[yawboakye]

what makes a language isn’t the core vocabulary but, crucially, the syntax structure. when you say ‘je suis malade’ instead of ‘suis malade’ that’s the germanic roots of french mandating the structure. latin loan words don’t make a language romantic.

[samus]

French is indeed a notable exception in that regard. However, the rest of the grammar structure is still overwhelmingly of Romance origin. This and some other odd things can indeed be explained because of the ancient Franks picking up the language of the people they ruled over, but incompletely so.

[yawboakye]

so i’m fairly familiar with latin’s grammar because i speak it, proficiently. first, there’s material difference between latin and modern french grammars. for example, the genetive, dative, ablative, accusative noun cases have been largely replaced with the nominative case + prepositions, which makes them no different from the (ultra-)modern german or english language. both german and english have conjugations too.

* i say ultra because proper german has more cases than french in fact.

[samus]

This has happened in quite similar ways to most other Romance languages as well though. Almost all of them (with Romanian being a notable exception) have gotten rid of their case system and only the pronouns contain traces of it. Nowadays, they express the "cases" with prepositions too.

[yawboakye]

agreed. so given that french grammar bears striking resemblance to german/english, and given that they’re all info-european languages, why are we quick to reject the germanic roots of the french language and classify it as romance? here i don’t know much history but i won’t be surprised if we learn that the association was deliberate, in order to elevate french to the status of latin? i.e. language fit for intellectual work?

[samus]

Good that you brought up English, which is also frequently argued to actually be a Romance language and where it is much more ambiguous. Since it actually acquired a massive amount of latin loan words directly and via medieval or modern French. Sometimes the same word twice or thrice.

The classification as Romance vs. Germanic is based on two important observations:

I. Even considering the Germanic influence, French and its close relatives are still more similar to each other and to the other Romance languages. If I see a page of French text, my knowledge of German is almost useless, but my Italian gets me very far. This classification can be made objectively by using Swadesh lists[0] or related tools.

II. We can trace its historical development very well and it seems to organically emerge from the vulgar Latin of late antiquity.

Of course the association with Latin was deliberate, but this happened much earlier when the Romans conquered, colonized, and eventually romanized Gaul. Because of this, there was simply never a need for loaning words from Latin on a large scale. Later, the Franks were just a new management that placed itself on top of the existing culture.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list

[yawboakye]

incidentally my latin helps me very little in french but a lot in italian and spanish, for example. in fact, i studied latin to make my task of learning french easier—but that never happened. i picked up habits and rules that produce outrightly wrong and nonsensical french.

on french being vulgar latin, i agree. but bear in mind that the vulgar latin spoken in the provinces are akin to creole (and other patois/pidgin dialects) of modern mainstream languages: they’re amalgamations of many languages, the mainstream languages furnishing words and phrases where necessary. barely do they supply grammar. that said french, unlike other romance languages, demonstrates a strong germanic syntax structure, which has persisted over centuries of iterations of the language. the overwhelming evidence suggests that french is germanic (both in syntax structure and vocabulary). it’s incorrect to assume that spanish and italian, for example, are pro-drop when in latin the so-called pro-drop is the default. intelligisne? is what you ask your interlocutor, not tu intelligsne? in french an explicit subject is required, without which the sentence is nonsensical and grammatically incorrect.

french is arguably romance but it is germanic too, and in no small way.