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northernlights@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Fondots@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I feel like that kind of illustrates the point though

  There’s a lot of precise grammar rules because the language is a little bit of a clusterfuck (I say that with love, I like the French language and speak a bit myself.) If you were to create a language from scratch, you’d probably choose to make one with much simpler grammar.

  Like most languages, French evolved organically out of other languages. There wasn’t really a point in time where someone said “hey I made a new language, here are the rules, I call it ‘French.’” Instead, for centuries people just kind of picked and chose what parts of Latin, Gaulish, Frankish, etc. that they liked and didn’t like, mashed them together in whatever way felt “right” and eventually French happened.

  Then when some eggheads decided to write down the rules, it was more of a “Ok, here’s all of the weird bullshit most of you are already doing, and there’s kind of a lot of it. It sounds very pretty, but let’s just all agree that thats enough and this is how our language works. Try not to add any more weirdness” (and they’ve been remarkably good at sticking to that, l’Académie Française doesn’t fuck around, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your views)

  You got a lot of words with letters that don’t make sounds or make very different sounds that you might think if you weren’t already familiar with the language’s eccentricities, you got some very common verbs that conjugate in weird ways, you sometimes mash words together with an apostrophe basically because it sounds nice, the Académie Française, when confronted with a new thing, sometimes decides that the terms that most of the rest of the world have decided on for that thing just aren’t “French enough” and goes and makes up a new word for it, etc.

  And again, I like French, I’m not shitting on it, English isn’t any better and the rules are certainly less formalized

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  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Exactly.

    I’d say that’s most languages in a nutshell - they start wherever, then grow organically based on a million reasons.

    And the written form is nothing more than an attempt to capture how it sounds, to codify how it’s currently used, not to be prescriptive.

    John McWhorter exains this really well in “Great Languages of the World” - he’s pretty light-hearted and amused by things like how convoluted and inconsistent English is, while also delving into how different languages likely came to be the way they are.

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