Portuguese accent Celtic-influenced?

[Catrau]

No. I can't figure out how French could have any influence on Portuguese. Portugal and core France (i.e. the North) are worlds apart.

....

But this is just a random encounter, which doesn't imply any parentage in any way.

Sometimes we encounter shocking realities:

- The father of our first king (count Henry) was a French knight from Dijon (Burgundy) he was grandson of the king of France and a relative of Hugo de Cluny;

- Apparently he was enrolled by the Templars to start a new nation while fighting the moors in Europe;

- To succeed he had to help one of the Iberian kings and hope lands would be given to him. Leon was the logical choice because of the border with the Atlantic which means one less enemy to fight later;

- When Afonso Henriques succeeded in the succession from Leon he called to the new nation all sorts of French from knights (Templars) to monks to help in the fight against the bloody Saracens and to effectively build the nation (agriculture, law, engineering) they planted vast extensions of fruit trees brought agriculture to savage lands, build bridges and roads, build the most exquisite Romanic monasteries (the ones that would be burned, assaulted and destroyed by another set of French some 700 years later). Other people came, especially English and Flemish but the French were the more important in numbers and in knowhow.

- Most of the people that could write during those days were French and although only some 200 years after that the Portuguese became the official language, it all started in the this early days of Saracen submission.

See, after all, our tortuous grammar may have come from somewhere, is Burgundy enough North? Your “worlds apart” may have been much more close than you ever imagined and in this matters there are no such things as random encounters especially in a place (Europe) where people always had enough mobility, that aren’t that far away apart to walk as they used to do, let alone ride.
In those days France and it’s central position in Europe played a very important role in other nations especially among some of her southern relatives, we may like that or not but it is undeniable.

It’s very curious how the Spaniards have a language so close to Portuguese and they got the easiest grammar, they only lose to English. No king of France grandson or Templar ideologist ever ruled there.

[Ouistreham]

Oh my God... I had heard that such demented beliefs enjoyed some popularity in Portugal but I didn't know it was that bad.

our tortuous grammar may have come from somewhere

French and Portuguese grammars have intricacies that do not exist in other Romance languages, but they happen not to be the same ones. E.g. French makes an abnormally sparse use of subjunctive whereas Portuguese uses it overabundantly in very original ways (even for infinitives).

It’s very curious how the Spaniards have a language so close to Portuguese and they got the easiest grammar, they only lose to English. No king of France grandson or Templar ideologist ever ruled there.

And?
Dutch is so close to German that it is actually a regional dialect of it. But German has a notoriously complicated grammar while the Dutch one is way simpler than the Spanish one.

The father of our first king (count Henry) was a French knight from Dijon (Burgundy) he was grandson of the king of France and a relative of Hugo de Cluny;

- Apparently he was enrolled by the Templars to start a new nation while fighting the moors in Europe;

- To succeed he had to help one of the Iberian kings and hope lands would be given to him. Leon was the logical choice because of the border with the Atlantic which means one less enemy to fight later;

- When Afonso Henriques succeeded in the succession from Leon he called to the new nation all sorts of French from knights (Templars) to monks to help etc...

But seriously... Do you think this is enough to affect a language's grammar and phonetics? England has been ruled for centuries by French speaking Normans, London was at some time the most creative centre of early French litterature, English was flooded with words and calques of French origin, but what was the effect on the English grammar and phonetics? Virtually zero!

I'm afraid you are crediting French with awesome remote control capabilities of foreign languages. Very flattering! But too good to be true.

[Comte Arnau]

Just a few vocabulary examples that I remember (Portuguese, French, Spanish respettively):
chapéu - chapeau - sombrero?
rua - rue - calle?
greve - greve - huelga?

and there are many others (where Spanish seems the isolate in comparison with French and Portuguese)

In Spanish the word rúa exists, although its use is very reduced. In old Catalan rua (or ruha) also existed, but we say carrer, like carrièra in Occitan or carrera in Aragonese. The word via exists in Iberia too for wide roads. But no strada.

Chapéu in Portuguese has to be a word taken from French, otherwise that initial ch doesn't make sense, it should be capelo/capel/capéu. In Catalan we have capell, although the most common word for a hat is barret, capell being mainly used in Mallorca now. In Italian they have cappello.

When the words come from Latin, they usually exist in all Romance languages but with different usage, register or meaning.

I'm sure greve in Portuguese has to be taken from French too. The Basques also took it from French and call it greba. In Catalan we call it vaga.

A language's phonology is a closed autonomous system. Mutual influences can exist only in some definite situations:

. When a minority language has been dominated by another for centuries: Scottish Gaelic sounds like Scottish English, Spanish Catalan like Spanish, Breton like French, Dutch Frisian like Dutch (but German Frisian like German!) etc.

