LES SONNETS Les cantilènes et la mort. (French Edition)

They had no effective authority in remote regions such as Brittany, Gascony, Toulouse, or Aquitaine. They enjoyed however the support of one extremely powerful institution, the only stable one in France—the Church. The Church had elected Hugh Capet and his successors, and, having the strength of its convictions, maintained them in power and even protected them from their more powerful and unruly vassals. They would not have been able to administer justice outside their own lands—obviously a serious handicap—if the Church had not enabled them to do so.

King and clergy supported each other mutually and gained considerably in strength and prestige. Through undertaking the protection of the oppressed, the king gained the reputation of a righter of wrongs who could be appealed to as to a higher court of justice. Indeed, Saint-Denis soon became the spiritual centre of the kingdom. Even so, by the end of the eleventh century, France was far from being united under direct rule from Paris. All that can be said is that by this time Paris was definitely the capital. Conditions were at least somewhat more stable than they had been, and learning began to flourish in the great monasteries and in such cities as Chartres, Rheims and Orleans.

The careful cultivation of Latin letters was firmly established well before the twelfth century. Finer churches were built, of stone instead of timber. Trade and travel increased. The Normans, in particular, opened up new possibilities outside France, in England — , in the south of Italy, in Sicily, and even in the Levant. There was a vigorous western reaction to the capture of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks: Now it is time to give some attention to those few vernacular texts which have survived from the time of the Strasbourg Oaths to the end of the eleventh century. It is possible that others were written but did not survive: In the context of the other vernacular texts, the Oaths, are exceptional in that they are secular, and in prose.

The others are religious in inspiration and, with one minor exception, in verse. Like the Strasbourg Oaths, however, they are closely associated with Latin, not only in the readiness with which they reproduce Latin words virtually unchanged, but also physically, in that they tend to occur in manuscripts which also contain Latin texts. We are reminded that French was considered a suitable written medium only for works of popular edification and instruction: Apart from the Strasbourg Oaths, the only other text to survive from the ninth century is the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, a poem of 29 lines relating the martyrdom of a fourth-century saint.

It was composed c in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, to the north of Valenciennes. It is sandwiched between a Latin poem on the same The language of the earliest French texts 27 subject and a German one see above, p. Though short, the French Sequence is linguistically more illuminating than the Oaths. It has greater syntactical variety, and though some words still appear in a completely Latin form e. The conditional sostendreiet and the preterite or pluperfect voldret, voldrent, on the other hand, with their glide-consonant [d], are not.

Three texts are available from the tenth century.

It consists of notes, partly in Latin and partly in French, of a sermon based on Jonah i and iv. It provides some scraps of evidence about the verbal system: Apart from that, it is chiefly important for extremely rare verbs, e. Once again we find pluperfect forms used with the function of preterites; Passion: E neporuec mes pedre me desidret, si fait ma medre plus que femme qui vivet, avuec ma spouse que jo lour ai guerpide. If now my kinsfolk in this land recognise me, they will seize me, by prayer or by force: And yet my father misses me, so does my mother, more than any woman alive, together with my wife whom I left with them.

Now I shall not fail to place myself in their keeping. They will not recognise me, it is so long since they saw me! Ben devuns ci estre pur nostre rei: Pur sun seignor deit hom susfrir destreiz E endurer e granz chalz e granz freiz, Si. Subject pronouns are omitted. Note the borderline use of the indefinite hom, as well as its etymological spelling. Both the definite and the partitive articles are used, but it will be noticed that they can also be omitted, particularly before plural substantives.

Some other points may be noted. For practical purposes, sire The language of the earliest French texts 33 from Latin. Latin letters continue to loom large as inspiration and as background, and Latin continues to have a considerable influence on the vocabulary, though less and less on the spelling. Syntactically, however, the texts go their own way. A by no means uncommon feature of all these early texts is the adaptation of learned Latin words to the minimal requirements of the vernacular, e.

The fact that the Oaths were sworn in Strasbourg is, of course, immaterial. Strasbourg lay fairly and squarely in a German-speaking area. The language of the earliest French texts 35 away from the north-east. The one is more archaic than the other, and there are Norman features in both, but neither is consistently written in a Norman dialect. In so far as the language is not Norman, and in so far as the language of the earlier text is not Picard-Walloon, what are we to call it? What do the complex linguistic facts suggest?

It is not too soon to ask these questions, but a little premature to attempt an answer to them until we have seen more evidence, of a kind to be found in the next chapter. In the meantime, we may also note the clear emergence, in the south, of Occitan texts which pose the same sort of problem for the south as the texts we have just been considering pose for the north— the problem of variety versus common features.

