The Story of French

Excerpts

Origins

The Romance of French

The apostrophe S - as in “my father’s” - is a hangover from the genitive case in Latin.

14세기경 Romance dialect 는 langues d’oïl (북쪽) 과 langues d’oc (남쪽) 으로 나뉜다. oc과 oïl은 모두 라틴어의 hoc (this, that) 이 변화한 말로 ‘yes’의 뜻으로 쓰였다.

In the north, for some reason, hoc was reduced to simple o, and qualifiers were added - o-je, o-nos, o-vos for ‘yes for me’, ‘yes for us’ and ‘yes for you’ This was complicated, so speakers eventually settled for the neutral o-il-‘yes for that’.

Dante Alighieri가 langue d’oc 라는 말을 처음으로 도입한 사람 중 하나.

p. 32
In her book Honni soit qui mal y pense, Henriette Walter points out that the historical developments of French and English are so closely related that anglophone students find it easier to read Old French than francophones do.

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p.41
The spelling of French evolved dramatically during this period (15세기경). Only Latin had a clear written code at the time, and the business of expressing vernacular sounds in writing was very new. … Until the twelfth century the writing of French had been very phonetic. In such a system, vit could mean either ‘eight’ or ‘he lives’, and vile was either ‘oil’ or ‘city’. This was find when only a few people read and wrote and when writing was not vital in day-to-day life, but that changed as the government and business grew. Suddenly, writing inconsistencies were creating misunderstandings, disputes and litigation.

This was why the lettrés, primarily notaries and clerks, started introducing unpronounced letters to distinguish words. H was a popular one – they decided to add it to vile and vit, so ‘oil’ and ‘eight’ came to be written hvile and hvit to distinguish them from vile (city) and vit (he lives). Latin etymology was an important source of new letters. That’s why a G was added to doi and vint, which became doigt (finger), from digitus and vingt (twenty) from viginti. Since chan could mean ‘field’ or ‘song’, it became champ (field), in imitation of the Latin campus, and chant (song), in imitation of cantus. This re-Latinization of French was partly the product of the snobbery of clerks, notaries and scholars, who thought that by adding Latin letters to French they would give it more dignity. However, they were not very coherent or consistent about it. To distinguish the number six from si (if), they added an X to make six, which conformed to the Latin sex. While they were at it, they added an X to di (ten), although this had no relation to the Latin decem. Some of these changes affected the pronunciation of words – such as six and dix, now pronounced with an S sound at the end to render the X, whereas before they used to be pronounced see and dee (linguists call this process orthographism).

In French and Not Otherwise

1515년에 왕위에 오른 François I 는 프랑스어의 성립에 중요한 역할을 했다.

p. 45
… in August 1539, that FRançois I signed the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. This document is often cited as a founding act of the French language. |}}

이 ordinance는 교회의 권력을 축소하고 왕의 권력을 강화하기 위한 목적으로 만들어졌는데,

p.46
Two of the 192 articles in the Ordinance, …, stated that from that moment, all rulings and administrative documents would be produced “en langage maternel françoys et non autrement” (in the French mother tongue and not otherwise). The “otherwise” referred primarily to Latin, the language of the Church. … In sixteenth-century linguistics, “mother tongue” is the language spoken at home, as opposed to the langage paternel (father’s tongue), which here was Latin …

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p.55
In some modern languages today, such as Spanish and Arabic, spellings are phonetic. English and French are both notable for having maintained etymological spellings … as writer Bill Bryson points out in The Mother tongue, there are fourteen ways to write the sound sh in English. … This is why French spellings, like English spellings, make little sense. Even German, with its complex grammar, is much more phonetic than either French or English.

여러 학자들이 spelling이 더 phonetic 하도록 바꾸자는 제안을 했으나 모두 실패했다.

p. 56
The reforms would perhaps have taken root if French had had fewer literate speakers and little tradition to speak of. But etymological spelling had already become the norm, and a norme is always very difficult to change. It took the Spanish language academy over a century and a half to make their language fully phonetic.

The Dawn of Purism

Malherbe -> Cardinal Richelieu -> Académie Française

한 가지 뜻을 표현하는 데에는 하나의 단어만 필요하다는 생각. 순수한 french라는 아이디어. 아카데미의 절대적인 위치.

Spread

Far from the Sun

프랑스는 많은 수의 ‘통역자’들을 아메리카 대륙에 보냈고, 그들은 곳곳을 탐험하여 이후의 정복자들에게 길을 열어주었다. 그래서 많은 지명과 이름들이 프랑스어에서 유래했다.

p. 102.
Settlers called snowshoes raquetts because they looked rather like the rackets of a new sport, le jeu de paume, French for “tennis” – a game borrowed from the French and named after the server’s call, “Tenetz! (take this!)”

The Language of Genius

Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français –Antoine De Rivarol

18세기 프랑스는 유럽에서 가장 큰 나라였고, 강한 군사력을 지녔으며, 삶의 질이 향상되고 있었다. 귀족과 일반인들 사이의 차이가 줄어들었다. 이러한 변화는 살롱문화를 탄생시켰다.

p.117
Slowly, manners and style, respect for culture, refinement and elevated ideas became the mark of the upper class. To shine in the salons one needed a sharp mind, a sharp tongue and a sharp quill. So language skill became a tool of social advancement.

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p.118.
The salons had different formats–some were weekly dinners, some were held many times a week and some were sporadic. They could include singing, theatre, dancing, debates or lively verbal sparring. Some specialized in the arts, writing or philosophy; others had different nights for different types of entertainment–serious, entertaining or frankly libidinous. But no matter what their form, salons sought one feature: esprit, a difficult concept to translate that is a combination of wit, cleverness, eloquent rhetoric and liveliness. … Only verbal dexterity, not social status, secured reputations in the salons. So, in a way, language acted as a great equalizer in French society, a role it still plays in modern France.

Revolutionary French

p.141.
When we lived in France, we were a little puzzled to hear people refer to the French language as an institution. … institution really refers to anything that has been instituted: established, set up or put in place. And that’s exactly how the French came to see their language–as a fixed and immovable part of the state apparatus. This view goes to the heart of one of the most fundamental cultural differences between English speakers and the French. The British tend to understate their institutions; their constitution is unwritten and their legal system is not codified into a whole. Strangely, their attitude towards language reflects this. The English language has rules (and many exceptions), but English speakers downplay the rules, especially when they are comparing their language to French. The French, meanwhile, proclaim and embrace their institutions with all their officialdom–and their language with all its rules.

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p144.
When the nation was being threatened, language became a means of defining the enemy.

New Sanctuaries

프랑스의 가장 성공적인 식민지 였던 Saint-Domingue는 훗날 Haiti가 된다. 이곳에서 태어난 가장 유명한 작가가 바로 AlexandreDumas. 그의 할아버지는 Montecristo라고 불리는 곳 근처에 플랜테이션을 소유하고 있었다.

French without Faute

Malherbe의 시대로부터 내려온 purism은 지대한 영향을 끼쳤다.

p. 179.
la faute (fault). A faute in French is not just a mistake (which is literally translated as une méprise). Faute has a moral stigma, contrary to erreur, which is more neutral. … In the seventeenth century, language purists gave the connotation of sin to mistakes in speech or writing, and it became common to speak of a faute de goût (error in taste). … It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, when the French built their education system around a very strong purist doctrine, that the stigma of fautes was implanted in the minds of millions of French speakers, where it remains to this day.

프랑스에서는 la dictée (받아쓰기) 를 매우 중요하게 취급한다.

p. 181
Francophones constantly remark on, or correct, one another’s speech and writing. Where language is concerned, they can demonstrate a righteousness that is quite similar to the way the Puritans confronted the notion of sin.

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p.182
Purism also gave francophones the idea that the language is its spelling.

1878년 경 사람들은 steam boat를 un vapeur라고 부르고 있었고, steam 자체는 une vapeur라고 불렀다. 아카데미는 이 용례를 허용하지 않다가 1935년에야 사전에 등재했다. 하지만 이때는 이미 증기선이 사라진 뒤.

Purism, 그리고 이와 엮여 있는 보수성은 다른 어느 나라보다 큰 낭만주의의 폭발을 가져왔다. (2세기 정도 늦었지만)

핵심적인 인물이 Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo는 The Hunchback Of Notre Dame을 Notre Dame 성당을 지키기 위해 썼다. 프랑스 혁명 이후 노트르담 대성당은 무시당했고, 여기 쓰인 돌을 다른 곳에 재활용 하려는 움직임도 있었다. 고딕 예술은 추한 것으로 여겨졌다.

p.188
The first three chapters of the novel are a plea to preserve this monument of Gothic architecture–in Hugo’s words, a “gigantic book of stone,” which he, as a Romantic, found beautiful.

Victor Hugo는 argot (slang) 을 과감히 도입하여 bon usage의 전통을 허물기 시작했다. (그 전에는 작품속에 나오는 모든 인물이 고상한 언어를 썼다고.)

Tool for an Empire

p. 205.
In the nineteenth century, France’s attitude towards the missionaries was in complete contradiction … The Republic was radically antireligious, but it encouraged missionary work abroad. … The reason was simple: Even with the subsidies, missions cost less than public schools. As language teachers, missionaries got better results than regular teachers did because they tended to learn the local languages where they worked. … In effect, they applied Jean Dard’s mutual method.

Lost Worlds

p.222
Another reason that French Canadians and Acadians survived was that they discouraged intermarriage, … though, they did practise it selectively. In situations where they felt they could assimilate English speakers, they actually encouraged it. …

Their abundant birth rate and tendency to avoid disadvantageous intermarriage helped create a quasi-tribal indentity among French Canadians and Acadians. … their fascination with genealogy. Almost all old-stock French Canadians and Acadians know the first name of their ancestor who first set foot on the continent, which is impressive, since many arrived in the seventeenth century. …

As far as the French Canadians’ remarkable birth rate was concerned, there was nothing spontaneous about it. French Canadians’ and Acadians’ sturdiest and most resilient institution, the Catholic Church, help up as models families of ten, fifteen or even eighteen children. The Church was the central pillar of French-Canadian society from 1763 up until the 1960s.

Adaptation

The power of attraction

The invention of cultural deplomacy

A new playing field

Choosing french

Rocking the boat

The francophonie

Change

The struggle for standards

p. 382.
The real question is: How do the purists keep their sway over the masses of French speakers, even outside France? The answer is that almost all francophones today believe in a sort of golden age of French, a time when everyone who spoke French knew how to conjugate the passé simple and could spontaneously coin French rhymes … They imagine that the time to be the era of Louis XIV, … At any rate, it’s pure fiction.

In the supposed golden age of French, the time of Louis XIV, three-quarters of French people could not speak French fluently, if at all. Among those who did, only a fraction spoke “pure” French. The rest undoubtedly spoke with great variation and approximations.

Protecting the future

p. 406.
The French Frenchify borrowings from English quickly and spontaneously, usually without any help from language commissions or the French Academy. An older example of this process is the French word for computer, ordinateur. It was a creation of IBM France, which in 1954 found it had a problem with the word computer in French. Said with a French accent, the syllables of computer sound like a combination of the two worst possible insults in the French language: con (cunt) and pute (whore). A professor of Latin at the Sorbonne, Jacques Perret, proposed the term ordinateur, a religious term referring to God as the one who imposed order on the universe. IBM trademarked it, but the word caught on and became a generic term

Global hesitations

The unwritten chapters