CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS ON THE
SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION OF FRENCH
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in
Linguistics
by
Marianne Patalino Adams
June, 1981
The Thesis of Marianne Patalino Adams is approved:
Professor Paul Kirk
Professor Alvin Ford, Chairperson
California State University, Northridge
ii
PREFACE
~he
purpose of this thesis is threefold.
First, to
contribute to our understanding of some of. the external
ncin-linguistic factors involved in linguistic change.
Second, to show how an examination of 16th-century grammarians' deScriptions of speech sounds can contribute to
our knowledge of the phonology of the period.
Third, to
contribute to our understanding of the evolution of attitudeS towards the French language and towards the history
of linguistic study in general.
The Renaissance was chosen because it was a time of
intense political, social, and intellectual transformation
and the consequences for language were important, and because it was then that
the
~odern
indiv~duals
first began to study
languages in addition to Latin and Greek.
It
is therefore the first time in which we have significantly
numerous direct written observations dealing specifically
with the indigenous languages.
While the material presented does not exhaust
th~
available literature, every effort has been made to make
it representative of the kinds of attitudes and opinions
to be found.
Rather than an exhaustive examination of
every 16th-century phoneme, this study has focused on
those sounds ·undergoing relatively rapid change, thus·
giving rise to diversity and controversy.
iii
These, it will
be seen, were numerous.
iv
ACKNmvLEDGMENTS
Shyness and a feeling that my own· literary skills
were inadequate to convey strength of feeling had at first
persuaded me not to write any formal acknowledgments.
But gratitude deeply felt begs for expression and by its
intensity cannot be easily held down.
I therefore most
gladly take this opportunity to say thank you, first of
all to my husband, Jim, for his unfailing encouragement,
for proofreading every word I wrote and making valuable
~uggestions
and corrections, for suffering my complaints
and standing by me, and for making this thesis and my
M.A. degree quite literalli possible.
I also most warmly
thank my chairman and teacher, Professor Alvin Ford, for
his kindness, guidance, and generosity with his time, and
Profess6rs Iris Shah and Paul Kirk for their helpful editing, and who together with Professor Ford have made being
a student of
linguistic~
at CSUN an unexpected pleasure.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
iii
Preface
Acknowledgments
v
vii
Abstract
Chapters
l.
The French Language in
the Renaissance
1
2.
Orthography
17
3.
Pronunciation
46
Conclusion
94
Bibliography
98
vi
ABSTRACT
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS ON THE
SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION OF FRENCH
by
Marianne Patalino Adams
Mast~r
of Arts in
Lin~uistics
Part I of this thesis shows how external nonlinguistic events such as political unification, improved
communications, national and linguistic pride, printing,
the prescriptions o£ grammarians; and the conscious
choices of a growing class of literate speakers became in
the Renaissance important factors influencing both the
direction of linguistic change and the rate of that
change.
Part II presents the debates raging in the 16th century concerning the spelling of French and shows how the
inclinations of 16th-century writers and printers were in
large part responsible for the spelling system of modern
vii
French.
Part III brings together representative statements of
16th,...century grammarians and phoneticii:ms concerning the
pronunciation of French-to show that descriptions of
speech sounds made before the days of tape recordings can,
however, contribute to our ability to reconstruct the
phonology of earlier periods.
By the 16th century, spelling had become conventional
and almost everybody was writing letters for sounds they
were not pronouncing.
Thus, traditional spellings tell us
little about actual pronunciation.
At the same time
learned in£luences were beginning to affect more and more
speakers creating conflict between the spontaneous evolution of language and the conservative forces which resist
change.
The resulting diversity noted in the various seg-
ments of the population and irregularities in forms interfere
'PTi th
the reliability of classical reconstruction
techniques, further increasing the importance of the grammarians' descriptions.
It will be seen that in many cases
these descriptions constitute our primary source of information as to when and for whom certain changes occurred,
while in other instances observations are scarce, unreliable, or clearly in error and we must depend largely on
other available evidence, such as rhymes and misspellings.
viii
Chapter 1
THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN THE RENAISSANCE
Historical Background
To precipitate the French Renaissance was not exactly what Charles VIII had in mind when he initiated the
Italian campaigns in 1494.
The effect of the campaigns,
however, was to do iust that.
Though of little conse-
quence in themselves, the social and cultural impact of
the military escapades was far-reaching.
di~covered
In Italy, France
a more refined and sophisticated way of life,
intellectual and artistic activity of
a
new sort, and the
Classical world shed of centuries of medieval
interpreta~
Inspired by envy, curiosity, and excitement, France
tion.
turned to Italy and through Italy to antiquity.
New
ideas poured into the country; everything Italian carne
into vogue; and Greco-Roman philosophy, art, and culture
inspired artists and writers to imitation and to creativity.
France was ready for the change.
A rapid recqvery
was being made from two centuries of devastation:
the
Hundred Y~ars War, domestic turmoil, the ravages of the
plague which had decimated half of the population of
Europe, widespread famine, terror, and depression were at
an end.
The economy was beginning to improve.
Labor
was scarce and could command higher wages, and a new
1
2
bourgeois class was growing in importance.
Out of the
debris of the feudal system came a stronger monarchy.
A
more unified country turned its back on the Middle Ages.
Any division between periods is always somewhat arbitrary.
Still, a number of forces were at work at this
time to produce decided, if not necessarily abrupt,
changes:
rapid advances in
science~
and technology, the
introduction of printing, the growth of nations and of
national and linguistic pride and rivalry, the desire to
raise the status of French, the increasing use of the
vernacular for "serious" matters, the growing·be1ief that
language could and should be regulated.
These were not
isolated phenomena, but inseparable one from the other
and from all of the other political, cultural, and intellectual transformations of the Renaissance.
And while
it may be that the connections between what happens in
society and what happens linguistically can seldom if ever
be overlooked, in the 16th century it is almost impossible
to do so.
"Immortal God!" writes Erasmus in 1517, "What a
world I see dawning!" (Santillana, p. 17).
Surely some-
thing quite different was happening.
Indeed, what we call the Renaissance is precisely
that great outburst of energy, creativity, and human
achievement that spread across Europe from the 14th
through the 16th centuries.
A thirst for direct know-
ledge and free exercise of reason meant a rejection of
3
medieval scholasticism with its .vain formal disputes and
pursuit of a logic conceived and designed to serve the
faith.
In contrast to the Church's well-ordered arrange-
ment of knowledge, Renaissance systems of thought were
far from coherent.
As new ideas of man, nature, and the
universe were constructed, the intellectual climate was
transformed, and out of the turbulence came the foundations of modern thought and science.
The consequences,
even for language, cannot be underestimated.
Emulation of Antiquity
Renaissance French is repeatedly described as exhuberant, inspired, creative, imaginative, spirited, expansive, vigorous, vital, fertile, and so forthj the very
qualities the next century would condemn as excessive,
disorderly, confused, inaccurate, undisciplined, negligent, outrageous, and chaotic.
While facile interpreta-
tions .of the past can mislead, clich€s do often arise out
of truth.
Be it out of creative inSpiration or youthful
rejection of outmoded traditions, or both, the century
did, indeed, turn its back on the cumbersome intellectual
machinery of the Middle Ages and did manifest an undeniable urge. to come ever closer to the fresh, true-, "essential" world of antiquity, a world suddenly emerging in a
new guise, unburdened of centuries of encrusted anachronisms.
\vhile the Church and the universities continued to
4
cling to empty rhetoric and vain and futile exercises of
logic, writers and poets immersed themselves in GrecoRoman tradition, revived ancient forms of poetry, exalted
natural pagan wisdom, discovered delights in nature, a
relish for life, and encouraged everybody else to do likewise:
Ly donques, et rely premierement (8 Po~te
futur), fueillete de main nocturne et journelle,
les exemplaires Grecz et Latins, puis me laisse
toutes ces vieilles poesies fran~oises aux
Jeux Floraux de Toulouze, et au Puy de Rouan:
comme Rondeaux, Ballades, Virelaiz, Chantz
Royaulx, Chansons et autres telles epiceries,
qui corrompent le goust de nostre Langue et
ne servent sinon ~ porter tesmoignage de nostre
ignorance .... Chante moy ces Odes, incogneues
encor' de la Muse Fran~oise d'un Luc bien accord~ au son de la Lyre Grecque et Romaine ....
la solicitude des jeunes hommes, comme l'amour,
les vins libres et toute bonne chere.
(Du
Bellay, Deffence, I, 38; ed. M.-L.)
Enrichment of the Vocabulary
In the process of imitating, assimilating, translating, and exalting the classics, the lexicon grew enormously.
Advances in science and technology, moreover, placed
_ additional demands on the language.
While national
languages were establishing themselves, they were not
yet ideally suited to the expression of abstract thought,
and their gradual adaptation to the new uses to which
they were being put can be observed throughout the
Renaissance.
New terms, if only because they were new,
could do a better job of expressing unfamiliar concepts
5
and subtle nuances of meaning than could older, popular,
well-worn expressions with their looser definitions and
completely different sets of associations.
Many scholars
today (see, for example, Brunot, II, 168-172, 221-2; von
Wartburg, pp. 136-142) say that, had one looked hard
enough, Old French words could have been found to do the
job as well.
But to me; expanding the vocabulary facili-
tated the expression of complex meanings with a minimum of
word1ness and explanation.
And yet, if expanding the
vocabulary was indeed a good idea, goOd ideas do have a
way of getting carried to absurd
e~tremes,
and the 16th
ceritury, in this, as in so many other respects, was no
·exception.
Borrowing from the Classical languages was not unique
to the Renaissance.
The use of Latin had always been, and
has, in fact, remained, a vital, inexhaustible, and easy
source of new words.
But while the Latinisms of the
Middle Ages were a natural consequence of translating back.
and forth between the two languages, in the 16th century
the new additions were to a great extent the result of a
deliberate and· conscious effort· to improve the language.
To be sure, translators continued to introduce new words
from the classi'cs they were translating, but many others
sought to. enrich the language by means other than Latin
or Greek formations.
Leading this campaign were the poets of the Pl~iade.
6
French is capable, they asserted, of producing works as
great as those of Latin and Greek, but
ne~ds
to be
embel~
lished to be of a dignity equal to these ambitions.
this end they revived archaic terms, sought out
To
region~
alisms and occupational terms, and created new compounds
out of
nativ~
elements.
An abundance of approximate syno-
nyms was thought necessary to express subtle shades of
meaning and satisfied the Renaissance desire for variety
and richness.
Du Bellay devotes an entire chapter to the
need for new words (Deffence II, 6), and Ronsard succinctly recapitulates the new philosophy when he writes, "Plus
nous
~urons
de mots en nostre langue, plus elle sera
parf ai te" (VI , 4 6 0) , and:
Ie vy que des Fran~ois le langage trop bas
A terre se trainoit sans ordre ny compas:
Andonques pour hausser rna langue maternelle,
Indonte du labeur, ie trauaillay pour elle,
Ie fis des mots nouueaux, ie r'appelay les vieux,
Si bien que son reriom ie poussay iusqu'aux Cieux.
Ie fys d'autre fa£on que n'auoyent les antiques
Vocables composez et phrases poetiques,
Et mis la Po~sie en tel ordre. qu'apres
Le Franx_ois fut egal aux Remains et aux Grecs.
(V,
'~Deffence
425)
et Illustration"
While developing the resources of French arose on the
one hand out of an obsession with enrichment it also to a
large degree came as a reaction against what was seen as
excessive foreign influence.
Imitation and emulation were
being replaced by a new attitude toward French, that of
7
recognizing French as a language capable of rivaling Latin,
Greek, and
I~alian.
Prominent writers came to its defense
and contributed to its growing prestige.
Geofroy Tory was
one of the first to defend the purity of French and to
condemn,les "esc-qmeurs" de Latin:
Quat Esclimeurs de Latin .disent Despumon la
verbocination latiale, & transfreton la Sequane
au dilucule & crepuscule, puis deambulon par
les Quadriuies & Platees de Lutece, & comme
verisimiles amorabundes captiuon la beniuolence
de lomnigene & omniforme sexe feminin.
me semble quilz ne se moucquent seullement de leurs
semblables, mais de leur mesme Personne ... Si
telz Forgeurs ne sot Ruffiens/ ie ne les estime
gueres meilleurs.
Pencez quilz ont vne grande
grace/ ~uant ilz disent apres boyre, quiz ont
le Cerueau tout encornimatibule/ & emburelicoque
dug tas de mirilifiques & triquedondaines, dung
tas de gringuenauldes, £ guylleroches qui les
fatrouillet incessammet?
(Champ Fleury, "Aux
Lecteurs") 1
A decade later Dolet writes:
... il en fault dire briefuement, & prifu~ment,
sans aulcune ostentation de scauoir, & sans
fricass~e de Grec, & Latin.
I'appelle fricass~e,
une mixtion superflue de.ces deux langues:
qui
se faict par sottelets glorieux:
& non par gens
resolus, & pleins de bon iugement.
(Les Accents;
rpt. Beaulieux, p. 124)
Throughout his famous Deffence (1549),
Du Bellay ex-
presses dismay that "les etrangers ne prisent nostre
langue comme nous faisons les leur," and encourages his
fellow artists to use French over Latin and to dignify
their language by enriching it.and rendering it illustrious.
1
Henri Estienne, the century's most prolific
.
.
Cf. Pantagruel, ch. VI, where Ra9elais develops. this
theme in his characterization of the "ecolier limousin."
8
linguistic patriot, went even further in his celebration
of French.
In Deux Dialogues (1578), he den6unces the
large number of Italianisms entering the language and the
Italian influence at Court:
"-Pour quarante ou cinquante
Italiens qu'on y voyoit autrefois, maintenant on y voit
vne petite Italie"- (p. 541), and asserted the superiority
of French in its ability to create new words, a
he
the~e
had begun earlier in Conformit~ (1565), where he condemned
those who:
... empruntent de leurs voisins ce qu 1 ils
trouveroient chez eux .... Et encores faisonsnous souvent bieri pis, quand nous laissons,
sans Sfavoir pourquoy, les mots qui sont de
nostre creu et que nous avons en main, pour
nous servir de ceux que nous avons ramassez
d 1 ailleurs .... pourquoy ne ferions-nous plustost
fueill~ter nos Romans [Old French poems] et
desrouiller force beaux mots taht simples que
composez qui ont pris rouille pour avoir este
si long temps hors d 1 usage?
(p. 22)
Peletier had said much the same thing in Dialogu¢ (1555):
Car qu ~t il question d¢ mandier les moz
d 1 alheurs, puis qu¢ nous an auons d 1 autr¢s a
notr¢ port¢, et nommemant quasi d¢ mt_m¢ moul¢?
E si on m¢ dit quiz n¢ sont pas si propr¢s:
j¢ di qu¢ si, par c¢ qu¢ l 1 usag¢ les a apropriez
.... Tel¢s. g 1 ans n¢ pans¢t pas la vrti¢ fa<;~m
d 1 anrichir la Langu¢ Fran~ocs¢. Car. par reur
manier¢ d¢ f~r¢ on 1 1 estim¢roet tousjours
soufreteus¢ et qu 1 EC,l¢ n¢ s¢rott r¢uetue qu¢
des plum¢s d 1 autrui.
(p. 10 4)
1
In Conformite', Estienne describes a host of peculiar
similarities
betw~en
French and Greek, proving to him
that since, "-la langue Grecque est·la roine des langues,
et que si la perfection se doibt cercher en aucune,
en ceste-lil qu 1 elle se trouvera,"- it follows that,
c
1
est
9
~pareillement
la larigue Franfoise, pour approcher plus
pres de celle qui a acquis la perfe6tion, doibt estre
estimee excellente par-dessus les autres'' (p. 18).
Which
French is Estienne talking about?
Du pur et simple, n'ayant rien de fard ni
d'affectation, lequel monsieur le Courtisan
n'a point encores chang~~ sa guise, et qui
ne tient rien d'emprunt des langues modernes.
(p. 19)
/
'
'
He continues his campaign in Precellence (1579), proclaiming
Fr~nch
superior to all other modern languages and
second only to Greek:
Car tout-ainsi que quand vne dame auroit
acquis la reputation d'estre perfaicte et accomplie en tout ce qu'on appelle bonne grace,
celle qui approcheroit le plus pres de ~es fa£ons
auroit ~e second lieu: . ainsi, ayant tenu pour
confesse que la langue grecque est la plus
gentile et de meilleure grace qu'aucune autre,
et puis ayant monstr~ que le langage Fran£ois
ensuit iolies, gentiles et gaillardes fa9ons
Grecques de plus pres qu'aucun autre: ii me
sembloit q~e ie pouuois faire seurement rna
conclusion qu'il meritoit de tenir le second
lieu entre tous les langages qui ont iamais
este, et le premier entre ceux qui sont
auiourd'huy.
(p. 3~)
Of course, Estienne proved very little, his inhaustible and exhausting supply of examples notwithstanding,
but his influence was widespread and undeniably important
to the emergence of that particularly Gallic infatuation
with mother tongue and country.
But foreign elements continued nonetheless to infiltrate French.
Indeed, even the most outspoken of critics
did not completely escape Latinisms in their writing, so
10
deeply engrained and unconscious was the habit of using
them.
Still, the new attitudes were important in the
struggle between French and Latin.
As writers became
conscious of the resources of the vernacular, they began
to use it for "serious" purposes and encouraged others to
do the same.
An important precedent.in the U:se of the
French was Calvin's Institution de la religion chr~tienne
(Latin, 1536; French, 1541).
Prior to this, works of a
metaphysical or philosophical nature had been in the exelusive
dom~ih
of Latin, the attitude being that if you
had something important to say,-you said it in that
language.
Modern languages were thought to be subject
to change, but Latin, the language of the Church, had to
be inviolate.
in this
Montaigne, by choosing to write in French
w~ll-known
and often quoted passage, was clearly
not writing for posterity:
"J'escris man livre 'a peu d'hommes et ~ peu
d I annees.. Si '2. I eust este !::ne matiere de dure'e I
il l'eust fallu commettre a un langage plus
ferme.
Selon la variation continuelle qui a
suivy le nostre jusques ~ cette heure, qui peut
esperer que sa forme presente soit en usage,
d I icy
cinquante ans: _Il eSCQUle taus les
jours de nos mains et depuis que je vis s'est
altere de moitit. Nous disons qu'il est
cette heure parfaict. Autant en diet du sien
chaque siecle.
(Essais, III, ix)
a
a
But when Peletier and Geofroy Tory chose to write in
French, they expressed an entirely new attitude toward
their language:
I'escri en ... langue mate~nell¢
Et tasch¢ a la mettr¢ en valeur
11
Affin de la rendr¢ eternelle
Comm¢ les vieux ont fait la leur
Et soutien que c 1 est grand malheur
Que son propre bien mespriser
Pqur 1 1 autruy tant fauoriser.
(Peletier, Oeuvres Poetiques; rpt.
Catach, p. 100)
Ien eusse traicte & escript en latin, comme ie
porrois bien faire, se croy ie, & c~me on peut
cognoistre aux petitz oeuures latins que iay
faict . Tprimer & mis deuant les yeulx des
. bons
estudlans tat en metre quen prose. Mals volat.
quelque peu decorer nostre langue Francoise,
& afin que auec gens de bCS'nes lettres le peuple
cO'mun en puisse vser, ien
veulx escrire
en Fran.
r
cois.
(Tory, Champ Fleury, fol. 1 )
~
~
The acceptance of French as a viable language for
science and philosophy as well as literature didn 1 t happen
all at once, and certainly not all in the 16th century,
but it was inevitable.
The·declining power of the Roman
Church facilitated the rejection of Latin as its vehicle
of expression.
The establishment of independent modern
nations meant ultimately the victory of modern idioms, and
the use by the state of a language everybody knew facilitated political unification and control.
The spread of
literacy, moreover, and the new business of printing books
~ere
at least as influential, as publishers, writers, and
booksellers sought to take advantage of the larger market
for books in the vernacular.
Since the establishment of
the first Mainz press in 1457 printing houses had spread
out over Europe with extraordinary rapidity, and still
printers could not keep up with what must have indeed
seemed like an insatiable curiosity and demand for
12
knowledge.
Not everyone shared the enthusiasm for French.
Latin
was still primarily the language of science, education,
medicine, philosophy, the other "important" matters.
But
the belief that French was now adequate for all purposes,
or c6uld be made so, had been established.
By 1550,
Meigret feels quite able to say:
Or ~t il qu notre lang' tt aojoui~huy si enrichie
par la proftssion t experi~n~e dt'langes Latin'
e Grt_cqe,
q'il n'~t po'ltd'art, ne siE(_n<2e si
difflci~ ~ subtile, ne mtme ~ete tant haote
theolojie (qoe q'elle luy so~t deffendue, pourtant la peinel d~ la coulpe d'aotruy) d5t tlle
ne puysse trttter amplement, ~ elegammtnt.
Parqot il nou faot coftsser q tll'a tn so~ qelq'
ordre, par le qel nou' pouuons distinger It'
parties dont sont copozez tou' langajes, e la
l r-v
reduir' a qelqes reg les. . ( Grammtre, fol. 2
)
By the end of the century, French had acquired a new
status.
It was being cared for, and there was a growing
sense of responsibility about using it.
If French were
to rival Latin, it had to.be "perfect," it was thought,
and it had to have a consistent set of rules as Latin did.
Establishing a Standard
A necessary step in raising French to the status of
the Classical languages was to provide it with a grammar:
Car l~ caus¢ qu'un¢ prolacion chang¢, tt qu'un¢
Langu¢ n't_t pas ancor¢s v¢nu¢ a son d¢gre d¢
p~rfeccion e consistanc¢ .... N¢ voions nous pas
d~ la Langu¢ Latin¢ d¢puis qu'tl¢ a ete redige¢
an form¢: c'Et_t a dir¢, d¢puis qu'on an a f~t
un¢ Grammer¢, d¢ 1aquel¢ depand l'Ortograf¢,
comm¢ chacun set: qu'el¢ n'a point pris d¢
chang¢mant?
(Peletier, p. 86)
13
It seemed to have been taken for granted that modern
languages did not have a grammar, and that unlike Latin
and Greek, could not be reduced to a set of definite and
dependable rules:
Combien qe d'une pouure consideracion la
plusgran' partie de no' Franfo~s soet ~n fantazie
qe la pou:::-suyte.d'une gramm~re sottttr<?P diffi<(il'
prE(' q'1mposs1bl' ccn nostre lange:
Je n'ETn
n'ey pas pourtant si dezespere qe je n'aye f~t
qelqe dilij~n~e d'~n £herther qelqes moyes, ~
rtgles.
(Meigret, Gramme.~~; fol. 2r)
r
Reference works (dictionaries, spelling books, grammars)
were non-existent at the beginning of the century, nor
were there any established or accepted standards to keep
practices uniform.
But a need for rules and for guidance
was beginning to be felt.
One of the first to express
this need was Geofroy Tory:
0 Deuotz Amateurs de bonnes Lettres.
Peust a
Dieu que quelque Noble cueur semployast a mettre
& ordoner par Reigle nostre Lagage Francois. Ce
seroit moyen que maints Milliers dhommes se
euerturoient a souuent vser de belles & bonnes
parolles.
Sil ny est mys & ordonne on trouuera
que de Cinquante Ans en Cinquante Ans la La
langue Francoise, pour la plus grande part, sera
changes & peruertie.
Le Langage dauiourdhuy est
change en mille facons du Langage qui estoit
il y a Cinquante Ans ou enuiron .... Parquoy ie
vous prie donon nous tous courage les vngz aux
aultres, & nous esueillon a .la purifier. Toutes
choses ont eu commancement. Quat lung traictera
des Lettres, & laultre des Vocales, vng Tiers
viendra qui declar~ra les Dictions.
& puis
encores vng aultre suruiendra qui ordonera la
belle Oraison.
Par ainsi on trouuera que peu
a peu on passera le chemin, si bien quon viedra
aux g~ans Champs Poetiques et Rhetoriques plains
de belles, bonnes, & odoriferetes fleurs de parler & dire honn:estement & facillement tout ce
qu6n vouldra.
( "Aux Lecteurs")
14
.
~
S1l est vray que toutes choses ont eu comancement, il est certain que ia langue Grecque,
semblablement la Latine ont este quelque temps
inqultes & sans Reigle·de Grammaire, comme est
de present la nostre, mais les bons Anciens
vertueux & studieux ont prins peine, & mis
diligece a les reduyre & mettre a certaine
Reigle, pour en vser honnestement a escripre
& rediger les bonnes Sciences en memoire, au
prouffi t & honneur du bien public.
( fol. 4v)
Tbry's influence was also substantial in the transformation of French typography between 1530 and 1540 from
the older Gothic and Italic characters which printing had
inherited from the manuscript tradition to the clearer
Roman type.
He was also the first to recommend the use of
accentsi the apostrophe, and the cedilla, and to use quotation marks.
But it was John Palsgrave, French tutor at the Court
of H·enry VIII, who wrote the first French grammar,
L'Esclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530).
In his
dedication to King Henry, he writes:
If [we have] by our diligent labours nowe at
the last, brought the frenche tong under any
rules certayn and preceptes grammaticall, lyke
as the other three parfite tonges be [Latin,
Greek, Hebrew], we have nat onely done the thyng
wiche by your noble graces progenitours, of all
antiquite so moche hath ben desyred, ... but
also .. ~done the thynge whiche, by the testimony
of the e~cellent clerke, maister Geffray Troy
[sic] de Bourges ... in his boke intituled Champfleury, was never yet amongst them of that
·contrayes selfe hetherto so moche as ones
effectually attempted.
(p. vii)
Several grammars followed Palsgrave's, but until the 17th
century his remained the most thorough treatment, though
somewhat archaic, being based largely on written forms.
15
The new gram,mars enjoyed considerable.popularity.
Moving up the social ladder was becoming a possibility and
individuals were beginning to see advantages to learning
to speak and write like their "betters."
And while the
idea of sending everybody to school was still far from
universal, the middle class was demanding, and increasingly able to pay for, an. educa.tion.
Go6d usage, correct pronunciation, and spelling became issues.
The problem to be faced, if good usage were
to be acquired, or prescribed, was to find out·just what
good u:sage was.
While a number of non-linguistic events
had come together to make the crystalization of a standard
and the regulation and control of the language possibilities, no one was quite sure just what the standards were
or ought to
be~
The lively, often bitter, struggle to
figure it all out met with little success at first, and
uncertainty prevailed throughout the century.
The Free Development of Ftench Draws to a Close
But what was particularly important in all this
activity was that for the first time external and what
might be considered artificial forces began to exert a
major influence on the natural evolution of the language:
the use of judgment and choice, of
ate selectivity, the
dict~tes
consc~ous
and deliber-
of fashion, the prestige of
certain social groups, the growing reading public, and
16
the
rol~
of the printing press in spreading and standard-
izing knowledge, were factors which interrupted, arrested,
modified, and even reveised the natural inclination of
language to change.
Their consequences for pronunciation,
in France perhaps more than anywhere else, cannot be overlooked.
As well can be expected, such events were of concern
to only a $mall portion of sixteenth-century society, and
while the speech of the educated classes came increasingly
under the influence of grammarians and of spelling pronunciations, that of the majority of the people continued
~valve
more or less spontaneously.
t~
Out of the widening
breach between these two tendencies, the popular and the
learned, arose much of the fluctuation and conflict that
typified 16th-century spelling and pronunciation.
Chapter 2
ORTHOGRAPHY
The Role of the Medieval Clerks
By the 16th century, orthography was no longer a
reliable guide to pronunciation.
Rapid changes in society
had gone hand in hand with rapid changes in pronunciation,
but the spelling inherited was that of the 12th century,
which having become fixed by traditidn failed to show
subsequent phonological developments.
Writers continued
to epell with the letters they were used to long after
those letters ceased having anything to do with the
sounds people made.
f!
To the superfluous letters left from the leveling of
pronunciation were added many others by the medieval legal
practitioners who, paid by the line and the number of
letters per line, found almost any pretext sufficient to
Latinize or
otherwis~
embellish their
writing~
The legal
pro£ession's preoccupation with avoiding ambiguity at all
costs was doubtless also a contributing factor; short
imprecise words were replaced with longer compounds and
derivations based on Latin, and letters were added to
distinguish homonyms or to help distinguish letters which
medieval script often rendered indistinguishable ("peut"
and "un," for example, were written "peult" and "ung" to
prevent their being misread ·as "pent" and the numeral
. 17
18
"vii," or perhaps even the participle "vu")
2
Peletier was aware of and attempted to expose the
motives·which led to the excessive letters the 16th century had acquired:
E.si l'Ecritur~ s'tt einsi muitiplie~ a rtson
d~ l'abondanc¢ des proc~s, ou les procts a
rtson d~ tant d'Ecritur¢s, c~ n'tt ici 1~ lieu
d¢ 1~ dir~. Mts quo~ qu¢ so~t, ceus qui suiu~t
1~ pales, sau¢t ecrir~ plus Ieger¢mant, e plus
pratiqtf¢mant, qu¢ les autr~s.
E leur tt bien
metier, vu la grand' press¢ qu'iz ont, pour
satiftr¢ a tant d¢ pled~urs.
Puis la lucratiu¢
qui an vient, leur a assoupli la mein, d~ tel~
facon qu¢ les Fran(oys amport~ront tousjou.rs
l~Lpris par sus tout~s nacions du Mond¢, s'il
tt question d¢ vittc~ d~ mein. Mes vo~ci 1~
point: qu'iz ecriu~t si leger~mant qu'a grand'
pein¢ ont iz lo~sir d~ distinguer un "o," d'au~c
un "r": tant s an faut qu'iz fac¢t discrecion
d'un "n" d'au~c un "u." Or ~;til, qu'eus voyans
qu¢ la soudein~te d~ leur meln, etott caus~
·
qu'on pr¢no~t souuant l~tr¢s pour l~tr¢s: iz
i ont afete e antr~mE[le d'autr¢s, pour
obuier a l'inconueniant.
Comm~ an quelqu¢s
moz, qu'a aleguez Monsieur D¢B~z¢, iz ont
mis ou "1," ou "b," ou "d," einsi qu¢ 1¢
cas 1¢ r¢qu¢rott.
(Dialogu¢, p. 131)
2 confusion was most apt to arise in words containing
a number of successive minims, the vertical strokes of
."i"'s, "m"'s, "n"'s, and "u"'s.
Thus aword like "minim"
would tend to app~ar in manuscript writing something like
"mni.mm." This helps to explain a number of innovations
and apparent peculiarities such as the dot on "i," first
added in the 11th century, the tail on "j," until the
17th century a mere variant of "i," the unetymological
"h" of "huile," "huit," and the "wh" from older "hw" in
such English words as "what," "when," "where," and "why,"
as well as the "g" of "ung" and the "1" in "peult" and
the like.
·
19
Theodore de B~~e, a particip~nt in Peletier's Dialogu¢, 3
and supporter of traditional spellings, had earlier defended the very same practice:
... comhle, pour "deus, veus, saus," iz liront
"dens, vens, sans 11 ; car chacun set bien qu¢ la
l~tr¢ vulguer¢ des Fran£o~s qu'iz ap~l¢t l~tr¢
courant¢, pour ttr¢ fort leger¢ e hatiu¢, n¢ ·
ftt point d¢ distinccion d¢ la voyel¢ "u"
.
auec·la consonant¢ "n," qui t.t d¢ fE(:rmer l'un¢
par 1¢ bas B l'autr¢ par haut, c¢ qu¢ les
Fran2o~s n'ont lo~sir d'obs~ruer an ecriuant
couranunant.
(p. 46)
.
Another partisan of
11
le vieux orthographe," Estienne
Pasquier, a foremost 16th-century lawyer, defended and
explained the spelling "ung":
Il n'est pas qu'il n'y ait quelque raison
en vne orthographe que nous auons veue autrefois en ce mot d'"vn"que l'on escriuoit avec
vn "g" au bout, lettre qui sembloit du tout
superflue, de quelque coste que l'on voulut
tourner sa pensee.
Mais cela aduint pour autant
qu'au parauant !'impression, aux liures que
l'on escriuoit
la main, on cottoit les nombres
par leurs figures I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII et
ainsi des autres suiuants:
et quand on commenta
de les cotter par leurs noms on adiousta
l'"vn" le 11 g" pour aster l'equiuoque qui eut
peu aduenir entre ce mot et le nombre de "sept"
repn{sente par sa figure de VII.
( "Lettre ~·. ·
Ramus," Oeuvres, II, col. 61)
a
a .
3
Dialogu¢ is set up as a conversation among friends
(except for the first 27 pages, which comprise Peletier's
"Apologi~ a Lou1s Meigrtt").