The earliest Occitan texts at least deserve a brief mention here: Occitan, both as a spoken and as a written language, was a potential rival to French. On the other hand, French had by this time survived the demise of two other rivals, German, which had virtually ceased to be spoken on French territory by the end of the tenth century Hugh Capet was the first French king who could not speak it , and Norse, which had ceased to be spoken in Normandy by the early eleventh century.

In the extreme north-west, west of a line running roughly from Mont-Saint-Michel to the mouth of the Loire, Breton was universal in the tenth century. In that same century, however, the Breton kingdom fell and thereafter the region was to be subjected to a strong Norman and Anglo-Norman i. Within two hundred years, the border between French and Breton had been pushed appreciably further west see map, p. The principal additions to the French vocabulary during the period — derived from Latin, whether they were learned words minimally adapted to French while remaining the same part of speech, or new formations from Latin roots, created by affixation.

Frankish words already in the language, like Latin ones, were liable to give rise to new derivatives, and there were also some late borrowings from Frankish. The Norse element in French has not yet been dealt with: The prominence given here to such exotic words must not blind us to the fact that the most obvious and prolific source for neologism in the eleventh century, and indeed at all times in the history of the French language, was Latin. Though there had been loss of many classical words, the vocabulary of Late Latin had widened considerably in response to new contacts and new needs, and it already included, for example, a great many Greek words over and above those particularly associated with the Church, as well as a host of words associated with the feudal organisation of society.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the widespread acceptance of the vernacular as a literary medium, side by side with Latin. From the beginning of the thirteenth century, we also find the vernacular being used to some extent in local documents in Picardy. Indeed, from the year onwards, French is used as well as Latin even in documents emanating from the royal chancellery in Paris.

The literature of the period is extraordinarily rich: The Song of Roland was followed by a host of other epics, feudal or politico-religious in theme, and having the same formal pattern as that early masterpiece, though as a general rule far longer and less well constructed. A new verse form, the octosyllabic rhyming couplet, arose early in the twelfth century and was used above all for what were known as romans, a word which at first suggested no more than a verse text written in the vernacular, and not necessarily—or at all—a work of fiction.

The same verse form was also used for didactic and moralising works, for shorter 1. Exceptionally, this particular roman is in syllable lines. As for prose, there is little of it before the end of the twelfth century, after which it comes to be used side by side with verse for romances inheriting the name romans , for chronicles, and for some types of didactic literature.

In the thirteenth century, though the first rapture and freshness are lost and vernacular literature becomes less original, more imitative and derivative, it still bears witness to the ever higher regard in which French was being held as a serious medium of expression. There were many reasons why the language of this region should have gained in prestige.

Normandy, Picardy, Wallonia, Champagne, Lorraine, Anjou, Maine and Touraine, and Anglo-Norman England too, all had their own dialect, and no doubt local sub-dialects too; but by the end of the eleventh century, these spoken dialects had not yet diverged as much as they were to do later, and they shared a great deal of common ground. Incidentally Poitou, earlier strongly under Occitan influence, was by now just as strongly under the influence of northern French.

Unlike their Carolingian predecessors, the Capetian kings were firmly established in a fixed capital, and that capital was Paris. Not only was the royal Court there, the law-courts were there also, and so were those schools which were soon to constitute themselves into a university.

Saint-Denis, close by, was the spiritual centre of the kingdom. Geographically and linguistically, Paris occupied a central position with regard to northern France and AngloNorman England: There were, then, good a priori reasons why the language of Paris and the surrounding region should have enjoyed prestige and encouraged imitation. Both terms are somewhat vague. Roman z could mean any Romance vernacular, and therefore did not exclude Occitan. In explaining the meaning of an unfamiliar or exotic word, an author might say: He had just told his readers that he wrote the poem in Canterbury, and he may have wished to reassure them that he was for all that no Anglo-Norman—a fact of which the reader has already had more than lines to assure himself.

Either the narrower or the wider sense of France would, of course, have made his point in that case, and it is really only the evidence of other texts which entitles us to take it in the narrower sense. Pontoise, only twenty-six kilometres north-west of Paris, lies fairly and squarely in the domain of Francien. In the thirteenth century, further testimonies reinforce the view that the language of Paris constituted a desirable standard, at least in speech. Philippe de Beaumanoir, a Picard poet, says of the Frenchspeaking English heroine of his romance Jehan et Blonde c It seems clear that in the twelfth and even more in the thirteenth century, the poets who speak of Paris, of Saint-Denis and of Pontoise as representing a linguistic ideal have the spoken language in mind.

How far is this reflected in the written usage of the day? The texts must be approached with caution. Many, in fact most, twelfth-century texts survive in copies, or copies of copies, made fifty, or eighty, or even a hundred years after the original date of composition. A scribe might transfer to the text he was copying some features of his own dialect, or the dialect of the person dictating to him. Yet, when due allowance has been made for this factor, and when one examines a text known to have been composed in, say, Bayeux on the one hand, and Troyes or Artois on the other, one is far more struck by the resemblances than by the points of divergence.

And how is one to explain that fundamental inconsistency which characterises O. There is really no such thing as an O. What we find instead is a collection of apparently Old French: It must be said at once that different ways of writing the same word are incompatible only if one associates them too closely with regional pronunciations. This is so wildly improbable that we must seek the explanation in a different and more plausible hypothesis, after asking and trying to answer certain questions.

Was the text written originally in a pure, unadulterated and consistent dialect, and are the inconsistencies due to subsequent recopying? There is no doubt that subsequent recopying could change, for instance, the proportions of Parisian and non-Parisian forms— but it is also not only possible but extremely probable that the texts were not written down in a consistent way in the first place. Here the case of Jean Bodel from Arras in Artois is instructive. There is little doubt that his own dialect was the Artesian variety of Picard. Around the year he wrote one of the most famous of all medieval French plays, Le Jeu de S.

It has come down to us in a unique manuscript containing this and several other Picard works, and copied nearly a hundred years later. The language is mixed. There are many Picard forms in it, but it can hardly be said to be written consistently in the Picard dialect.

Scribes may have either eliminated some of the Picard features which were present in the original, or added new ones, or both. Yet it is reasonable to suppose that Jean Bodel did not write his text consistently in Picard in the first place, since some of his rhymes would not have been rhymes in that dialect. Why did he not write consistently in Picard? The case of Jean Bodel is far from unique. Several substantial twelfth-century texts known to have originated from Normandy have come down to us in forms which are never consistently Norman and are, not infrequently, only superficially Norman.

An early attempt to solve this problem was to suggest that because the forms were mixed, the text must have been composed originally in the borderland between two different dialects. Here again, the evidence of rhyme shows that some of the rhymes would not have been rhymes in Norman. We are surely forced to conclude that the linguistic awareness of the authors concerned, and indeed probably their linguistic ideal, transcended the boundaries of their own dialect.

Of what did they have a wider linguistic awareness? There are only two possibilities, and they are not mutually exclusive. So far as it was cultivated in regions to which it was not native, it ceased in effect to be a dialect and began to become a national language. To put it another way, it does not really matter whether what all the dialects had in common was Parisian French or not, at first, but it seems a remarkable coincidence, to say the least, that so much that is common to all the dialects happens to be characteristic of the language of Paris too, as it later manifested itself.

A further point remains to be made. Those authors who were apologetic about their language might well have escaped censure, even in the most fastidious court circles, if their works had been read aloud by a Parisian, for, faced with having to read aloud from a common scripta, the reader, once he had identified the word, would give it his own pronunciation—exactly as we do today when we are reading aloud.

Even the highly standardised French and English spelling systems of today do not actually prevent a reader from pronouncing words according to his own idiolect. A Norman reading a Parisian text aloud in Normandy, and a Picard reading the same text aloud in Picardy, might pronounce the words as they pleased: We may sum up the situation in these terms. The earliest texts were written down in regionally marked northern French. We have no records of Parisian French from the same period, with which to compare them. In any case, there was at that time no particular Old French: We must bear in mind that at such an early stage there was no very wide gulf between the speech of one area of northern France and another, and in writing down the vernacular at all, a good deal of the notation making due allowance for the inadequacies of the Latin alphabet would serve as well for the speech of one region as for that of another.

A written language which approximated to it would therefore command prestige, even before Paris itself became an important centre for literary activity, as it did in the thirteenth century. Indeed, already in the second half of the twelfth century, the written language in fact suggests Francien more strongly than it suggests anything else. Even when, as was often the case in this period, texts were composed in Normandy, the Norman element emerges as superficial and could nearly always be read as Francien. In , Normandy, which had been since an apanage of the English kings, was annexed by Philippe-Auguste, and thereafter the language of Norman texts tends to approximate even more to the language of Paris, subject to a further complication, which is that in general, in the thirteenth century, if there is a regional element which tends to colour texts which are basically Francien, it is no longer Norman, but Picard.

Thus in that century we find that, so far as there is a standard language used for literary composition, it is Francien coloured by Picard. To this somewhat composite written language the name scripta franco-picarde has been aptly applied.

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What it amounts to is that some Picard forms, and many Picard spellings, were acceptable as alternatives in the written language of Paris, though they may not have corresponded exactly to spontaneous Parisian speech. After all, there is a measure of artificiality in any written language.

As for the language of vernacular documents, found from the beginning of the thirteenth century onwards, at first above all in Picardy, here the regional element was more pronounced, since the documents were far more likely to be of purely local interest or importance. Even so, from the beginning, a strong common French element was present, and this element becomes more and more plainly identifiable with Francien. The regional element gradually 46 A History of the French Language recedes, even from texts which can have been intended only for local consumption; but it has not entirely disappeared even at the end of the Middle Ages.

We must of course assume that there was appreciably more difference between geographically widely separate spoken dialects of northern France than appears in the texts of the period. In England, Anglo-Norman continued to be spoken by the ruling classes throughout this period, and was the medium of an extremely rich literature. As a spoken language, however, it had little prestige in France.

In the south, the prestige of Occitan called at the time, locally, lemosi or proensal suffered a severe set-back as a result of the Albigensian Crusade —13 , launched by Pope Innocent III. The campaign, led by Simon de Montfort, led to the fall of the Toulousain dynasty, and thus indirectly to the political subjection of the south to the royal authority.

Though this made very little difference to the use of Occitan as the de facto everyday language of the south, it delivered a crippling blow to the literary form of it, and put an end to its influence on the language and literature of the north. To attempt a description of O. It also means seeking out the common Francien element although this never appears in an absolutely pure and unadulterated form in any one text. For practical purposes, however, it is usual to take the language of the later twelfth century as a norm, although this means that very little prose is available for study, the texts of the period being overwhelmingly in verse.

It also involves stating, as rules, features which in practice do not lack exceptions, and implying a fixity which is constantly being belied by analogical and other changes. A host of regular sound changes of the type selectively illustrated at the end of Chapter 1, together with many sporadic changes, had given rise to a wide range of vowel sounds, which included several diphthongs and two triphthongs. At this time the vowel [o] was absent from the system: It is to be noted that the nasals, whether diphthongal or not, were not pure: There were twenty-one consonantal sounds, bringing the total of sounds to forty-nine: The sounds of O.

The spelling of the twelfth century has its inadequacies, but at least it has the merit of attempting to suggest the pronunciation, rather than the real or imagined etymology of words, or their real or imagined relationship to each other. In principle, every letter was pronounced, though how it was pronounced could not always be ideally indicated by the Latin alphabet. The letter e was used for four different sounds: On the other hand, the scribes represented diphthongs and triphthongs reasonably well, 48 A History of the French Language and can be forgiven for not indicating w were of.

Between vowels, -ss- was normally [s]; while in the same intervocalic position, a single s was normally pronounced [z] as in Mod. The sounds [lj] and [ ] were written in a variety of ways: Recent changes were not always reflected in the spelling: We must not, then, idealise the phonetic nature of O.

Etymological letters were liable to intrude, even during this most realistic period of spelling. The phonology of a language and its morphology are not separable from each other in practice. We have already seen how the early sound changes which took place in northern France between the fifth century and the end of the eighth were not compatible with the continuation of the flexional system of Latin. A new system, on much simpler lines, had constituted itself in early O.

We have already seen it in operation in the earliest texts, but we have yet to analyse it more closely. This conservatism is usually attributed to stronger scholastic influences in the region concerned.

A History of the French Language

At all events, the forms of O. The second masculine declension has no nominative s in the singular, bcause there was none present in Latin, e. The third masculine declension is the most difficult and irregular, since it shows the greatest discrepancy between forms. Occasionally, an extra syllable in Latin did not involve a shift of stress, hence: A very high proportion, ending in -a in Latin, end in -e in O. Hence fille filles O. A third feminine type, very thinly represented, is characterised by a shift of stress and an extra syllable: This phonetic fact is confirmed, though not consistently, by scribal usage see p.

Some final consonants give rise to -z [ts] and not -s in the nominative singular and oblique plural; but since from an early date final -z and final -s appear to be interchangeable, there is no need to record here particulars of these cases. With regard to adjectives, here again phonetic principles explain the forms. Nevertheless, there is a partial distinction in O. The modern analogical feminine forms grande, forte, etc.

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An adjectival type corresponding phonetically to the masculine 1. The definite article is declined as follows: The Latin pronouns me te se undergo a twofold development according to stress, which in practice means according to position and function: The possessives meus tuus suus also undergo a twofold development according to stress and function.

