A History of the French Language

Peter Rickard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134838776
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This well-established and popular book provides students with all the linguistic background they need for studying any period of French literature. For the second edition the text has been revised and updated throughout, and the two final chapters on contemporary French, and its position as a world language, have been completely rewritten. Starting with a brief description of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Gaul, and the earliest recorded forms of French, Peter Rickard traces the development of the language through the later Middle Ages and Renaissance to show how it became standardized in a near modern form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

1
FROM VULGAR LATIN TO THE RECOGNITION OF THE NEW VERNACULAR

The prehistory of the French language begins with the colonisation of Gaul by the Romans. The Celts who inhabited Gaul when the Romans came were Indo-Europeans, related to the Greeks, Romans and Germanic peoples in both culture and language. They appear to have lived originally in central or eastern Europe, but began to move westwards around 500 B.C. and settled in Gaul some two hundred years later, displacing the other peoples whom they found there, notably the Iberians, who were driven towards the south-west, and the Ligurians, who were driven towards the south-east. By this time there were also important Greek settlements on the Mediterranean coast at such places as Marseilles, Nice and Antibes, which have preserved their Greek names. In the second century B.C. these Greek settlers, harassed by the Gauls, asked for Roman aid against them, and thus brought about the first Roman campaign in Gaul, a campaign which, spread over thirty years from 154 to 125 B.C., led to the conquest of what the Romans then called the Provincia or province, a name which survives today as Provence. At first the Roman colony extended from the Alps to the Rhône, then the frontier was pushed south-west across the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees, taking in what is today Roussillon. In 57 B.C., Julius Caesar undertook the conquest of the rest of Gaul, a process which was virtually complete by 52 B.C., for the Gauls, essentially a loose confederation of tribes, lacked political unity.

In the newly conquered territory, Gauls of any rank who had anything to do with administration and supply soon found that they had an incentive to learn Latin. Moreover, the only kind of education available was the Roman one: indeed, the Gauls could not write at all until they learned the art from the Romans, and this explains why those few monuments of the Gaulish tongue which have come down to us are mostly written in the Roman alphabet. Even so, Romanisation and Latinisation were a very gradual process. The bestowal of Roman citizenship on all free-born inhabitants of the Empire by Caracalla in A.D. 212 probably made no very great difference to the linguistic situation in Gaul, and it would not be unreasonable to suppose that in the second or third century A.D., in areas remote from Roman supply routes, Latin would be seldom heard and even more seldom understood, and Gaulish the normal language used. For this very reason, perhaps, Gaulish eventually lost much of its former prestige, and came to be looked down on as the speech of rustic underlings. Even so, it seems to have lingered on in places until as late as the fifth century; while in the Rhône delta Greek was used as well as Latin in Christian worship until as late as the sixth century.

It is important to realise that the Latin which was introduced into Gaul with the legions and which, after the conquest of the region, continued to be influenced from without while undergoing modifications from within, was significantly different from what we understand by ‘Classical’ Latin. There is perhaps in every language an appreciable difference between the polished literary form of it and what people actually say in everyday life, however literate they may be. Spoken Latin is generally termed Vulgar Latin, but this term is also applied to those forms of written Latin which by their lateness and their divergences from the known standards of Classical Latin are believed to be closer to the spoken language— but only closer to it, by no means identical with it. It therefore follows that even the most strikingly non-classical text is not, to say the least, an ideal record of the spoken language, and much has to be deduced by combining the study of Vulgar Latin texts and inscriptions with the comparative study of the Romance languages in their earliest attested forms, if one is to attempt to reconstruct the broad features of spoken Latin. Even so, the picture is anything but complete. There are a great many texts in Vulgar Latin, from all over the Empire, and they suggest an almost suspiciously homogeneous language which, while it diverges in a great many ways from Classical Latin, seems to have firm rules of its own and to rise, artificially of course, above such regional variations as may have already existed. Many students of Vulgar Latin, however, are reluctant to believe that there was any substantial regional differentiation before approximately the sixth century A.D.

