but there are few academics now who accept the scenario you lay out. Even Wikipedia says “from the 3rd to 9th century (most heavily from 450 to 600).”
So conceivably there could have been conversations between Bretons and Gauls,* each struggling to follow the other’s language. Probably close enough for rudimentary comprehension but not quite close enough to have a conversation without effort. That’s interesting. Thanks for the info, Dr.
*Proto-Breton with Late Gaulish
That may be because you are understanding it (or at least listening for meaning). To hear what a language sounds like, you need to somehow “tune out” the meaning and hear it as just a stream of sound. I think it is next to impossible, for example, for any of us to hear what our own native language sounds like, because we hear it as words rather than sounds.
For me, the “5 pure vowels” and lack of [zh] and [sh] sounds in Spanish and standard Italian give them a clear and bright sound, in contrast with Portuguese, French and southern dialects of Italian.
Yeah, I don’t think Portuguese (at least, those dialects of Portuguese that are spoken in France by Portuguese immigrants) sounds very much like Spanish : there’s a whole lot more fricative sounds and diphtongs that sound like “oinch”, “einch”, “aon” to my barbarian ears.
They’re different enough that I can readily distinguish it from Spanish or Italian by ear anyway, despite not speaking a word of any of the three languages (well, I did a few years of Español in high school, but it’s not like I could still ask directions to the shoe store :))
My theory (which I admit is totally bogus) is that French evolved from a bunch of winos who were too drunk to speak distinctly, and their slurred speech turned into the “correct” way to pronounce the French language.
Is this the exact same setup as Spanglish here in the border states with Mexico (Calif, New Mexico, TX etc)?