19/09/2021
History of French and other languages,
used by French subjects
French is spoken throughout France, although other languages and dialects are also represented in parts of the country, including Basque, Alsatian, Corsican, Breton, Provencal, Catalan, and Flemish.
Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian) are a group of related dialects formed from Latin, which belongs to the Italian branch of the Indo-European language family.
French is spoken by about 98 million people, mainly in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and some African countries. Some Romance languages are of regional rather than national importance. Such adverbs include the Provencal language, which is widespread in the south of France and has 12 million native speakers. In the past, more unified as a literary language, Provençal now has several local dialects.
As evidenced by ancient manuscripts left behind by Roman poets and others of that era, in Republican Rome, the oral form of the language of the lower strata of society underwent changes in pronunciation and grammar so much that it was very different from the written version and from the speech of the privileged classes. During the period of Roman expansion, it was this version of Latin, used by the so-called plebeians, that was spread by soldiers, merchants and settlers in new territories remote from Rome.
However, not all of Europe was influenced by the Romance at the same time. Sicily and Sardinia were colonized in 238 BC, while Dacia - modern Romania - did not come under Roman rule until AD 100. In the new provinces of the Roman Empire, the so-called "vernacular Latin" (Vulgar Latin) underwent further changes under the influence of the local population, who introduced their speech techniques and pronunciation.
The fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD separated Rome from the conquered territories, and the distant provinces became even more different from each other, developing their own version of oral Latin. In every region of the former Latin world, the formerly unifying function of the Romance languages has turned into a discordant one.
French and Provencal
Gallo-Roman France was divided into northern and southern parts, accompanied by the invasion of the German-speaking Franks - hence the name "France". Here, the process of dialectization continued into the Middle Ages, resulting in a variety of speech forms, such as Walloon, South French, Provencal languages. The dialect spoken by the inhabitants of Paris acquired the status of national, due to the political significance of the capital, and today it serves as an example of the French language.
Case system
In widely used Romance languages, there has been a tendency to simplify the Latin case system by eliminating differences in the endings of words. For example, the Latin word "porta" (door) had three singular forms: in the nominative, vocative and instrumental cases - porta; in the accusative - portam; and in genitive and dative, portae. Modern Romance languages use only one singular form: French - porte, Italian and Portuguese - porta, Spanish - puerta. Other differences between the Romance languages and Latin are the absence of a neuter, the appearance of a definite article, more frequent use of prepositions, direct word order, and the formation of auxiliary verbs to express temporal characteristics.
Verb forms
In French, the verb forms make it mandatory to use personal pronouns. For comparison: French "je chante" (I sing) and Italian "canto". However, in general, the Latin verb forms remained unchanged.
Phonology notes the disappearance of differences between Latin short and long vowels, the voicing of intervocal voiceless consonants and, in some languages, the disappearance of the final -s in syllables and words. In languages that were particularly prone to the use of stressed sounds (such as Gallo-Romance and Old French), many unstressed vowels disappeared or decreased, and in almost all Romance languages, some stressed vowels were converted to diphthongs. Only in French and Portuguese did the vowel sounds before the nasal consonant undergo nasalization (become nasal). For comparison: French "main" (hand), Portuguese "mao" and Spanish and Italian "mano".
Basque
Basque (Basque or Euskara) is a language spoken by one million people in northern Spain and southwestern France. Although there have been attempts to correlate it with the ancient Iberians, the Hamito-Semitic language group, and the Caucasians, its true origin has remained a mystery.
Basque is similar in sound to Spanish, with its five clear vowels and specific features such as grassed r and palatal n and l. Despite the