The unstressed forms give rise to the O. Latin suus, originally indicating possession by the subject, was extended to cover possession by any third person singular, and its stressed forms were suens, suen, fem, soe, soes. In the end, ces tes did not survive at all, while celes survived only as a pronoun. There are vestiges, in the earliest texts, of derivatives of iste, ista used without ecce, namely ist, este. Only celui survived, and is restricted to pronominal use. Much might be said about the conjugation of verbs. Phonetic laws, as we have seen, are no respecters of parts of speech, and they account, together with sporadic changes and a good deal of analogy, for the O.

To take one example among many of the interrelation of sound-change and analogy, the final -o of the first person singular of the Latin first conjugation present indicative is preserved in O. Otherwise it has disappeared without trace. Hence on the one hand jo, je chant amer Similarly with laver lef Old French: Ambiguity could usually be eliminated by the latent probabilities of the context.

Any of the six permutations of subject, verb and object were possible, though some were more common than others, and one of the most common was already the modern order: Inversion of verb and subject, however, was particularly frequent, being normal whenever an adverb or adverbial expression, or a grammatical object, opened the sentence or the clause. Since the grammatical system allowed substantival complements to precede transitive verbs, reprise, though it existed, was seldom used.

The order subject-object-verb known as rejet was extremely common in relative clauses.

The substantival object of an infinitive normally preceded the infinitive. In compound tenses the substantival object frequently comes between the auxiliary and the past participle. Pronoun objects of an infinitive precede the modal verb, when there is one, and not the infinitive. Unstressed pronoun objects are avoided in the first position in the sentence: In combinations of object pronouns, the accusative comes before the dative, an order which survives today only when both pronouns are of the third person.

En comes before i—the reverse of the modern order. The position of adjectives is very unsettled: Any infinitive could become a substantive of the first masculine declension. Used with verbs, ne constituted sufficient negation in itself. Pas, point, mie, gote could be added for emphasis, but were often dispensed with. It is to be noted that the words one, onques, Old French: Rien was even a feminine substantive in its own right 56 A History of the French Language language whenever the meaning, or the logical sequence of tenses, called for it.

In main clauses the subjunctive was far more common than it is today, and was used, furthermore, without the introductory que which is now obligatory. In subordinate clauses too, particularly concessives, que could be omitted, e. Verbs of thinking and believing, even when used affirmatively, regularly called for the subjunctive when what was believed was contrary to fact. On the other hand expressions of emotion, which in Mod. Affirmative comparative clauses are not infrequently found with the subjunctive. A major stronghold of the imperfect subjunctive was its use in both the protasis and the apodosis of conditional sentences, e.

The past definite was normal in conversation with reference to the remote past, and sometimes even with reference to events of the same day, although in this last function and to some extent in the first, it overlapped with the perfect tense. Idiomatically, the past definite was also used, particularly in verse, in descriptive passages where Mod. The past anterior and the pluperfect were virtually interchangeable. The comparative and the superlative degree are not always formally distinguished. The basically Latin vocabulary is of two kinds: Words borrowed after a particular sound change is complete will in theory escape the 1.

The non-Latin element in the vocabulary of O. There is much hesitation as to suffixes, thus tristece 58 A History of the French Language first because it indicates grammatical relationships very clearly and indeed rigorously by means of a word-order which is largely fixed, and by a series of unequivocal grammatical markers; and secondly because it uses a spelling system which, being based far more on etymology than on pronunciation, enables one to identify at once words which in speech may not be differentiated at all.

To conclude this brief survey of O. Totes autres pierres passoient Celes del graal sanz dotance. Only the context tells us that the first element is the direct object and not the subject of the sentence. The meaning is Those sc. The first que expresses causality; the second introduces a subordinate clause dependent on the impersonal expression in the previous line. Le roi, being the oblique form of li rois, cannot be the subject of the clause: Venist imperfect subjunctive is used without a subject pronoun, because it is perfectly clear by O.

The French said that they could not operate nearly so well at sea as they sc. Note also that the que of disoient que is not repeated, and that lor is invariable. The second occurrence of the word lacks flexional -s, although it is the subject of the clause. By the end of this period c. Outside France, and outside Anglo-Norman England, where French was still the language of the ruling classes, Crusades and political and military activity had carried the language to southern Italy and Sicily, to Greece, to the Levant, and to Palestine. Naples and Sicily were ruled first by the Normans and later by the Angevins.

