French/Spanish
Hey, last week I was in Canada and I heard a lot of French words, as Canada is a France-founded country. However, I heard a lot of Spanish words intermingled with the French words, but the French spoke the words differently and with separate accents. What is the deal with that?
5 Answers
I remember I started to learn Spanish when I already knew some French ( my native language is English) Pretty soon I was noticing 'French' words used in Spanish. Of course as the Spanish pronounce every syllable the words were not said the same eg dormir and bien.
In addition just when you thought you could make a French word sound Spanish and increase your vocabulary, you pick one with a different root. Have you seen the old comedy series from the UK Fawlty Towers? A know all, but useless owner has employed a waiter from Barcelona (though the actor had been born in Germany) He tries to speak the odd word of Spanish to him. He wanted to talk about the butter on a plate he had and said 'burro' which is a good guess the French word being buerre but Manuel is very confused because that is Spanish for donkey where Spanish is mantequilla.
English is a mix of romance words from Latin and northern European words. When Britain was invaded the French brought with them the words used in the law and words for cooked items - cooked lamb was Mouton ( mutton) cooked cow was boeuf ( beef) etc
Spain is enriched by words of Arabic origin having a long history of the Moors.
Probably the words you heard were words with a Latin root - I am not going to argue whether they were first spoken in Spain or France. Go to Italy and you will find even more words.
Enjoy the language.
Of course the complete expert is Daniela who can fill in any gaps I have left or Moe
My native language is Spanish but I also speak French. When I first started studying it, it was really easy to understand the words. A lot of them are just like Spanish but with a french accent. I only had problems with orthography because of double letters but English helped a lot on it.
There are many French words that end in -tion and this ending in French is nasal but could sound like the Spanish ending -ción because French words are always stressed on the last full syllable.
Some examples of words that would sound alike (the first word is Spanish, the second French):
conversación / conversation
iniciación / initiation
imitación / imitation
Spanish, French, and Italian are all Latin based languages. There are many cognates (words that are exactly the same or similar) shared by all three. There are more cognates between French and Italian, but Italian is pronounced more like Spanish.
If you were to study French and/or Italian at school, you would quickly learn how similar they are, yet how different they sound.
I can't really answer this question without there being some examples. Do you perhaps remember some of the words they said?
French, like Spanish, is part of the Romance language family. There might be some words that sound very familiar due to Latin roots.
On the other hand, in the course of language evolution, words from other languages are borrowed. For example, in English we have words like "bouquet" and "rendezvous" which are words that are blatantly French just pronounced a little differently. What you heard is probably this phenomenon.
However, that may still not be the case. Again, I can't definitively answer the question without there being some examples of the words you heard. I hope you enjoyed Canada!