In its essentials, the Latin spoken in Gaul in the second, third and fourth centuries A.D. is unlikely to have been more than superficially different from the Latin spoken in other parts of the Empire. What were the common features of this spoken Latin, so far as we can deduce them negatively and positively from the texts and from the evidence of early Romance? A detailed characterisation of Vulgar Latin lies outside the scope of this book, but a few significant features may usefully be mentioned here. Distinctions of vowel quality become more important than the classical distinctions of vowel length, although distinctions of length by no means disappear; h has no phonetic value; the diphthongs [æ] and [oe] have been reduced to [e] and [e] respectively; in the verbal system there is widespread analogical redistribution of conjugation; the classical neuter plurals in -a are often treated as though they were feminine singular, while masculine substantives in -us and neuter substantives in -um are frequently confused; the synthetic passives of Classical Latin are badly known and comparatively little used; new compound tenses involving the use of habere with a perfect participle come into being; there is much confusion in the use of cases, accompanied by a more liberal use of prepositions making the case-distinctions less necessary. The vocabulary contains many neologisms and lacks, to an increasing degree, certain classical terms: thus ictus ‘blow’ tends to be replaced by colaphus (Mod.F. coup); tergum ‘back’ by dorsum (dos); ignis ‘fire’ by focus, originally the hearth (feu); vir ‘man’ by homo (homme)—this last already classical, but more restricted in use. Early Christianity too influenced the vocabulary of Vulgar Latin, notably through the introduction of Greek loanwords which had already taken on a Christian meaning, whatever their original associations had been: hence angelus ‘angel’ (ange); ecclesia ‘church’ (église); diaconus ‘deacon’ (diacre); episcopus ‘bishop’ (évêque); presbyter ‘priest’ (prêtre); martyrium ‘martyrdom’ (martyre); hymnus ‘hymn’ (hymne); monachus ‘monk’ (moine).

Such was the kind of Latin current in Gaul and thus available to its inhabitants two or three or four hundred years after the Roman conquest. It is impossible for us to tell to what extent, if at all, those Gauls who spoke Latin, at first as a second language and later as their only language, carried over into it habits of articulation deriving from a long tradition of Celtic speech.¹ A regional pronunciation of Latin may well have developed, but it is not likely to have made any very profound changes during the period in question. We must remember that the Latin of Gaul was still in steady contact with the language of Rome: not until appreciably later was it left largely to its own devices, and at no time was the isolation absolute. What is much more easy to demonstrate is the influence of Gaulish on the vocabulary of the Latin spoken in Gaul and, though far more rarely, on the vocabulary of Latin in general. Some aspects of Gaulish daily life may have appeared to the Romans so characteristic, or so quaint, that no existing Latin word seemed adequate to describe them, or it may have been that the Gauls, in learning Latin, clung tenaciously to some terms which were dear to them for one reason or another, or which seemed untranslatable. Whatever the reason, it is certain that many quite common French words date from this period and are of Gaulish origin. Naturally, when they are first attested in writing (as some of them are) they are given a Latin spelling and a Latin termination, e.g. riga ‘furrow’ (raie— now also ‘parting of hair’, ‘stripe’, ‘crease’); rusca ‘bee-hive’ (ruche); *soccus ‘plough-share’ (soc); carruca ‘plough’ (charrue); *cambita ‘felloe’ (jante); *liga ‘dregs’ (lie); *multonem ‘sheep’ (mouton); *bucco ‘buck’ (bouc); *bertium ‘cradle’ (O.F. bers, Mod. berceau); alauda ‘skylark’ (O.F. aloe, Mod. alouette). Gaulish names of trees, types of landscape and soil, measures of distance and area, have also left their mark, *betullus ‘birch-tree’ (O.F. boul, Mod. bouleau); *brucaria ‘heather’ (bruyère); ivos ‘yew-tree’ (if); *sappus ‘fir-tree’ (sapin); *cassanus ‘oak’ (chêne); *cumba ‘small valley’ (combe); talutium ‘bank of earth’ (talus); caio ‘embankment’ (quai); *baua ‘mud’ (boue); *grava ‘strand’ (grève); *margila ‘marl’ (marne); leuca ‘league’ (lieue); arepennis ‘acre’ (arpent). Other borrowings include bodina ‘boundary-mark’ (borne); beccus ‘beak’ (bee); *sudia ‘soot’ (suie); *druto ‘strong’ (dru ‘dense’, ‘luxuriant’); cerevisia ‘malt beer’ (O.F. cervoise); and such useful verbs as glenare ‘to glean’ (glaner) and *brisare ‘to break’ (briser). Most of these words were peculiar to the Latin of Gaul, but a few others, borrowed early, subsequently spread all over the Empire, wherever Latin was spoken, e.g. caballus ‘horse’ (cheval), replacing the classical equus; bracae ‘breeches’ (braies); camisia ‘tunic’, ‘shirt’ (chemise); cambiare ‘to (ex)change’ (changer); camminus ‘path’, ‘way’ (chemin); carrus ‘wagon’ (char and derivatives).

