Reddit reviews The Story of French

We found 7 Reddit comments about The Story of French. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Griffin

7 Reddit comments about The Story of French:

u/desGrieux · 75 pointsr/AskHistorians

I'll take a stab at answering this, but it's kind of hard to focus on one aspect. I'm a linguist, not strictly speaking a historian. But I've done work in historical linguistics.

This of course is very dependent on the region, but in general yes.

The most complicated issues with answering the question is how your define what constitutes a language versus a dialect, which is primarily a political and cultural issue. Comprehensibility would be the logical division of languages, but that exists in degrees, not in absolute terms, so those lines are arbitrary.

Most languages existed in what we call a dialect continuum where your neighbors sounded different, but you could understand them. But you couldn't necessarily understand your neighbor's neighbor, even though your neighbor could.

For one, the idea of "nations" didn't really exist yet, so there was A LOT of linguistic diversity. For example, when Napoleon started doing censuses, French (at the time, the language of Paris) was spoken natively by less than a quarter of the population (Check out The Story of French) and was understood by less than half of the people in modern day France. Most people spoke regional languages such as Basque, Breton, dialects of German, Italian, les Langues d'oc, and other dialects of langue d'oïl (of which the modern French language, a descendant of the Parisian dialect, is a member).

England was similar. English itself had many dialects and celtic languages were still very prevalent in their regions. In addition, as an island nation, many people people involved in seafaring had at least basic knowledge of French. Anyone involved with the upper classes would have basic knowledge of French.

Spain had Basque, Galician, Portuguese, Mozarabic, Castilian, Catalan, Aragonese, etc.

German and Italian only came to have a sense of a "national language" long after Goethe and Dante practically invented them. Before that it was a hugely diverse region of non-mutually comprehensible dialects.

The point of mentioning all these is that traveling or doing commerce across even very short distances often required a different language if not at least different vocabulary.

Upper classes were very often multilingual, especially women. Women were often from other regions for the purposes of alliances and the like, and so they often didn't share a language/dialect with their husband. This is partially the reason for the term "mother tongue" as it used to be distinguished from the language of the community (since the mother was often from elsewhere). This was especially true of royalty, who often imported princess from very different kingdoms across Europe. There are exceptions to this of course, but this was the general trend.

Merchants would very frequently have basic knowledge of other languages because of the nature of their job. We have lots of records of small phrasebooks and things of that nature. When lots of merchants were involved, they often created their own "language" such as lingua franca. In fact, so many people were familiar with this language in its day that it became the name for any neutral language two non-native speakers used.

Another key aspect of this was Latin. Anyone with even basic literacy (while extremely limited) would have knowledge of latin. And even if you weren't literate, you certainly went to mass so even the poorest of poor had exposure to Latin.

Peasants who didn't have the opportunity to leave their towns were the least likely to know another language. But they still got exposure, hence why English today has more French vocabulary than Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.

Also the language landscape changed frequently, so it seems that languages in general were easily learned. Gaul become Latinized very quickly so it doesn't seem that celtic speakers had much difficulty acquiring Latin (Romans even commented on how similar Gaulish was to Latin, so that probably helped). Etruscan was easily replaced by Latin, Basque and other (with a big question mark) languages of Iberia were quickly replaced as well. English uprooted Celtic, only to be subsequently imposed upon by Latin's daughter French. This would not be possible at that scale and frequency if language learning and bilingualism were not common.

u/LRE · 31 pointsr/languagelearning

French. It's a serious panty dropper here in the US. Plus it has an enthralling history.

u/greenkarmic · 29 pointsr/todayilearned

People don't realize how much the English and French languages are connected. I suggest this book, it's really good: The Story of French

u/mmolleur · 2 pointsr/French

https://www.amazon.com/Story-French-Jean-Benoit-Nadeau/dp/0312341849

u/MiaVisatan · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

u/Farwater · 2 pointsr/pagan

> I wonder how much you can understand what makes French French by learning Gaulish...

That's a great question! Honestly, not a whole lot just because modern French has evolved so much over time and is fundamentally based on Latin. Don't get me wrong, Gaulish was important to the development of French, as the vulgar Latin spoken throughout the Roman province of Gaul was a mish-mash of different Gaulish dialects mixed with Latin. But I think that French overall is clearly an Italic language, and the Franks probably had just as strong an influence over it as the Gauls did. But despite the fact that only a small fraction of French vocabulary comes from Gaulish, it definitely helped transform French into the language it is today.

What I just wrote above was an extremely abridged, superficial version of the Gaulish history of French. It's a complicated subject, and you would probably have to chase down an expensive textbook to get a proper history of it.

There is a good pop-history book about the French language called The Story of French. It's 500 pages, but I found it fun to read. It barely even touches on the French language's history with Gaulish, though. There's just that much more to write about French development in Medieval to modern times.

But I would say that the few words that do come from Gaulish are surprisingly important words and they help shape the character of the language. It seems like almost anything rustic, nature-based, or agrarian comes from Gaulish (alouette, lark; cabane, cabin; cheval, horse; mouton, sheep; etc., the list is very long)

There are also a small number of key words that aren't rustic which come from Gaulish, such as aller (to go), chemin (path/route), cloche (bell), craindre (to fear), crème (cream), drapeau (flag), manteau (coat), petit (small), and pièce (piece).

I'm sure you can see that some of these words even worked their way into English via Norman. Wikipedia has a good list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Gaulish_origin

I feel like I rambled a lot and still couldn't do the subject justice, but I hope that answered your general question and gave you some more insight.

u/Darragh555 · 1 pointr/Showerthoughts

Thanks for clarification about Academie Francaise. We might also mention guys like Malherbe who did a lot of work to try to make French as standard as possible. There's a great book called The Story of French that goes into a lot of depth about his work and the work of the Academie, and the work of the Alliance Francaise to bring French to the globe.

French has changed a lot! Just not as much. The change English underwent is phenomenal. I wonder how both French and English compare to other languages (like Italian!) because I'm only really familiar with those two. If I had more of an idea of that I think I could form a more broad-based comparison in my head, but atm it's a bit like comparing two kinds of apples without knowing how different other kinds of fruit might be.

And, this is an old thread, maybe I'll post a question about all this somewhere else.../r/askhistorians perhaps...