Reflect on the history of your target language. To what language family does it belong? What sounds, words, and structures exemplify periods of contact with other cultures? How do these considerations enhance your understanding of the target language and culture in terms of their associated historical origin, development, and contemporary realization? and pragmatic questions of usage? How do languages change over time? How do linguists track, predict, and extrapolate these changes?
French is a Romance language that belongs to the Indo-European family. French phonology is characterized by great changes in the sounds of words as compared with their Latin parent forms. It can be recognized in the ways that it very simply derived from Latin. The plural, similarly to spanish adds s, es to make nouns plural. The masculinity and femininity are distinguished by the accompanying article or adjective. The language also shares the forms of verbs with the related romance languages--> preterite, imperative, imperfect, present, future, and conditional. The relationship that the language has to the dialects is very similar to italian where there is high differentiation based on geographic boundaries. I think that thinking about french as a system in relation to the other romance languages that I have been exposed to helps me to understand how the grammar systems are similar and or different. I think that having an understanding of how the language was developed helps to see the the language itself as building blocks. Seeing the development of the language I think helps you build the language for yourself in your head. I also have looked into the changes of the language over time and it is interesting to see the power of the youth and of popular media to change the rhetoric and vocabulary of colloquial french. Especially looking at the parisian dialect, there are words and phrases that aren't solely French, but rather have developed from french into something entirely different. Linguists take note of the changes in phonetics, the changes in syntax, borrowing from other languages etc. in order to map historical progression, and then be able to lineate these changes to social, cultural, environmental, economical trends of the time period.
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