It will be seen that these words cover a limited though useful range: they are almost exclusively homely, even earthy words connected with husbandry, with the soil, with the landscape, with rough-and-ready garments. There is a conspicuous lack of abstract terms, but Latin was after all well provided with those. As for place-names, the Romans usually added typical Latin endings to the Gaulish names and declined them accordingly: only exceptionally did they rename Gaulish localities. Many names of towns derive from the name of the tribe which inhabited the district, inflected in the ablative or locative plural of Latin; thus Remis, the home of the tribe known to the Romans as the Remi, gives rise to Reims (Rheims). This explains in many cases the -s ending of modern French towns, for example Angers, Limoges, Nantes, Poitiers, Sens, Tours and Troyes. Paris takes its name from the Parisii, the tribe whose capital, now l’Île de la Cité, was originally called Lutetia. Many Gaulish place-names ended in - dunum, a suffix which originally suggested a fortified place: Verdun and Lyon(s) derive from this type, -acum, too, was a common termination for place-names, in north and south alike, and the development of these names offers a striking example of the wide divergence there has since been, phonetically speaking, between north and south. The more conservative south preserved - acum as -ac, as in Armagnac, Cognac, Jarnac, etc.; whereas in the north, the same suffix became -ai, as in Camaracum>Cambrai, and indeed often -i (usually written -y) if it was preceded by yod [j]: Cluniacum>Cluny; Clippiacum>Clichy. There were two localities named Aureliacum, one in Cantal, the other near Paris: the former has developed to Aurillac, while the latter, as Orly, has given its name to the well-known airport.

River-names are notoriously conservative. The names of the principal French rivers, Seine, Marne, Garonne, Loire, Rhône, Allier, Saône, Isère, still perpetuate their old Gaulish names.

So much, then, for the positive contribution of the Celtic language formerly spoken in Gaul, to Latin, and through Latin to Mod.F. In assessing the Gaulish element, we must of course make allowance for other words which were borrowed, but which fell into disuse during the Middle Ages, or which have survived to the present day only in dialects, and not in what has become the standard language. As for an influence on pronunciation, this can be assumed only in a very small number of well-authenticated cases where the phonetic change in question is not organic but a matter of substitution—the result of contamination of a Gaulish word with a Latin one, e.g. tremere ‘to tremble’+*krit->*cremere, hence O.F. criembre ‘to fear’, Mod. craindre; or the change of articulum ‘joint’ to *orticulum, whence orteil ‘toe’.

By the end of the fifth century, the Gaulish language had died out and had been replaced by a form of Latin still very close to forms of Latin spoken elsewhere in the dying Empire, but containing numerous local words and possibly already showing phonetic tendencies which might eventually have differentiated it from Latin as spoken elsewhere, even if no other factor had supervened to accelerate and accentuate the process. With the collapse of the Roman Empire the unifying, centralising force of Rome collapsed too, and the different provinces were to an increasing extent cut off from each other. Christianity, however, had in the meantime made considerable progress throughout the Empire, though its influence was very much at the mercy of local secular rulers, who might or might not be Christians. Nevertheless, such formal education as was available continued to be on Roman lines and the tiny, almost exclusively ecclesiastical, literate minority continued to write a Latin which in intention was classical, but which fell increasingly short of classical norms. This written Latin continues to reflect the spoken language but dimly, and apart from the by now thoroughly assimilated Gaulish words which occurred in it, resembled nothing so much as the written Latin of other parts of the Empire. In other words, it was still suggesting far more homogeneity and uniformity than existed at the level of the spo...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• ABBREVIATIONS AND PHONETIC SYMBOLS
• 1: FROM VULGAR LATIN TO THE RECOGNITION OF THE NEW VERNACULAR
• 2: THE LANGUAGE OF THE EARLIEST FRENCH TEXTS
• 3: OLD FRENCH: LANGUAGE OR DIALECT?
• 4: MIDDLE FRENCH DEVELOPMENTS
• 5: PROGRESS AND PRESTIGE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
• 6: CODIFICATION AND STANDARDISATION: CLASSICAL AND NEO-CLASSICAL FRENCH
• 7: FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT DAY
• 8: THE DEFENCE OF FRENCH
• APPENDIX: THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD TODAY
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING