Talk:Old French

Gaulish loanwords

In the article you state that 200 words have a Celtic origin and 15% comes from Germanic/Frankish. Are these figures accurate? I have read -- I admit in an linguistic book from the 1960s -- that only around 40 words still remain from Gaulish and 400 from Frankish. Also- how many words does 15% represent?

The 200 word claim is repeated in the secion on the French lexicon in "The Romance Languages", (Harris and Vincent, eds.), ISBN 0-19-520829-3. IIRC, the 15% claim (for the total lexicon of Old French) comes from Pope's "From Latin to Modern French," which I don't have in front of me. Smerdis of Tlön 14:09, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Some populist works put the number much higher, but reputable scholarly works give 150 or so. Delamarre lists 167 words in Old, Modern, and Dialectal French that come from Gaulish (each with a separate entry) with shorter lists for words that entered Provençal/Occitan, Italian, Catalan, Spanish and Romanch. So, I have edited '200' to '167' and given a reference. --Nantonos 16:40, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

References?

I was about to add the reference to Delamarre (see above) and then realised this would be the only reference in that article! I went ahead and did it anyay, but it highlights the lack of references in this otherwise promising article. --Nantonos 17:12, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps this reading list will be helpful - anyone have any of these works? http://users.ox.ac.uk/~fmml0059/TutorialF4.html --Nantonos 17:12, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Is caballus really from Gaulish? My Latin dictionary gives Greek: kaballe. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.70.36.5 (talk) 18:32, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

New article?

• I for one think that an article on French words of Gaulish origin and French words of Frankish origin are in order here. I might do it myself if I can track down the Pope book. As an amateur etymologist I would use this list my self, especially when those words made it into English in some form. And if arguments arise as to which language a word traces to, alternate theories with appropriate links (where applicable) could be noted in the interest of fairness/completeness.Hraefen 06:02, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Proposed move

It has been proposed that Languages of Oïl be renamed and moved to Langues d'Oïl. Comments and votes on Talk:Languages of Oïl, please, if you're interested. Man vyi 09:15, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Normans

It is important to distinguish however words which came from Germanic initially, via Frankish, and those that were introduced later, via the Normans in the 10th century.

This needs explanation. Why did words from the Normans not enter French before the 10th century? It is particularly confusing given the opening paragraph, which associates Old French with the area ‘roughly corresponding to the northern part of modern France’, which would seem to include Normandy. Widsith 14:07, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

I've reworded that sentence. It seemed to want to say that more Germanic words arrived with the Norse invasions of Normandy. Smerdis of Tlön 15:22, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Much better. Widsith 18:55, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Classical Latin

Since when does Classical Latin have the diphthongs AE (pronounced as y in my) and OE (pronounced as oy in boy)? The both digraphs (that's how these are called, not diphthongs!) AE and OE were pronounced /e/, as in bed in the Classical period. In the Archaic period (Archaic Latin), yes, AE=/ai/ and OE=/oi/ but not in the Classical period! --85.206.191.128 10:51, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Do you have a reference for that? There seems to be controversy as to when the various sound shifts took place. AAR, it's probably an issue that more properly belongs at Vulgar Latin than here specifically. - Smerdis of Tlön 11:41, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

In every Latin book I have ever read, AE and OE are called diphthongs. 70.81.81.203 03:44, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

"derived languages"

Whether you accept Old French = Old Francien, or Old French = intermediary dialect, it is incorrect to state that all of the langues d'oïl derived from Old French; they all derived from the langue d'oïl, but that is not the same thing as Old French (though it is often misused in this sense). Norman, for example, derived from Old Norman, which was a distinctly different dialect than Old French. (If Old French is intended simply to mean langue d'oïl, then this article is redundant with langue d'oïl). The Jade Knight 18:25, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, this article currently attempts to cover both the ancestral langue d'oïl, and the specific ancestor of French. One solution might be to move the general content to Langue d'oïl and reserve Langues d'oïl for an overview of the modern languages of the family and this article for what is specifically Old French. Compare Old Russian language and some of the arguments at Talk:Old East Slavic. Man vyi 10:33, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

This proposal has my support. The Jade Knight (talk) 22:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Sentence

Can someone make this sentence below clearer so that the reader doesn't have to guess at the meaning?

