French with a German Grammar

Inspired by Yulzari's sig "English is German with a French grammar." How might a language that could be described as "French with a German grammar" Come about?
 
Inspired by Yulzari's sig "English is German with a French grammar." How might a language that could be described as "French with a German grammar" Come about?

That sig is such bullshit. English does not have a French grammar. It has a thoroughly Germanic grammar, comparable to Afrikaans, and to some extent Dutch and the mainland North Germanic languages.

In fact... given that English has a Germanic grammar, and more Latinate (either direct or via French) words than Germanic words by any count, it has a better claim than any language to be French with a German grammar.
 
I thought French already had a Germanic-based grammatical structure.

No, it's a Romance language. French does exhibit traces of Germanic influence in vocabulary and pronunciation, and occasionally grammar, but on the whole it's still overwhelmingly descended from Vulgar Latin, like the other Romance languages.
 
French does exhibit traces of Germanic influence in vocabulary and pronunciation, and occasionally grammar
And even that could be nuanced : I saw a lot of peripheral or non-French but Romance vocabulary and pronunciation being considered as Germanic-issued* for no good reason (as the famous "que dalle" that took several tortured explanation to make it coming from Frankish)

Basically, what could be attributed directly to Vulgar Latin or Classical Latin was reputed Germanic at some point (similarly as Early Medieval structures were reputed Germanic in spite of overwhelming influence).

Not to say that you don't have any germanic adstrate in French, but that it's not that present that it might have been made (would it be only because some can be found as well in Old Occitan, on which theories on why Old French was supposedly more germanised, can't be held as much).

Over than these details, I mostly agree with Alon and funnyhat.
 
I thought French already had a Germanic-based grammatical structure.

Not really. Not at all, actually.

There's a difference between grammar and lexicon. While French and English, or French and German, may share lots of vocabulary, that doesn't mean that grammar, the structure of the language, shares the same relationship. For instance, while Modern English is made up of a significant amount of Romance-based lexicon, its grammar is inherently Germanic. One instance of this is English's tendency towards satellite framing. That is, English uses particles/adverbs to describe manner and direction in verbs (consider the difference between go in and go out versus enter and exit; the distinction in the former is not a part of Romance-language grammar and instead different verbs are used).

Grammar is the primary consideration when dividing language families up and proposing links between languages, something which is quite confusing when the languages share a significant portion of their lexicon. The prime examples here are the Altaic proposal (comprised of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic branches), which are likely just different families with similar lexicon due to continuous contact (which makes the rare inclusions of Japonic and Koreanic even odder). Also is the relationship between Chinese and Vietnamese. Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up an enormous proportion of the Vietnamese language, though grammatically, Vietnamese is closer to (e.g.) Khmer than Chinese, by an enormous margin. But I digress, I suppose.

Indeed, English is not at all "German with a French grammar"--in fact, it's more of "French with a German grammar" (more is relative: in this case, the comparison is still quite far from the truth), and in this sense I agree with Alon. The point being, as Germanic languages, English and German are much closer on a kinship basis. The same would hold true between French and German.
 
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Inspired by Yulzari's sig "English is German with a French grammar." How might a language that could be described as "French with a German grammar" Come about?

Hi there, JennyB. This may interest you; a faux-French Romance con-lang developed for the classic "Ill Bethisad" collab TL, which seems to have had a fair bit of Germanic influence.....

Jovian Language
 
Inspired by Yulzari's sig "English is German with a French grammar." How might a language that could be described as "French with a German grammar" Come about?

English does definitely NOT have a French grammar. The grammar is Germanic, but much of the vocabulary is of French origin.
 
English does definitely NOT have a French grammar. The grammar is Germanic, but much of the vocabulary is of French origin.

And even, if I remember correctly, commonday terms are much more Germanic in origin than the more nuanced absolute vocabulary of English, which probably contains a tremendous amount of French or Latin-derived terms that aren't really used on a day-to-day basis.
 
Such a thing would butterfly away the whole french language to begin with. You would need a massive germanic migration for the local culture to be affected to the point of making it more germanic. That alone would probably change the history of Europe.
 
And even, if I remember correctly, commonday terms are much more Germanic in origin than the more nuanced absolute vocabulary of English, which probably contains a tremendous amount of French or Latin-derived terms that aren't really used on a day-to-day basis.

This essentially. While the absolutely enormous total vocabulary of English is mostly Latin derived (with a lot of french intermission), the majority of English's common vocabulary is Germanic (probably close to 70-80 percent).
 
Such a thing would butterfly away the whole french language to begin with. You would need a massive germanic migration for the local culture to be affected to the point of making it more germanic. That alone would probably change the history of Europe.

Didn't read the OP -that's a paddlin'
 
This essentially. While the absolutely enormous total vocabulary of English is mostly Latin derived (with a lot of french intermission), the majority of English's common vocabulary is Germanic (probably close to 70-80 percent).


Right. It would seem that when languages collide, a lot of vocabulary is exchanged but the respective grammars remain relatively stable.

For English to lose its core Germanic vocabury and become more nearly "French with a German grammar" it would probably have to undergo the same sort of process as Irish did with respect to English. In that case, the language in question would be vernacular Anglo-French, with English itself being either extinct or in much the same state as Irish is now.
 
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