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Indeed. I greatly enjoyed the recent Jeopardy category, "BOOK TITLES EN FRANCAIS". Essentially, "What is the English name of the novel when given the French t

Indeed. I greatly enjoyed the recent Jeopardy category, "BOOK TITLES EN FRANCAIS". Essentially, "What is the English name of the novel when given the French title?" I aced it. Can I speak French? Hardly. Has enough Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and other bits of Romantic verbiage seeped into my brain seemingly via osmosis over the course of my 3.5 decades to allow me to read basic French? Surprisingly, even to me, the answer is yes.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Many European languages are interlinked like that. I found learning a bit of Latin on top of my passable English and my native Swedish opened up romance languages to a honestly pretty crazy degree. Knowing the simple glue-words like demonstratives, pronouns and interrogatives means I can get the gist of it in a way I couldn't before. In a strange way looking at these languages feels like looking like the close relatives of my native Swedish does (i.e. Norwegian and Danish). It's different, but in many cases I have so many of the basic pieces the rest can be inferred from context with reasonable accuracy.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  Swedish brought in a big corpus of words from French though (native English, passable Swedish, school French), due to diplomatic relations in the 1700s. So, e.g. Army: Danish hær, Norwegian hær, Swedish armé, French armée Ice-cream: Danish is, Norwegian is, Swedish glass, French glace Arm-chair: Danish lænestol, Norwegian lenestol, Swedish fåtölj, French fauteuil Window: Danish vindue, Norwegian vindu, Swedish fönster, French fenêtre (of course, a bunch of French also made its way into Danish and Norwegian as well. And the pronunciation is not always obvious either with French loanwords. I shocked my partner once while waiting at Postnord by saying out loud “Säger man kön (hard k) eller kön (soft k)?”)
  - Tor3 5y ago
    Nitpick - some of the variations between Swedish and Norwegian is because Swedish and Norwegian ended up with different words from Middle Low German, i.e. the differences stem back from the Hansa period, and not as late as the French relations of the 1700s. So, "fönster", for example, didn't get picked from French, it's from Middle Low German "vinster" (which became "finster, fynster" and then "fönster" in Swedish). In this case the Middle Low German word replaced the older Swedish word (which did have the same origin as the current Danish and Norwegian words for "window"), but that replacement didn't happen in Norwegian/Danish (in other cases one or both did pick up a word from Middle Low German, but it may have been a different word because the traders in Bergen weren't the same ones which operated in Sweden).
    - robin_reala 5y ago
      I love a nitpick, thanks for the impromptu history lesson. I really need to read up more on the Hansa period.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > And the pronunciation is not always obvious either with French loanwords. Or the spelling. I mean, I know how the letters are pronounced, so I can see that fåtölj is actually a good transcription, but visually it bears no resemblance whatsoever with fauteuil. I have found that French words that ended up in English were actually quite difficult to recognise in a conversation, even though they are written exactly as in French most of the time. I guess it’s related to the great vowel shift (but not only, even consonants are weird), but English really is weird compared to a lot of continental European languages. For example, a /r/ sounds like a /r/ in anything from Spanish to Finnish. Granted, there are differences in prononciation, but it is still not distorted beyond recognition. Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/.
    - yorwba 5y ago
      > Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/. Compare English "iron" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-iron.ogg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-iron.ogg German "eiern" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-eiern.ogg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-eiern.ogg French "ailler" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:LL-Q150_(fra)-Lepticed7-ailler.wav https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:LL-Q150_(fra)-Lepticed7-... None of the <r>s is anything like [r].
      - saghm 5y ago
        Maybe I just pronounce it weird, but I tend to pronounce "iron" the same way as the phrase "I earn", just with less space between them. Obviously the "r" is closer to the "n" in my pronunciation, but it feels like a stretch to say that it's the "r" with the weird pronunciation. If anything, the vowels are what seem weird to me; the "i" is long, which does not seem obvious it would be the case from the spelling alone, and the "o" is just completely silent, which is the only case of that in English I can think of off the top of my head (although I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few others).
        yorwba 5y ago
        "iron" probably underwent a process called r-metathesis after the spelling was standardized (or the spelling was based on a different dialect). If the spelling had been based on the later version, it would've been "iorn". I was going to give a lengthy explanation, but someone on StackExchange already did: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/264662 https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/264662