A number of other Germanic peoples, including the Burgundians, were active in the territory at that time; the Germanic languages spoken by the Franks, Burgundians, and others were not written languages, and at this remove it is often difficult to identify from which specific Germanic source a given Germanic word in French is derived.

Were active? In what way? At this remove? Does that mean 'on this account', or 'for this reason'? —Preceding unsigned comment added by RedRabbit1983 (talk • contribs) 12:19, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

errors in Vulgar Latin vowels

According to any reference book one might choose, Vulgar Latin had seven simple vowels, not nine as shown on the chart. There were three back vowels: lower and higher O, and U. Short Latin U (e.g. bucca) developed into the VL higher O, as did Latin long O. There were three front vowels: lower and higher E, and I. Short Latin I (e.g. fide) developed into the VL higher E, as did Latin long E.Jakob37 (talk) 05:45, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

As I understand it, at some time in Vulgar Latin (a term which refers to a broad range of time and place of spoken Latin)there was a leveling between /I/ and /e/ , and between /U/ and /o/. This didn't happen all at once, and probably not necessarily everywhere Latin was spoken. Perhaps the table should say "/I/, later /e/" and "/U/, later /o/". Also, I'm curious as to how in some Latin words, short i seems to be preserved across many languages, such as tristis and facilis. These don't seem to have ever been *treste or *facele. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.171.146 (talk) 03:06, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Please consult the Wikipedia article on Vulgar Latin, and try to arrange the vowel chart here to be compatible with the information in the chart there. As to the gradual change of one vowel into another: 1) there is no general linguistic principle about how fast or slow such things happen; unless you have some specific time-related evidence to introduce (which would also make the discussion rather more complicated), the chart we see in your chart already implies that "there was a leveling between /I/ and /e/" etc. 2)We might want to distinguish between a Vulgar Latin system which distinguished the vowels by quality and which co-existed parallel to the "Classical" pronunciation based on quantity, but that really belongs in the Vulgar Latin article, not here. If you want, you could refer to the reduced seven-vowel system as "Italo-Western-Romance" since it does not apply to all of Latin's descendants. As for words such as "tristis", have you considered the difference in development between stressed and non-stressed vowels? Jakob37 (talk) 14:41, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Vulgar Latin clearly had 9 vowels, at least in the early period -- this is the only way to account for the differing developments in Sardinian, Romanian and Italian. As you yourself point out, the 7-vowel system is the system of Proto Western Romance (PWR). As for tristis and facilis, tristis had a long i in Latin, not a short one, and facilis is a learned borrowing. Benwing (talk) 05:19, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Altho a certain kind of logic does lead to "Vulgar Latin clearly had 9 vowels", the fact remains that in much scholarly literature, Sardinian and Romanian are left out of the picture, with the result that what is technically "Proto-Western Romance" (or Italo-Romance) is often equated with Vulgar Latin in terms of the phonological system. As for the 9-vowel system, "The Romance Languages" (ed. Harris, Vincent 1988) refers to this as "Transitional Late Latin" (p.32) or even just "Latin" (p.33-chart). The only difference with Classical Latin, in terms of contrasts, is the loss of distinction between two kinds of "a", and one wonders how late Classical Latin actually shows evidence for the long vs. short "a". I would also think the actual number of contrastive vowels is perhaps a little too abstract a concept: Sardinian only shows five contrasts, Balkan Romance shows six contrasts (divying up the pie in quite a different way), and PWR shows its seven. Was there simultaneously a super-system of nine contrasts spread over the whole Roman empire to account for these three systems? I'm not sure.Jakob37 (talk) 12:29, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Sound changes

Where does the addition of the epenthetic e before initial s before another consonant occur in this chronological list of sound changes? I've searched and searched but I can't find it, but I know it shoudl be there somewhere. Also, I have often seen words quoted in etymologies as being Old French ending with -u (nouns derived from latin second-declension). Is this just an orthographic phenomenon, or was there a sound change from /o/ back to /u/ before the loss of final vowels?

