Severine wrote:I'm not even sure I want to wade into this discussion about French transparency, but I can't help myself, so I will share two main thoughts and then nip out the back while nobody's looking.
1. Between French and English, I would say that there is a somewhat low vocabulary transparency for core words of extremely high frequency (pronouns and prepositions are good examples, as Le Baron pointed out) but an impressively high transparency with more advanced words of lower frequency. Le Baron presents this as undermining the argument for transparency, but I disagree. This arragement is, in my view, much easier for learners than the inverse (lots of cognates for common basic words, fewer cognates for advanced words).
If you're trying at all, you're going to learn he, she, they, for, with, to be, to have, to do, etc. no matter what, because you'll see them so often. You don't really need a discount with those words, so the fact that they're not similar, I would argue, doesn't matter.
The cognate discount is much more useful for rarer words, because once you know basic vocabulary and some grammar, those cognates provide enormous momentum and spare you a lot of work. Take a random headline I just grabbed off of LeMonde: Les écrans à l'école ou le règne des injonctions contradictoires. I consider 'school' and 'screen' pretty basic vocabulary, whereas 'contradictory', 'reign', and 'injunction' are not. However, all three of the latter are cognates, so a well-educated beginner anglophone French student should have no trouble with that sentence (and vice versa).
2. It's true that the grammar structure of French is very different, but much less so for English speakers with an advanced education and familiarity with a more old-fashioned, formal manner of speaking and writing.
A phrase structure like, "La situation dont nous parlons" is much less intimidating for someone who has read and perhaps even used structures like "the situation of which we are speaking." Do people speak like that today? Not many. But if you've read classic English literature at all, you've seen it. You don't need to speak that way yourself to recognize the structure as something you understand and have it click.
Same thing for pronouns like auquel, lequel, etc. If you know when to use 'who' and when to use 'whom', you won't have trouble conceptually with qui and que. And for those who have a solid mastery of English grammar, the concept of the pronouns y and en replacing structures beginning with à and de is hardly mystifying. If your teachers ever explained direct and indirect objects, it's not hard to understand when to use le/la vs. lui, and what they mean. I could go on. As it so often does, education pays off.
Similarly, the more expansive and advanced your English/French vocabulary, the easier you'll find advanced vocab in the other language, because the Latin-derived words that tend to dominate professional and academic speech provide a huge amount of overlap.
I would like to revisit ever so briefly this idea of language «transparency» due to the presence of cognates. For me, transparent has always meant «which one can see through». I’ve never seen the concept of transparency used in linguistics to somehow refer to easy to recognize or understand.
For example, English and French vocabulary share around 60% of cognates, so that should make French easy for an educated speaker of English. Such a person could supposedly easily get the gist of an article from a newspaper like Le monde or Le devoir without having studied French at all.
Similarly, since English is a so-called Germanic language, a speaker of English could in theory get a gist of an article from Der Spiegel just by looking at it. A French-speaker could do the same with the Corriere della Sera in Italian. And so on.
However the question here is what exactly is understood or what does a gist mean. Here us a title from today’s Le monde :
Agriculture : après la flambée de colère, Emmanuel Macron cherche une sortie de crise durable. We have the cognates
agriculture, cherche, sortie, crise, durable. What exactly would an English-speaker who has never studied French understand ?
This whole debate reminds me of the discussion about lexical coverage necessary to understand a text. If I recall properly, Paul Nation speaks of 98% coverage for optimal comprehension.
When it comes to actually speaking and writing the target language, I wonder how far the transparency of cognates gets us. How is pronunciation helped by the presence of many cognates ?
In a writing test situation, you will be often given a task to accomplish. For example, write a two paragraph e-mail letter to remind a customer that a payment will be automatically deducted from their bank account in the coming days and that they should make sure that there is enough money in the account. Pretty simple stuff. Can our same native speaker of English do this in French ?
How easily could a native French speaker who has never studied Spanish do this is Spanish given that Spanish and French have so much in common ?
This so-called transparency supposedly makes related languages very easy to learn. There is undoubtedly some truth in this. It makes sense that the more features two languages have in common, the easier it is to learn one from the other.
That said, easier does not mean easy. The complexities and subtleties of mastering a foreign language and then keeping the languages separate from others are such that learning a language, even a related one, requires a lot of work.
Edit on March 29, 2024: minor spelling mistakes
And it was a joke in a bilingual household where everyone has a comprehension well above A2 in their weaker language, so everyone is assumed to know prepositions, basic verbs, etc. And the joke mentioned "any big ... word." Which in this case, is an extremely informal way to refer to "mostly Latin-derived vocabulary." And yeah, there are faux amis and so on, but there aren't too many that affect comprehension too badly, not compared to all the words that have fairly close meanings.