Originally Posted by
Ouistreham
IMO the most striking feature of French is the freedom of word stress, since you can emphasize at will the beginning or the end of any word.
The good side is that it gives a very rewarding sense of freedom, you can adjust the intonation of any sentence to what you want to say like you improvise a melody.
The bad sides are that French speech often sounds terribly dull and monotonous, and that the speakers tend to believe that word stress is optional also in the other languages, hence their famous habit to randomly stressing foreign words.
This being said, I think that Southern French fully qualifies for sounding typically Romance. Their ancestral Occitan dialects are virtually dead, but they speak French on their own way, with a reduced set of clearly defined vowels, all mute "e"s being pronounced (even where there aren't any), denasalized nasals, less agressive occlusives, sing-song tones that are indeed reminiscent of other Romance languages. (Except that the paroxytons, the distinction between 'parole sdrucciole' (palabras esdrujolas) and 'parole piane', which is fundamental in Romance, has been lost.)
Like they say, "we have forgotten the lyrics but we still remember the music."
IMH the main consequence of that so-called erosion is that most common words and conjugated verbs were shrunk to single syllables, whereby the notion of word stress became irrelevant. Just compare Italian "CANtano" to French "ils chant(ent)", made of two independant monosyllables.
In the oldest French texts the word for "eau" was "ew(e)" (as it still is in Walloon), a diphtong that logically evolved to "e-au" and finally to the monophtong "eau", while the Occitan word was "aig(a)".
Note that Piedmontese, that underwent heavy influences from both Occitan and meainstream French, chose a mean term with "eva", while all other Italian dialects use "acqua" or "aqua".
This is a recent development, with no structural effect. The uvular/pharyngal 'r' became standard in French (as well as in German and Danish) less than a hundred years ago. The substitution of the old-fashioned rolled 'r' is still in progress in peripheral areas like Quebec and the Pacific Territories for French, and parts of Bavaria and Austria as for German.
Agreed.
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