I am not looking for someone with whom to argue this out, as I have no real facts to back this up; these claims against Latin are just entirely from my own personal experience, and I'd be interested to hear anyone else's opinion on the subject.
If, by some lucky chance, someone agrees with my statements, I would be really greatful to know your opinion as to why this French-Latin link seems to hold so much weight, and also, I'd like to find a source of information which would indeed help build French as much as Latin is supposed to.
In writing this, I hope I have not offended anyone, as that was definitely not my intention. Thank you for your replies and opinions. Re: How much does Latin help French? Post by ptolemyauletes » Sun Mar 22, am French IS Latin after years of changes to sounds and spelling and word selections.
To use an analogy, think of Shakespearean English. This gives an idea how much a language can change over time years. Go back another years in English and you have Anglo-Saxon, a language that is utterly incomprehensible to a modern English speaker. The amazing thing is actually how little French has changed from Latin over years. Many of the words you are likely referring to are in fact from Latin descendents, but their forms have been changed, in some cases quite radically, so they may not seem at first glabnce to be connected.
The seemingly inconsistent and bizarre system of French spelling gives an indication of how much the language has changed. Its modern spelling does not reflect the changes in pronuncuation that have occurred over the last several centuries. In other cases, French uses more obscure Latin words, which seem likely to have been words used by the common folk rather than Caesar and Cicero. An example is the Latin word caballus, which gives modern Italian, Spanish and French their words for horse, while the classical word equus seems to ahve died out completely, only being revived with more modern creations such as equestrian.
French has also adopted words from other, less closely related languages. There must have been many words borrowed from German over the years, as an example, and more recently, a lot of English words have found their way into the language. As for vulgate Latin, Late classical and Medieval Latin gives a good indication of the evolution of the language, and early versions of French, Italian and Spanish and other languages also help to fill in the picture.
I am no expert on all of this, but my own observations I hope are of some use. As for being of use in learning French or Italian or Spanish, here is my experience.
I have some little experience with French, having grown up in Canada, where it is cumpulsory to take a few years of French in school.
I forgot most of it long before I learned Latin. With almost ten years of Latin behind me now, I am able to read French, Spanish and Italian newspapers at a basic level, having no experience with two of these three languages.
Does Latin help you to learn these languages? Hope this is helpful. The only thing we can guarantee when communicating via the internet is that we will be almost completely misunderstood, and likely cause great offence in doing so. Throw in an attempt at humour and you insure a lifelong enemy will be made.
Post by ptolemyauletes » Sun Mar 22, am An example of a word in French that is not so obviously descended from Latin is ecriver, which is a direct descendant from scribere in Latin. Many Latin words seem to have lost the initial 's' and had it replaced by an 'e'. Also 'b' and 'v' are common letters that are interchangeable across languages. Post by Jacobus » Sun Mar 22, am Thank you both for your help. I am very grateful. The only reason I was expressing a little doubt on Latin's usefulness for French and possibly other Romance languages, is because of the seemingly numerous words in French which seem to be completely unrelated, at least to me, to their corresponding Classical Latin forms.
I thought this to be completely unrelated until I found the Latin expression "bellum gerere", to wage war. Perhaps the French "la guerre" derives from the verb instead of a noun? The Latin equivalent of this, as far as I know, is "cognitare".
I don't see any relation between these two verbs at all, although I think the Vulgar Latin for "to think" was something like "pensare" or something along those lines. What I'm trying to get across with these two fairly inadequate examples is that I don't think all French words which claim to be from Latin come from Classical Latin - some of them seem to come from Vulgar Latin, unless the root of "penser" is an exception, Is it possible to look at Vulgar Latin?
How necessary would this be, really, as Classical Latin seems to give rise to most of the forms. Thanks Jack. Post by Lex » Sun Mar 22, am I've always thought that the reasoning that studying Latin is useful because it helps in the study of Romance languages is specious, at best.
Finally, this question is somewhat similar to the question Why do experts recommend learning Esperanto? Esperanto has a great propaedeutic value as a first foreign language because it is much easier to learn than most natural languages. Latin, by contrast, is not easier or not noticeably easier than the Romance languages or than other natural languages in general, so it is not surprising that a search for the propaedeutic value of Latin does not turn up any studies.
I also performed this search on more specialised sites. So while knowing Latin has some benefits when learning living Romance languages, I would not delay learning any Romance languages by learning Latin first. The four major "latin" languages lie on a continuum, with French and Spanish being the most different. This happened for geographical and historical reasons; Portugal borders on Spain, and France and Italy are neighbors France and Spain less so, despite a common border, because of the Pyrennees.
French deviates the most from Latin, probably because of its proximity to Germany; the French laisser and the German lassen both mean "let. German , roots. Likewise, Spain historically had some Celtic and Arabic influences, and where Spanish deviates from Latin, it's probably in one of those two directions. My Portuguese teacher told me that he felt that a knowledge of Latin was of help to students studying the two more "proximate" languages, Italian and Portuguese, and of some help for the two more "remote" Romance languages.
And learning one would make it easier to learn a second. He also said that he wouldn't learn Latin just to learn one romance language, but the effort would be worth it if you wanted to study "several. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email.
Notify me of new posts via email. Ian James Parsley Life in small business and local politics. Share this: Facebook Twitter. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.
Follow Following. Ian James Parsley Join 8, other followers. The ones who go on and study Classics usually can read Latin fluently after a couple of years. I am in my fifth year of studying Latin. The past 3 years have been spent in translation the first two years studying grammar, etc. Learning Latin is also particularly beneficial for people who intend to study law, given the numerous Latin terms and phrases in legal discourse.
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