I have never tried, though I have worked with Vietnamese people who spoke pretty good French. I wonder if it has similarities; what I can tell you is that when I was in Hanoi and my colleagues were speaking in Vietnamese I understood nuffin' lolol
INFJ Forum
Ren
Ren
But perhaps there are structural similarities, I don't know
mintoots
Lolol i wondered because I think I read somewhere that a French monk systematized the language but perhaps...
mintoots
He was probably noting down the structure of the language rather than embedding any French grammar into it.
java
I'd be surprised if it had any grammatical similarity. Maybe loan words.
mintoots
You're probably right. I guess I'm drawing a parallel because Filipino has some similarities with Spanish so I wondered if it were the same with Vietnamese and French
java
"French’s impact on Modern Vietnamese is not as great as that of Chinese. [...] elements of French vocabulary became part of the language. Again, Vietnamese largely managed to adopt and “Vietnamise” words from French rather than change towards being more like it."
java
If Vietnamese was already unified and dominant, then it's hard to change its core structure, but the Philippines had hundreds of languages before Spain arrived, right? Is Filipino some kind of hybrid, almost conlang, between Spanish and those languages?
mintoots
Yes that does make sense. Chines influence over Vietnam came even in the pre-colonial era and should be more extant. Even the Chinese influence of Buddhism thrives over Christianity.
mintoots
Filipino is not a hybrid at all. It is predominantly Tagalog, which was the language of one of the biggest pre colonial polities that in turn became the seats of govt for colonizers
mintoots
Although there are parallels to the structures and some languages are closer in evolution , the accents and the intonations still change, hence multiple dialects among languages too.
mintoots
Perhaps the different languages have trained the Filipino brain to be multilingual, hence the relative ease in accepting both Spanish and English. Chavacano in the South is a Spanish-Bisaya Hybrid of languages.
mintoots
Davao Conyo, a new emerging language is also a hybrid of Hiligaynon, Tagalog, Bisaya, and English. It's quite intriguing. The terminologies are constantly changing too. Within a year multiple expressions are born in the colloquial.