This list could also use some cleaning up. There are some changes that are listed twice, and it's not clear if they're meant to have occurred twice or not. There are also some lapses in consistency of notation. I'd try cleaning it up myself, but I'm afraid of basing a change on a misinterpretation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.171.146 (talk) 02:56, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Agreed about the cleanup. The epenthetic /e/ was added during the Vulgar Latin period, and should be listed at the very beginning; properly it was a short /i/ added before the Romance vowel changes, which changed it to an unstressed /e/. The final /u/ in etymologies is simply the Vulgar Latin /u/ resulting from the Latin -um ending, prior to the Romance vowel changes; it was deleted in the Gallo-Romance period. Benwing (talk) 02:51, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Old French/British Coronation

A number of years ago, I read that there is a part of the British coronation ceremony which incorporates Old French. Does anyone have any information on the subject, which could be included here and in the coronation page. ButtonwoodTree (talk) 04:13, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

You may be thinking of Anglo-Norman. The Jade Knight (talk) 03:43, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Sound change rs > ss

From the section on sound changes:

'rs' > 'ss' when originating from Old Latin 'rtt', but retained when originating from Old Latin 'rct' (thus dorsum > Modern French dos, but ursus (compare Greek arktos) > Modern French ours).

This looks highly dubious, considering that sound change has no memory. It would mean that a distinction had been maintained between two different kinds of rs all the way from Old Latin through Vulgar Latin to Old French. --Schuetzm (talk) 14:53, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's obviously bogus, and I took it out. Benwing (talk) 05:23, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Also, the 'rs' in 'ursus' in no way derives from "Old Latin 'rct'". The 'ct' vs. 's' difference exists because the word had a thorn cluster in PIE, i.e. '*Hrtkos'; cf. Hittite 'hartagga' "wild beast". Benwing (talk) 05:28, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

IPA charts

The phonetic system seemed pretty spread-out and hard-to-find in this article, so I have added a couple of IPA charts based on late-12th-century OF. They are based on a couple of sources, as referenced. I'm not sure where exactly they should go in the article, perhaps they ought to be either higher up (to introduce the language) or lower down (to summarise the sound changes as explained). Diphthongs/triphthongs also need to be added. Widsith (talk) 15:52, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Provoire/prestre

It's an interesting "myth" that provoire and prestre are the same word. I can't find any evidence of it. In fact, both can have full inflections and they don't appear in texts together than often. If anything, in early Old French they were the same word and in later Old French which is better recorded in writing (Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes) they were synonyms rather than the same word. However, I can't find any evidence to suggest that, it seems to be either a myth or just really hard to cite. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:47, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

It is true that these two forms cannot be derived phonetically from the same stem, so it's not a completely straightforward case, but I don't think there is any doubt that they were originally two forms of a single paradigm in OF. One standard citation is from the Roman de Thèbes (have a look at lines 2053-56 here). Otherwise I would think that any textbook on French historical morphology will mention this example in the discussion of imparisyllabic nouns. (If you want to show that it's a "myth", then the onus is on you to find full paradigms of both words in early OF, or at least to reconstruct them hypothetically and explain their phonetic development from Latin.) CapnPrep (talk) 12:30, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Update: here's a quote from de la Chaussée (1977) that suggests that there were indeed two parallel paradigms in Proto-French (but a single composite paradigm in OF):

PRESBYTĔR, PRESBYTĔRI a subi une refection. Au nominatif, la syncope de la posttonique explique PRESTRE (avec réduction du groupe -sbtr-). Mais PREVEIRE ne peut pas remonter à PRESBYTERI : même en admettant que le phonème grec transcrit Y soit devenu ĭ donc é tonique, on ne pourrait attendre que *PRESBEIRE, car le b n'est pas intervocalique. La forme PRAEBYTER (CIL, x, 6635) montre qu'il y a eu réfection sur PRAEBITOR, -TŌRIS (PRAEBĬTĔRE → PRAEBITĒRE), peut-être deux flexions parallèles. La Gaule du Nord semble n'avoir retenu qu'une flexion composite : PRESBYTER > prestre, PRAEBITĒRE > prǝvéirǝ. La forme PROVOIRE s'expliquerait par un changement de préfixe. (§22,3A,b)

CapnPrep (talk) 13:14, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Nice find for the citation. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:21, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Lede text doesn't match article.

