French so different from other romance languages

[Carignan]

Another early old French text, but from a different dialect, more northern... the Sequence of st-Eulalia (around 880 A.D.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequenc...t_Eulalia#Text

This looks a lot more like modern french than the Oaths of Strasbourg posted earlier. I can understand 50% of the words.

[Mens-Sarda]

Another early old French text, but from a different dialect, more northern... the Sequence of st-Eulalia (around 880 A.D.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequenc...t_Eulalia#Text

this looks like more to actual French compared to the other

[Tchek]

Yes, actually I always thought, and I've always heard that the sequence of St-Eulalia was the most ancient text in Langue d'Oil. The language is a koiné of northern Oil dialects, namely Picard, Walloon and Champenois.

[TheForeigner]

How numerous were Franks and other Germanics on the soil of modern France,Wallonia and Romandie and how large was the total and predominantly Gallo-Roman population ? How much influence you think they had on the language and culture of these Latin lands? The Romans are said to not have settled in great numbers outside the Mediterranean coastal areas.

[Ianus]

Probabily the pronunciation is influenced more by Celtic subtratum that Germanic settlers.

[TheForeigner]

Probabily the pronunciation is influenced more by Celtic subtratum that Germanic settlers.

How come occitan, north italian and iberian romance dialects and languages don't have the same issues?

[Mens-Sarda]

How come occitan, north italian and iberian romance dialects and languages don't have the same issues?

during the barbarian invasions in late Roman empire the province of Gallia was sacked, conquered, and settled by various Germanic peoples, not only Franks, moreover, the vulgar Latin language was not the same in every place, the language changed according to when a region was colonized and latinized, and from where the Latin colonists came from, for example, in Sardinia, Latin language arrived in different waves, and from different direction, the result is that from north to south of the island we speak two languages almost unable to understand each other

[kkk77]

Things I find particular to French:

Strong nasalization.
The R sound.
The rounded U sound.
Being a syllable-timed language.

I think the first three are what makes French so hard to confuse with anything else.

[Corvus]

Don't let the massive difference in pronunciation fool you. French is closer to Italian than Spanish is. The only reason it's less mutually intelligible is because of the pronunciation.
French and Italian are both Occitano-Romance languages whereas Spanish comes from a different group, much older, it's under the Iberian Romance along with Portuguese, so it has more in common with Portuguese than it does with Italian.I'm not saying that Italian and Spanish are nothing alike, all I'm saying is that French is in fact closer to Italian and the only reason why they are not as mutually intelligible is because of their huge pronunciation differences.

[bo-marco]

I don't think there ever was any strong Germanic influence. Only a few commonalities, due to areal diffusion. For instance the closed front vowels (the ö and ü sounds), and the fact it's non-pro-drop, i.e. that an explicit subject is always required with the verb, a feature only seen (as far as I know) in French in addition to all Germanic languages. Which has a lot of structural consequences on the grammar, like the use of inversion for interrogative clauses.

So you're talking about a Romance language with closed front vowels as "Föra" (out) and "pütlet" (child) like Mantovano, a non-pro-drop language (explicit subject is always required) as Mirandolese "a piōv" (it rains/il pleut) or "a sucéd" (it happens), a language using inversion for interrogative clauses like Bolognese "i ên" (they are) vs "êni" (are they?) and maybe a language with two markers for negation, before and after verb, like reggiano "a n vōl mia dîr" (it does not mean/il ne veut pas dire)? Oh yes, it's emilian.