[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.

[samus]

Yeah, I made them same observation when I tried to pick up Latin while learning Italian. It really doesn't make sense to multitask these, unless one is interested in learning both. Even though they are related, it's not necessarily of help when learning it.

Nobody is denying that French has Germanic influence. And it probably encouraged its highly divergent evolution from its relatives. The neighboring Picard language is a lot more conservative for example.

Please compare the following paragraph to its translation into German, Norwegian, and Italian. That should really settle the discussion. From the Wikipedia article about Christmas. My estimation is that like 95% of these words are of Romance origin:

> Noël est la fête chrétienne qui célèbre la Nativité, c'est-à-dire la célébration qui rappelle la naissance de Jésus-Christ. La fête de Noël vient peu de temps après le solstice d'hiver boréal auquel elle est associée (voir ci-bas). La déchristianisation faisant, la fête de Noël est aujourd'hui coupée de son fondement religieux dans de nombreux pays occidentaux, mais elle y subsiste comme fête traditionnelle.