Most of this article, quite rightly, is about one of the langues d'oïl; but the lede text makes it sound like the article will be about the langues d'oïl taken collectively. (The term "Old French" is often used in reference to the langues d'oïl collectively, and the article should probably address that, if only in a hatnote. But as long as the article itself is about Old French specifically, the lede needs to match.) —Ruakh_TALK 17:19, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Old French and the Frankish language

Perhaps this article could explain how it is that the Franks came into what is now modern France speaking a Germanic language, conquered the Celts/Romans living there, and then adopted the language of those they conquered (albeit with some modification) rather than preserving their own language and adopting loan words. (In other words, why it is that the French speak a Romance language rather than a Germanic language, as the Germans, English, Dutch and many others do in territories conquered by the Germanic tribes.) The article mentions that the Frankish language affected pronunciation of Old French, but not why "Old French" (or Old Gallo-Romance) superseded Frankish in the first place. RobertM525 (talk) 11:19, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

There were many reasons why Old French superseded Frankish:

1. Latin was the only written language in the Western Roman empire.
2. Most of the Franks were bilingual before the conquest.
3. Latin was the language of the clergy which was closely linked to the Franks.
4. The inhabitants of Southern Gaul didn't use the Germanic language, so Vulgar Latin became the language of unification.
5. Unlike England where the Germanic language was already spoken by the time of the Anglo-Saxons invasion, in Gaul the Germanic language was no longer spoken by the Belgae and other tribes of Northern Gaul. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.82.96.145 (talk) 02:26, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't think it was as simple as the Franks coming in, conquering the Gauls, then forletting their native tongue. Early invaders spoke Old Low Frankish, later rulers spoke Old Frankish (=Old High German), which signifies that a later wave of immigration en masse from the east occurred, enough to cause the descendants of the early Franks to learn the new Germanic dialect. I think too that the emergence of Old French rang the death knell for Old Frankish, as Old Frankish begins to decline just shortly after Old French emerges. Old French may have been regarded as a replacement for both Latin and Old Frankish among the people, with only a few wealthy newcomers speaking Frankish. This decline happens slowly, over centuries, as the Germanic languages retreat farther north and east, the laves of which still cling to life in regions of northern and eastern France. Leasnam (talk) 22:39, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

In fact, it can be concluded that in Charlemagne's time (8th/9th century) the boundary between Germanic and Romance was not nearly as clear-cut as in later times, and there was a broad bilingual zone in Northern France, with Romance language islands all the way to the Rhine.

(One Romance island was even found in the Black Forest, of the Gallo-Romance or French type, judging by place names. Presumably, Roman settlers fled to the Black Forest from the Alemannic invaders, after the breakdown of the Upper Germanic limes in the 3rd century. Incidentally, that seems to confirm that the Roman settlers were never actually evacuated from the Agri decumates, as historians traditionally claimed.)

On the other hand, a large area in Northern France was settled by speakers of Old Frankish, or later Old High German (Old West Franconian dialect; the Pariser Gespräche and perhaps the Oaths of Strasbourg seem to contain samples of it), judging by place names of Germanic origin, in particular, but in the course of the 9th century, at the latest (or already the 8th in places), this dialect dropped out of use, in order to be replaced by Early Old French.

(It is to be noted that the citizenry of the ancient Roman cities in Gaul had, in all likelihood, never abandoned their Romance tongue; the speakers of Germanic were probably the families of peasants and aristocrats, probably alongside settlements of Romance-speaking peasants, so that it depended on the settlement in question what language was spoken. Essentially, there was a mosaic of Germanic and Romance settlements, I presume, with a small aristocratic class that was Germanic-speaking, as well.)

The partition of the Frankish Empire in 843 is conceivably the decisive event that caused the bilingual speakers to stop speaking Germanic with their children, or their children to reject the Germanic tongue of their ancestors, paving the way for French to take over everywhere in the western part of the empire (although the language boundary seems to have never followed any political border; the borders changed too frequently, anyway, but the border between France and Germany broadly approximated the boundary between French and German/Dutch). The Romance language islands in the east, on the other hand, seem to have lingered on longer. In the end, it seems to have been a self-enforcing circle of cause and effect, something linguistic and political boundaries often display. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:18, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Adjective

I do not see any treatment of the Old French adjective: how it is inflected, placement, comparisons/superlative construction, etc. Leasnam (talk) 21:51, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

I've made a start, we should mention somewhere that most other parts of speech are invariable (adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions for a start). Something on pronouns would be good, do we already have anything? Mglovesfun (talk) 19:33, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

CapnPrep's summary doesn't quite work - povre doesn't fit in anywhere as the feminine does end in -e, but not an extra -e (not povree) and the stem doesn't change. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:36, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I just reproduced Moignet's (simplified) criteria for a three-way classification, but I'll add the necessary complications from Zink and other sources. CapnPrep (talk) 23:47, 14 February 2011 (UTC)