can someone answer me a question?

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I don't speak language other than English well. I used to know a quite a bit of Spanish about 20 years ago.

Re: Romance languages: My understanding of Romance languages is that they have roots in Latin. But French is considered a Romance language, and I don't see the link.

Uh, what don't you see? French is very close to Latin in some aspects. Whenever I read a motto in Latin, I can usually figure it out, just having studied French.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages

The pronunciation seems closer to English. I can see similarities with Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese - but French seems very different.

I can assure you (no, I'm not a native French speaker, but I did study it for 8 years) that French pronunciation is so much more intense and complicated than English. In my opinion.

I see what you're saying, though, Spanish and Italian are more "flow-y" and less clipped like English. But Portuguese, good lord, that's some difficult stuff to hear right there. It's fascinating to me to listen to Portuguese, it's almost like a little Spanish, a little Italian, and then a whole lotta something else.

I was thinking of the way the vowels are pronounced.

Huh?

First, no one today actually knows how Latin was pronounced--we just have academic approximations and some Latin scholars with very high opinions of themselves. Any Latin used in the Catholic Church has been so Italianized in its pronunciation that there's no way of knowing if the Church pronounces is anything like how the Romans spoke it, or if it sounds more like the later Italian ethnic languages that killed off Latin on the Italian pennisula. So there's no way of knowing if any of the modern romance languages sound anything like how Latin was spoken. Just because Spanish, Italian and Portuguese today sound more similar to each other than to French means nothing in regards to their relationships with Latin.

Second, every languages changes over time. None of the romance languages sound like they did even a couple centuries ago. French perhaps has changed the most because there were mandated changes to how it was pronounced. The French my French ancestor spoke when he came over to fight with Lafayette in 1777 would have sounded quite different from French today.

Third, English has been heavily influenced by both Latin and French. First the Romans came to take the gold in England's and Wales' hills, stayed awhile and then left behind lots of Latin words for the then Old English speakers. Then for a few centuries after the Norman Conquest in the 11th century, English was a minority language on the British Isles, because French was spoken by the royalty and aristocracy and Latin by the clergy and academics. The only people who spoke English were peasants and urban riff-raff, like street vendors and prostitutes. In fact, English nearly died out. This is why we have so little literature and writing in English from this time--no one wrote in English, except for a very few, like Chaucer. But what this did to English was change it dramatically, giving us what we now know as modern English--the English Shakespeare and everyone from his time and after has spoken. The perhaps the biggest difference between Middle English and modern English is the Norman-French influence. While English still remains a Germanic language in rudimentary vocabulary, grammar and syntax, it acquired a vast amount of words and some grammar from Norman-French, and we have more or less kept the Norman-French pronunciation of those acquired words, just with Anglicized spellings--many words that are in common use today, like cabbage, war, mansion, affair, scripture, language, royal, influence, change, money, choice, regard, and thousands of others are of Norman-French origins (origins is another one). So does French sound more like English? No, English sounds more like French. You've got it backwards. Without the French influence, today's English would probably sound more like modern Dutch or Danish.

Lastly, French is indisputably a romance language based in Latin. A Gaulish dialect of Latin was spoken throughout the region that is now France, from the time Julius Caesar conquered the Gauls in the 1st century BCE. Then Gaulish Latin was infleunced by various Germanic tribes that moved into France, who then picked up Gaulish Latin but left their own unique influences eventually giving us what we now call "Old French," sometime before the 9th century CE. But regardless of what other influences and changes have come about, French evoled out of Gaulish latin, and retains those Latin roots to this day.

Just a small sample of French's Latin roots: The verb for "to be" conjugated in present tense, compared to Spanish, English and German:

Latin: esse

sum
es
est
sumus
estis
sunt

French: être

suis
es
est
sommes
êtes
sont

Spanish: ser

soy
eres
es
somos
sois
son

English: to be

am
are
is
are
are
are

German: sein

bin
bist
ist
sind
seid
sind

I think Portuguese sounds like Russian.

To me, french language is written and spoken in a way that does remember something between italian and english. In fact even if i don't speak french, i can understand it. Not very well, but i understand.

Having learned both French and English as foreign languages I would say english is harder to pronounce even though in many ways its closer to German, my native language.

for pronouncing French there are rules. After a while when yu see an unknown french word you can pronounce it. In english you can never know. Many specialized words I learned online so I never heard them spoken. When I hear them for the first time orally I am usually surprised at what they sound like. And then the T-H the this that...