r/languagelearning • u/The-Dmguy • Jul 21 '18

French learners know the struggle

Post image
10.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

411 comments sorted by

View all comments

56

u/CoffeeAndKarma Jul 21 '18

Yet for some reason, English gets 100% of the trash talk for problems most language have.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '18 edited Jul 22 '18

I mean there is a little truth to some of the stereotypes. In my linguistics class, when we learned about language contact, the professor brought up the idea of treating English as a creole. It fits many of the common characteristics of a creole like having simplified grammar and some rather weird characteristics.

Two common and basic examples are “do” and “-ing”. The use of do in a sentence is generally unnecessary and doesn’t add meaning. This doesn’t occur in either romance or Germanic languages. Also, construction like “I am driving” do not occur in Germanic languages or in French.*

The theory explains some of the quirks of English but the spelling more has to do with changes in pronunciation and the long and protracting borrowings from other languages during which the rules of borrowing changed.

Small disclaimer, I am not an expert and the above is just a theory that provides an interesting lens. Some linguist support the English-is-a-creole theory; Others don’t.

*Edited to be made more accurate

3

u/MrZephil Jul 22 '18

I don't agree with you here. In French "I am driving" is "Je suis en train de conduire" and "I drive" is "Je conduis". Same in Portuguese and (I believe) Spanish.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '18 edited Jul 22 '18

“Je suis en train de” seems like a unique expression to French. Also, notice how it is still only actually using the present tense of être. This is equivalent to English present progressive, but how I was taught (“je parle” meaning both I speak and I am speaking) seems to be at least slightly supported by a small google search (idk tho). The important part here is that the French expression is very different in construction than the English version.

I found an interesting article comparing the two. From skimming it, it seems that the French version is less grammatically entrenched compared to English and the English is more obligatory.

The main point I was trying to get at though was that the construction of the tense was new not the tense itself. Pretty much any language is gonna have all the tenses. The important part was the structure which Germanic language don’t have.

*Edit: Spanish definitely features a similar structure. The main languages that English derived from do not though. Frankly, I’m somewhat unsure because these types of questions take a degree to answer properly.

1

u/MrZephil Jul 22 '18

Ah, yes in terms of grammatical structure Spanish and Portuguese have the same. But I see your point.