Although Sicily was lost to Aragon in , the Angevin dynasty continued to rule in southern Italy until the fifteenth century. Cyprus was ruled by the Lusignans, a Poitevin dynasty which was to last until the late fifteenth century. The prestige of French did not depend entirely on political influence, however. In northern Italy, the language was widely 60 A History of the French Language cultivated as a literary medium.

A consensus makes it begin in the first half of the fourteenth century and end in the first half of the seventeenth, on the grounds that by the early fourteenth century significant changes were beginning to manifest themselves while others, already complete, were seriously undermining the system as it had operated previously, and on the grounds that by the early seventeenth century we are already beginning to find French which, in all its essentials, is strikingly modern. For convenience, the main emphasis in this chapter will be on the internal development of the language, particularly as regards phonology, morphology and syntax, in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but since the sixteenth century is important also for the rise of conscious attitudes towards the language question, conscious attempts to formulate linguistic norms, and in general for an intense and active preoccupation with linguistic matters, the discussion of these themes will be deferred until the next chapter.

The historical and political background to the period may be briefly summarised. The successive French kings were engaged in complicated struggles both with the English kings and with their own powerful vassals. It must be remembered that Guyenne and Gascony, a substantial area of France, were English territory, while other parts of France too were claimed and sometimes overrun. In the middle of the so-called Hundred Years War — , the assassination of the Duke of Orleans at the instigation of Jean sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, led to a full-scale war between the Armagnacs partisans of Orleans and the Burgundians, in which the whole country took sides.

In the Burgundians allied 61 62 A History of the French Language themselves with the English, thus heightening an already grave threat to the survival of France as a nation. The king, Charles VII, was forced to leave the capital for Bourges, and it was only after his return in that the Treaty of Arras brought about some measure of national unity against the English menace. A series of successful campaigns led in to the dislodging of the English from Normandy, where they had been in occupation since ; and in to their expulsion from Guyenne and Gascony, where they had held sway since the middle of the twelfth century.

Only Calais remained in English hands. Subsequently, Louis XI —83 met with a large measure of success in his efforts to unite France under the Crown. By subtle diplomacy he was able to disarm both England and Burgundy, and to gain control of both Provence and Anjou, bequeathed to the crown in by their last rulers. Local parliaments, set up in Toulouse , Grenoble and Bordeaux , only served to emphasise the royal authority in the regions concerned.

Feudalism was almost extinct, and a new national consciousness had taken its place. The literature of this period is plentiful, yet except for a few masterpieces it does not equal what had gone before or what was to follow. At all events, against the background of a considerable Latin literature, French was by this time a common enough medium in the domain of belles-lettres, though it was still largely excluded from science and, except for works of popular piety, from theology.

The accepted norm throughout this period is the language of Paris, slightly coloured by the spelling conventions and to some extent the forms current in Picardy. The last northern French author to write in a strongly marked dialect was the Picard chronicler and poet Jean Froissart —c. In the south, although dialects of Occitan were universally spoken, the written language tended overwhelmingly to be, for literary purposes, either Latin or French, the deciding factor being essentially the one which prevailed in the north too, namely genre and subject matter.

For official purposes, however, more use was made of Latin, and for a time of local languages, than of French. With the advent of printing the first press was set up in Paris in , the output was for a long time predominantly Latin, for the most urgent need was for Latin texts and commentaries; but, insofar as it was not Latin, it was essentially in the language of Paris and in no other French dialect. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were some sixty presses in Paris, and about forty in Lyons.

Throughout the period, there is a steady increase in the use of French Middle French developments 63 for official purposes, in legal documents and in public records, not only in the royal chancelleries but also, regionally, in the chancelleries of dukes and counts. The local colouring of regional archives gradually fades and the language of Paris predominates. During the second half of the fifteenth century, it was making slow but steady progress southwards, to east and west of the Massif Central.

Outside France, during the same period, the French language recedes. By the end of the fifteenth century, it had ceased to be an influential language in the south of Italy, in Sicily and in Cyprus. In England, it was learned purely as a foreign language. Several important phonological developments took place during this period. Of these the first in order of importance because of its drastic effect on the two-case system was the muting of final consonants.

This process had begun as early as the thirteenth century when the following word began with a consonant. By the sixteenth century, the process was complete, although, to judge from the would-be phonetic spelling of certain sixteenth-century grammarians, final consonants were still heard not only in liaison which then was not confined to groups closely related in sense , but also before a pause. Final [r] was no exception to the rule, and by the end of the fourteenth century infinitives in -er, -ir and -oir ended phonetically in [e], [i], and [we] respectively.

The [r] was still pronounced in liaison, however, and before a pause, and was later restored to the -ir, -oir classes, but not to -er. Loss of final [r] also led to some confusion between names of agents in -eur and the common adjectival suffix -eux, since they were both pronounced alike.

A result of this which still makes itself felt in Mod. Until well into the nineteenth century, however, it had the effect of lengthening the preceding vowel. Internally, it had become mute after a vowel as early as the fourteenth century, hence pri e ra confirmed by scansion; and 64 A History of the French Language from the same period dates its disappearance between two consonants: Pretonic vowels in hiatus ceased to be syllabic early in the period, being absorbed by the tonic vowel immediately following.

This is amply confirmed by the metre of verse texts, although the spelling of words like meur [myr], seur [syr], beu [by], veoir [vwer], seoir [swer] is slow to adjust itself to the new pronunciation. The numerous diphthongs and the three triphthongs of O. One of these, written au, was still pronounced [ao] for at least some sixteenth-century grammarians, before becoming [o] later in the century. When final or before a vowel, [we] was still a diphthong for some as late as the sixteenth century; but there had been, and continued to be, much hesitation as to the pronunciation of this sound, generally represented in spelling by oi.

The popular tendency was to reduce it to [e], but learned influence preserved or restored the diphthongal pronunciation. There was much hesitation between [e] and [a] before [r]. The popular tendency in the fourteenth century was to open [e] yet further it is merely a matter of lowering the tongue a little to [a] before [r], and this pronunciation has prevailed in some words, e. Learned influence opposed this change, however, with the result that not only did [er] prevail in many words, it was even over-zealously introduced into words where [ar] was Middle French developments 65 historically correct, e.

In tonic syllables there was much hesitation, e. It is to be noted, however, that in words introduced into the language in the Mid. By this time the assimilation of the nasal consonant was complete. Denasalisation before intervocalic [m], [n], [ ] makes considerable progress during this period. Some of the changes mentioned are reflected in contemporary spelling, but not consistently.

The praticiens, as these clerks were called, had organised themselves into a powerful corporation as early as They were to some extent aided and abetted by the availability of cheap ragpaper, replacing the more expensive parchment and vellum which invited careful lettering. It must be admitted that even if the conventions of spelling had remained unchanged, the phonetic changes which we have just 66 A History of the French Language noted would inevitably have led in the long run to a gulf between spelling and pronunciation.

As a matter of fact, spelling conventions changed very considerably during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but, unfortunately, they changed in a direction which was largely irrelevant to phonetic change. Hasty and illformed letters made certain visual safeguards desirable, if not essential. Un, the indefinite article, looked like a cluster of up-anddown strokes. To make it more readily identifiable, a g was added, hence vng, ung. Since a final unpointed i could easily be mistaken for the last stroke of such letters as u, n, m thus m, for instance, could be misread as iu, in, ni, ui, and vice versa , final y was preferred, hence amy, cry, midy, party.

Seu Middle French developments 67 become -aus, -eus, -ous. Scribal practice used the graphy as an abbreviation for -us, but a later generation of scribes thought that a , -e , were -o , a poor reflexion of the sound, and added the u which they c hence -aux, -eux, -oux. Unfortunately their preoccupation with rapprochement led them to indicate the relationship with the original -al, -el, -ol and they added an l, so that in the Mid.

As regards morphology, the most important single transformation in this domain was the breakdown of the two-case system, brought about by the loss of flexional s from the pronunciation. Even in thirteenth-century French and earlier still in Anglo-Norman there had been signs of faltering: Thus we find flexional s widely used where it is not called for, e. S ceases to have any relevance to the two-case system, and becomes a sign of the plural irrespective of case, or, to a diminishing degree, an orthographical survival, as in the nominative form Dieus, Dieux quite often found even in the fifteenth century.

As a rule, it was the oblique forms of substantives which were generalised; but in a few cases the nominative has survived, e.

LE BÂTON ET LE CHAT A NEUF QUEUES (French Edition)

There are even a few cases where both nominative and oblique have survived, though with a differentiation of meaning or at least of use: Some substantives owe their present form to back-formations from the plural: Even so, the forms chastel, chapel, genouil, are occasionally found as late as the sixteenth century.

Ou Middle French developments 69 Dans, by the way 70 A History of the French Language the plural pronoun elles, which had traditionally had both functions. This new oblique use of elle leads to the elimination of the older stressed feminine object pronoun li. The unstressed indirect object pronoun li, used for both genders, is replaced by lui, formerly a stressed accusative and dative masculine form, but henceforward used for both genders as a dative, and occasionally also used for elle as a direct object pronoun, while still continuing its traditional use as a masculine accusative form.

It might be pointed out here that stressed forms of pronouns were normal in O. Even the sixteenth century maintained for a time the medieval possibility of substituting eulx masculine and feminine for reflexive soy or se. As regards the relative pronoun, the most noteworthy feature is the use of que for qui in the nominative, first as a singular, and later as a plural pronoun as well.

The oblique qui, dependent on a preposition, was frequently used of things as well as persons. There is a notable increase in the use of analogical feminine forms of adjectives of the grant, fort type, though it must be added that grant showed itself to be particularly conservative, the feminine grande s being in the main used predicatively rather than attributively, e.

Present participles too only gradually adopt the termination -ante when feminine. This hesitation in adjectives and participles has its relevance to the formation of adverbs, since the important class ending in -ment owed its origin to the addition of -mente, the ablative case of the Latin mens, to the feminine form of the adjective. Thus we find hesitation between the older, phonetically regular forment, and the newer fortement, between diligenment and diligentement, between granment and grandement, and between vaillanment and vaillantement. It is, incidentally, not always the new form which prevailed in the end: Adjectives in -al and -el the former is learned, the latter popular , and such words as tel and quel, are also slow to adopt analogical feminine forms.

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In the case of adjectives in -al, this meant that even as late as the sixteenth century we sometimes find feminine plurals in -au l x as well as in -ales, e. The feminine forms of a small number of adjectives came to be used for both genders: This phenomenon is due to various associative Middle French developments 71 influences, e.

In the verbal system a large number of analogical levellings take place during this period. The older imperfect and conditional endings -oie, -oies, -oie t give way gradually to the forms -ois, -ois, -oit. In the present indicative, the first person singular termination e becomes universal in first conjugation verbs, except where the stem ends in a vowel je suppli, je pri.

In all conjugations, the first and second persons plural of the present subjunctive tend increasingly to end in -ions, -iez, but the older terminations -ons, -ez are still sometimes found, as late as the sixteenth century. In the imperfect subjunctive of first conjugation verbs, the older first and second persons plural in -issions, -issiez are gradually replaced by assions, -assiez.

The third person plural of first conjugation verbs sometimes appears as -arent, a phenomenon which may be explained by the analogy of the other terminations -as, -a, -ames, astes, though it is also in line with the popular tendency to open [er] to [ar] see p. Analogical -s is frequently added to the first person singular of the present indicative of verbs other than the first conjugation: Vocalic alternation see pp. The regular futures of venir and tenir, je vendrai and je tendrai, were in O. To remedy this, Mid. As for syllabic alternation see p. The -t- of euphony in inverted forms of the third person singular, avoiding hiatus with a preceding -e or -a, appears to be a sixteenth-century development: Early in the period, the two-case system ceased to function.

Very slowly, the word-order adapted itself to the new situation. Sentences may still begin with a direct object, but they tend to do so only when there is a strong logical link with the previous sentence, e. Telles paroles dist le bon roy; Autre chose fist Nostre Seigneur.

Now the type Cest ome vi ier comes to be rivalled by Cest homme, je le vi hier. The order subject-object-verb rejet , though still not uncommon in relative clauses, where the subject is a pronoun, becomes rare where the subject is a substantive, e. Another important development in word-order is that inversion is no longer automatic after a preceding adverb or adverbial phrase. It is still quite frequently found in the fifteenth century, but the direct wordorder is also common, and particularly so when the subject is a pronoun. The noun object of an infinitive still usually precedes the infinitive or, where relevant, the finite verb on which the infinitive depends ; and the noun object may still be intercalated between the auxiliary and the past participle.

There is still much hesitation as to the position of the adjective, but at least there is a strong tendency to make such common monosyllabic adjectives as grant, fort, bon precede, and to avoid placing adjectives of colour before the substantive. Pronoun objects continue throughout the period to occur in the order: In the sixteenth century, rouge vin, blanc pain, etc.

Also, as in O. In the interrogative, the O. Est ta puissance perdue? The reprise construction Ton argent vient-il? Ta puissance est-elle perdue? With increased stereotyping, subject pronouns lose much of their autonomy, yet they can still be used emphatically and separated from the verb, e. Il, par invention grande, mesla deux especes de animaus: The relative clause may be remote from its antecedent: Participles and gerunds do not have to be related to the subject of the main clause: Verbs tend to agree, as in O.

Object pronouns may be used without change or repetition, even when coordinated verbs are incompatible as to construction, e. Avoir is sometimes 74 A History of the French Language used instead of estre as the auxiliary of the verb aller. Share your thoughts with other customers.

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