I just started to learn French, and, with my past with latin, was wondering if there was a book or website that had french derivatives from latin to help me remember vocabulary. Thanks
I think the best way to find the Latin cognates is getting a native French dictionary that has an etymology section. I recommend robert or larousse. Many are quite easy to recognize and the ones that aren’t, are not really helpful in memorizing anyways. An example is seau (bucket) >Lat. situlus
I agree that a knowledge of Latin would be an enormous help in acquiring any other Romance language, up to and including Romanian, but the phonetic simplification of French (and Provençal) has been so drastic, I wonder if knowing the etymology might do more harm than good?
hi, knowing latin can help your french vocab a little bit. the rules for latin → french are set out in the grevisse and also in eg bourciez 1967 which is the book i use. the general rule is that vowels in the latin word’s accented syll and (if different) the word-initial syllable tend to persist in french (sometimes with a change of sound), whereas vowels in other syllables are weaker and (eg in the latin unaccented penultimate) tend to disappear, or in other unaccented syllables tend to be retained only if the vowel is “a” (in which case it transforms into “e”).
e.g. vendere → vendre (collapsing penultimate), tabula → table and femina → femme (collapsing penultimate, transformation of final “a” into “e”), ornamentu → ornement) (transformation of pre-accent “a” into “e” and loss of final vowel which is not an “a”), &c.
nb french nouns deriving from latin come from the acc. in vulgar latin (loss of final m), so eg portam → porta (vulgar) → porte (fr).
i don’t know if there are any books in english which give all the rules for this, but for a really good general read on the influences (latin and non-latin) on french, see the first half of “french inside out” by henriette walter, cheers, chad.
To add to 1%homeless’s suggestion, a very good online dictionary can be found at http://atilf.atilf.fr/ that has etymological information going back to Latin. And looking up words should give you a feel for what kind of changes occur.
But I do agree that French has undergone the most phonetic change from all the (major) Romance languages so it’s probably easier to go from Latin to French, then to trace a French word back to its Latin source. I’m thinking of things like roi < regem, voir < videre, where there doesn’t seem (to me) to be any indication of the original consonant (the oi on the other hand is a sign of a Latin long e).
Thanks for all the suggestions.