"Spanish" Catalan sounds like Spanish... when spoken by the 3 to 4 millions of speakers who have it as a second language.

It’s very curious how the Spaniards have a language so close to Portuguese and they got the easiest grammar, they only lose to English.

Spanish has an easier phonology (and, arguably, spelling) than the rest of Romance languages. But I don't see in what Spanish grammar can be considered easier than that of other Romance languages, tbh.

[Damião de Góis]

In Spanish the word rúa exists, although its use is very reduced. In old Catalan rua (or ruha) also existed, but we say carrer, like carrièra in Occitan or carrera in Aragonese. The word via exists in Iberia too for wide roads. But no strada.

Estrada? That's how we say "road". I thought it was the same in spanish?

rua = street
estrada = road

[Catrau]

Oh my God... I had heard that such demented beliefs enjoyed some popularity in Portugal but I didn't know it was that bad.

I'm afraid you are crediting French with awesome remote control capabilities of foreign languages. Very flattering! But too good to be true.

I do not pretend to speculate about this issue, in fact I couldn't do it even if I wanted to, my world runs far away from the study of languages. This is just my opinion, I'm not dement, and it's not just my opinion it is also the opinion expressed in a few books I've read and which references I can send you if you want to judge the authors demency. I know this is not the mainstream but makes sense and the pieces join well together. France did had a huge impact in the formation of the kingdom of Portugal, in those days, the people that wrote the first writings in Portuguese were French. My feelings for that are none, I don't care if they had impact or not.
You should not compare things that aren’t comparable: England is England and Portugal is different. The Norman conquest of Britain although contemporary of the formation of Portugal was a completely different story. England was already there while Portugal wasn’t more than a project, there wasn’t a holy war going on at English doorsteps and English people aren’t Portuguese.
You may be right, that may had nothing to do with the way we spell Portuguese but there are people that think otherwise and also think that all those examples aren’t just random encounters. It’s common understanding that Portuguese has not only closely related words to French that doesn’t appear in Spanish but there’s a whole different dimension, when I had to present work in Spain, Spaniards usually had trouble to follow me because although I was speaking Castilian I was thinking in Portuguese and Spaniards often told me I was expressing myself as a French… I can’t really explain that to you. You need to ask them why but apparently it had precisely to do with the phrase construction…

[Comte Arnau]

Estrada? That's how we say "road". I thought it was the same in spanish?

rua = street
estrada = road

I really don't know why I wrote estrada, it's not the word I was thinking about. Yes, of course, estrada exists in Portuguese and, although with a different use and frequency, in Spanish and Catalan too. (The word commonly used here with the sense of estrada in Portuguese is carretera)

Fuck, as soon as I remember the word I was thinking about I'll edit it.

[Damião de Góis]

I really don't know why I wrote estrada, it's not the word I was thinking about. Yes, of course, estrada exists in Portuguese and, although with a different use and frequency, in Spanish and Catalan too. (The word commonly used here with the sense of estrada in Portuguese is carretera)

Fuck, as soon as I remember the word I was thinking about I'll edit it.

I don't know what you are thinking about, but here are similar words:

estrada
caminho
trilho
rua

(less used)
via

[Comte Arnau]

Didn't know about trilho. Interesting.

[Catrau]

I don't know what you are thinking about, but here are similar words:

estrada
caminho
trilho
rua

(less used)
via

Carreiro

[Rouxinol]

O estudo da língua e das suas origens está diametralmente oposto à minha formação... Contudo, não encontro lá muita lógica em admitir que a nossa gramática, dita complicada (em comparação à espanhola, por exemplo) se deva a qualquer influência francesa. Horror. Lá por D. Henrique ser borgonhês a língua falada pela população local foi aquela que evoluiu para o Português, julgo eu. Por exemplo, apesar do francês ter sido falado durante séculos pela aristocracia inglesa, nem por isso o inglês foi influenciado gramaticalmente, foneticamente e por aí fora pelo francês - que era a língua falada e escrita pela elite reinante. Não terá sido o castelhano que se simplificou face ao galaico-português? Enfim, estou a atirar postas de pescada para o ar. De qualquer modo, essa teoria "francesa" não parece ter muitos adeptos - ou mesmo nenhuns, ao nível académico? - entre os linguistas, pelo menos foi aqui a primeira vez que li sobre isso quando aplicado ao português do continente. No máximo, o que já tinha ouvido/lido foi que o sotaque açoriano teria sido influenciado por franceses que se teriam estabelecido ali - e honestamente há aspectos fonéticos que me fazem lembrar o francês - qual polaco ou hebreu (mirabolante, e historicamente não faz sequer sentido).