Is English Just Badly Pronounced French?
- Thread starter frush11
- Start date
Fill Collins
I didn't mean to verge!
No
Fell down a linguistic rabbit hole on YouTube the last couple hours lol. Fascinating subject
English's sentence structure is Germanic in nature. But when the Normans took over England plenty of loan words came over. I mean there's a shyt ton of French stuff we say. Rendezvous, RSVP, museum, tailor, etc. Dude names a lot of them in the video.
English in America is a b*stard language just like we're a b*stard country. Partially what makes it so hard to learn is that it's a Germanic Language with a shyt ton of Romantic Language loan words, with portmanteaus (another French TERM!) like straight-up German, and new words being added every day.
ReasonableMatic
................................
You should get into Creole languages.
It’s the most fascinating thing to study imo, you would LOVE it.
Because it shows how our African Ancestors thought.
And how those African Ancestors way of thinking manifested itself in us throughout the Americas in a completely new location among different Central and West-Africans.
So, what does this mean?
This means that certain African words would get preserved the exact same or in Creolized forms.
But one of the most fascinating things.
Is that even Colonial languages would get used in African ways outside of the structure of their European origin.
For instance, English verbs would get restructured to multi-functional use cases and become nouns, or progressive markers.
Sometimes even having 3 or 4 other functions outside of the original English or French context running parallel with the meaning and use cases of our Ancestral African languages directly.
Where Haitian Creole and Sranantongo from Surinam are the most radical Creoles in the Diaspora, meaning that they retained the most African features.
Jamaican Patois, Gullah and AAVE were in more proximity to its Colonial languages (English) and each decreolized in different degrees.
That’s why some Creole languages are closer to English than others in various degrees. Some decreolizing to dialects of English,
but all retained African features that in some cases run parallel.
Like the zero-marked copula in AAVE
“He my brother” | 0 = is
Or zero-marked verbs in AAVE
“They working today” | 0 = are
And these features manifested throughout the WHOLE African Diaspora in the Americas, because we’re all of African descent.
Meaning, how we think is literally African, no matter where in the Americas we ended up from Central & West Africa.
It’s fascinating as hell.
Our Ancestors were smart as hell in creating new languages among eachother under those conditions.
Once you go down that rabbithole, it’s a whole nother endless amount of historical and linguistic evidence found that in detail explains why those “we not from Africa” koons are ridiculous.
Our Africanness is literally in the way we think and speak.
Last edited:
HarlemHottie
Uptown Thoroughbred
Iirc, the French loan words make up a good amount of 'higher register', ie, more formal, 'educated' sounding, vocab. French overlords, Anglo Saxon servants. So the words for animals themselves tend to be Germanic- based, like chicken or cow, but what it's called on the plate, or when it's served, tends to be French- based, like poultry and beef.
Sbp
Superstar
It's an offshoot of old German that borrowed a lot of words from French and Latin
I'll always love what we've done with English. I always find it interesting how just about every studied linguist respects there's no shortage of us who have a negative view of it
Yes, I've dabbled in origins of AAVE structure, especially your specific example. I've also looked into some of your other examples like the structure of haitian creole. Interesting that it is considered most radical creolization, but it makes sense, since while I'm hardly fluent in french, it still didnt seem to match up as much.
Also love reading about the spanish/arabic borrowed words.
HarlemHottie
Uptown Thoroughbred
I am, it doesn't. I literally have to sound it out when I'm reading, incomprehensible by ear. I thought my fluency was degrading, but no, I can listen to French news or converse in person with a native speaker, no problem.