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Many European languages are interlinked like that. I found learning a bit of Latin on top of my passable English and my native Swedish opened up romance languages to a honestly pretty crazy degree. Knowing the simple glue-words like demonstratives, pronouns and interrogatives means I can get the gist of it in a way I couldn't before. In a strange way looking at these languages feels like looking like the close relatives of my native Swedish does (i.e. Norwegian and Danish). It's different, but in many cases I have so many of the basic pieces the rest can be inferred from context with reasonable accuracy.

robin_reala 5y ago
Swedish brought in a big corpus of words from French though (native English, passable Swedish, school French), due to diplomatic relations in the 1700s. So, e.g. Army: Danish hær, Norwegian hær, Swedish armé, French armée Ice-cream: Danish is, Norwegian is, Swedish glass, French glace Arm-chair: Danish lænestol, Norwegian lenestol, Swedish fåtölj, French fauteuil Window: Danish vindue, Norwegian vindu, Swedish fönster, French fenêtre (of course, a bunch of French also made its way into Danish and Norwegian as well. And the pronunciation is not always obvious either with French loanwords. I shocked my partner once while waiting at Postnord by saying out loud “Säger man kön (hard k) eller kön (soft k)?”)
- Tor3 5y ago
  Nitpick - some of the variations between Swedish and Norwegian is because Swedish and Norwegian ended up with different words from Middle Low German, i.e. the differences stem back from the Hansa period, and not as late as the French relations of the 1700s. So, "fönster", for example, didn't get picked from French, it's from Middle Low German "vinster" (which became "finster, fynster" and then "fönster" in Swedish). In this case the Middle Low German word replaced the older Swedish word (which did have the same origin as the current Danish and Norwegian words for "window"), but that replacement didn't happen in Norwegian/Danish (in other cases one or both did pick up a word from Middle Low German, but it may have been a different word because the traders in Bergen weren't the same ones which operated in Sweden).
  - robin_reala 5y ago
    I love a nitpick, thanks for the impromptu history lesson. I really need to read up more on the Hansa period.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > And the pronunciation is not always obvious either with French loanwords. Or the spelling. I mean, I know how the letters are pronounced, so I can see that fåtölj is actually a good transcription, but visually it bears no resemblance whatsoever with fauteuil. I have found that French words that ended up in English were actually quite difficult to recognise in a conversation, even though they are written exactly as in French most of the time. I guess it’s related to the great vowel shift (but not only, even consonants are weird), but English really is weird compared to a lot of continental European languages. For example, a /r/ sounds like a /r/ in anything from Spanish to Finnish. Granted, there are differences in prononciation, but it is still not distorted beyond recognition. Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    > Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/. Compare English "iron" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-iron.ogg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-iron.ogg German "eiern" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-eiern.ogg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-eiern.ogg French "ailler" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:LL-Q150_(fra)-Lepticed7-ailler.wav https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:LL-Q150_(fra)-Lepticed7-... None of the <r>s is anything like [r].
    - saghm 5y ago
      Maybe I just pronounce it weird, but I tend to pronounce "iron" the same way as the phrase "I earn", just with less space between them. Obviously the "r" is closer to the "n" in my pronunciation, but it feels like a stretch to say that it's the "r" with the weird pronunciation. If anything, the vowels are what seem weird to me; the "i" is long, which does not seem obvious it would be the case from the spelling alone, and the "o" is just completely silent, which is the only case of that in English I can think of off the top of my head (although I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few others).
      - yorwba 5y ago
        "iron" probably underwent a process called r-metathesis after the spelling was standardized (or the spelling was based on a different dialect). If the spelling had been based on the later version, it would've been "iorn". I was going to give a lengthy explanation, but someone on StackExchange already did: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/264662 https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/264662