Ayres-Bennett Wendy - History of the French Language Through Texts

A History of the French Language through Texts

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A History of the French Language through Texts

Wendy Ayres-Bennett

First published 1996

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

1996 Wendy Ayres-Bennett

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would be glad to hear from any who have not been traced.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN 0415099994 (hb)

ISBN 0415100003 (pb)

Symbols

> : becomes

< : comes from

* : placed before a word indicates that the form is unattested; this may be a form posited on the basis of evidence such as comparative data from other Romance languages.

Figures

From P. Rickard, A History of the French Language (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 40.

From L. Theis, 843: La Premire France, LHistoire, Jan 1987, vol. 96, p. 89.

Bibliothque nationale, lat. 9768, fol. 13r, col. 2.

From A. Tabachovitz, tude sur la langue de la version franaise des Serments de Strasbourg (Uppsala, Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri-A.-B., 1932), p. 1.

From A. Ewert, The Strasbourg Oaths, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1935, pp. 2223.

Glasgow University Library, Hunter 252, fol. 175r.

From R. Olivtan, La Bible. Qui est toute la Saincte escripture. En laquelle sont contenus/ le Vieil Testament & le Nouueau/translatez en Francoys (Neuchtel, P. de Wingle, 1535).

From L. Meigret, Le Trtt de la grammre franoze (Paris, C. Wechel, 1550), fol. 6v

Acknowledgements

Three people Rebecca Posner, Glanville Price and Peter Rickard deserve my heartfelt thanks both for the constant support and encouragement they have offered me over the years and for undertaking the onerous task of reading the complete manuscript of this work and offering detailed comments on it. Others have generously helped with individual commentaries, and especially Clive Sneddon (text 8), Tony Hunt (text 10), Frank Lestringant (text 26), John N. Green (text 36) and Francis Nolan (text 44); mention should also be made of colleagues in the French Department, Cambridge, and in particular, Peter Bayley and Sarah Kay. I would also like to thank Simon Bell and his team at Routledge and the staff at the Cambridge University Library for their practical assistance, and my sons Matthew and Luke Bennett for their tolerance and good humour. Finally, my greatest debt goes to my husband, Andrew Bennett, whose roles in the completion of this project are far too numerous to mention, and to whom this book is dedicated.

Introduction

Texts and Why We Should Study them

What is the point of a history of French through texts? There are, after all, a number of good readable general histories of the language available which make relatively little use of texts or relegate them to an appendix. Peter Rickards A History of the French Language (1974, 21989) provides an excellent introduction in English for students to the subject, and there is also an impressive selection of one-volume surveys in French, including those by Picoche and Marchello-Nizia (1989), Cohen (1947, 41973), or Wartburg (1934, 101971), all of which have their merits. Is not philology, the study of texts, somewhat out of date?

But what if we want to adopt a less passive approach and try to discover for ourselves how the French language has evolved? How can we find out about the history of any language? It is, of course, impossible for us, except in respect of the recent past, to turn to recordings or interrogate native speaker informants about their usage, as would a linguist describing and analysing the contemporary French system. Rather, the historian is dependent on textual material, on written sources, with all the difficulties that we shall see this implies. These texts must provide us with information about the linguistic usage of earlier ages; subsequent comparison of the usage in texts of different periods may then provide clues as to how the language has evolved.

In this volume, therefore, texts are central. Whereas in the past collections of texts have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the Old and Middle French periods (see, for example, Aspland (1979) or Studer and Waters (1924)), and especially the earliest extant monuments of the French language, here texts dating from the earliest examples in the ninth century up to the late twentieth century have been included, so that the evolution of French up to the present day can be traced. For each period a range of texts is given, including a number of longer core or key texts. The texts are accompanied by detailed linguistic commentaries and not merely notes on difficult or unusual usages or textual variants; this includes detailed descriptions of the sound system (phonology), spelling (orthography), forms or internal structure of words (morphology), construction and word order (syntax), vocabulary (lexis), meanings (semantics) and discourse type of the key texts; briefer, more specific, comments about interesting features of the other texts are given.

The collection thus allows the history of the French language to be viewed both synchronically and diachronically. These concepts are perhaps best understood through Saussures well-known analogy of a chess-board. One can either stop a game of chess at any moment in the game and describe the position and the relationship of the pieces to each other in terms of the structure of the game: such would be a synchronic description. Alternatively one could trace the moves, or history of a particular piece, say a knight, throughout a game: this would give a historical or diachronic description of that piece. In providing synchronic analyses of French at different points in its history, the danger is avoided of viewing Old French, for instance, as merely a stepping stone in the history from Vulgar Latin to Modern French. Thus, from a historical point of view it may be interesting to know that negative pas and the noun le pas (step) derive from the same Latin term, passum. For a synchronic description of Modern French, however, this is less relevant, since for most speakers they are now discrete items.

Texts of Different Discourse Types

Two basic characteristics are shared by most standard, traditional accounts of the history of French. First, as the very name, the history of the French language, implies, traditional surveys have tended to see the language as a monolithic structure and ignore or marginalize variation. Many, for instance, chart the evolution of French in terms of the emergence of a unified standard language, itself characterized by the suppression or elimination of dialectal variation. Typical of this approach is the statement by Picoche and Marchello-Nizia (1989: 3) in the introduction to their history of French: Ce livre a lambition dtre une histoire de ce