I have been unable to discover whether or not. the conversation actually took
place, but many similar ones at least must have been going on at the time in educated society.
De Beze, a supporter of the Reformation, later
escaped to Geneva where he wrote many books iri defense
of his faith.
He also wrote De FrancicaeLinguae Recta
Pronunciatione Tractatus .(1584).
Later reference will be
made to Livet's tr~nslation of parts of this work.
20
Beaulieux
(Histoir~
de l'orthographe franfaise, 1927)
examines in great detail medieval orthographic practices
and their contribution to the abundance of superfluous
letters current in 16th-century French; his work is recommended to readers requiring further background than can
be given here.
It may be worthwhile to point out, however,
that Beaulieux's relentless condemnation of the legal
fraternity's excessive use of letters ("Il est pour nous
, ,.
.
hors de doute que notre orthographe a ete gatee par les
/\.
~
gens de justice; sans eux elle elit conserve, tout au mains
jusqu'a la Renaissance, toute sa simplicit~ (I, 184-5)
while widely accepted today may be somewhat misleading.
It does not, for one thing, take into account the same
practitioners' extensive use of abbreviations; nor does it
explain the superfluity of letters to be found in the
writings of many of their contemporaries (Catach,
L'Orthographe frangaise, pp. xiii-xiv).
That the legal clerks nevertheless developed a system
convenient to the needs of their profession cannot be
doubted; it was a system whose orthography, syntax, arid
Vocabulary facilitated constant translation back and
forth between Latin and French.
The coexistence of the
two languages did not change Latin, it being the more
prestigious, but its influence on French, which it was
felt could only profit fr6m the experience, was enormous.
"La Belle Escripture"
To the superfluity of letters it had thus acquired,
the orthography of 16th-century French, in the spirit of
the
Renaissanc~,
added another layer solely for histori-
cal or decorative purposes.
De
B~ze
presents to the other
participants iri Peletier's Dialogu¢ ~ number of prevailing
principles by which the 16th-century writers justified the
inflation of words with purely graphic letters:
1.
Etymology, or the need to raise the dignity of
French by showing its Latin heritage:
Souuant aussi on l~ss¢ les l~tr¢s, ancor¢s qu'(l¢s
n¢ s¢ p~ononc¢t po1nt, pour Ia reueranc¢ d¢ la
Langu¢ dent les moz sent tirez. Car s'il ~t
einsi qu¢ notr¢ Langu¢ des2and¢ quasi tout~ du
Latin, pourquo~ s¢rons nous si nonchalans, m~s
plus tot si ingraz, d'an voulo~r abolir la
r¢ssamblanc¢, l'analogi¢ e la composicion? ...
N'ttc¢ pas 1¢ meilheur d¢ garder la majeste
d'un¢ Ecritur¢ 1¢ plus a;ntier¢mant qu¢ lon peut?
... e qu¢ par c¢la tl¢ aproch¢ra plus pr~s d¢ la
dinite des Langu¢s ancienn¢s.
(Dialogu¢ pp.
51-52)
Consider
Ge~an
for example, continues de Beze, which for
all practical purposes has no etymology:
I¢ conf£ss¢ bien qu'an.notr¢ Fran~ots nous
n'auons pas des sons s1 mal~sez a raporter par
ecrit, ni an si grand nombr~, cornrn¢ ont les
Al¢mans: par c¢ qu¢ leur Langu¢ {t fort robust~,
e si j'os¢ dir¢, farouch¢:
d'autant qu'{l¢ ~t,
einsi qu'on dit, quasi tout¢ sans etimologi¢:
e la notr¢ qui ~t douss¢ e delicat¢, particip¢
quasi an tout au{c 1¢ Latin.
(Dialogu¢, p. 48)
Peletier, however, challenges the logic of the etymology
argument, saying that if
tr~ditionalists
claim it to be a
violation of etymology to omit letters in writing, should
22
they not also criticize speech, in which the omissions were
first made (pp. 89-90)?
Meigret, in his Grammere, also challenges the reasoning of .those who support the need for etymological letters,
·his argument being that logic would require going all the
way back .to Latin and saying not "ey, as, a, auons,·auez,
ont," for example, but "je habe, tu habes, il habe, habons,
habez, il' habet"
2.
(fol. 104v).
"Rapprochement," or the need to show the rela-
tionship between words of the same root or family.
For
example, says de B~ze, an "s" must be written in "descrire,
l.l
though not pronounced, in order to show its re-
lationship to "description," and a "p" in "temps," to
relate it to "temporel":
Les autr¢s s¢ mt,t¢t pour raporter les Deriuatiz
aus Primitiz: Comm¢ an ces moz "Descrir¢,
Descripcion": La ou combien qu¢ la lc_tr¢ "s"
n¢ s¢ prononc¢ point au pr¢mier:
si tt cl¢
necesser¢ an tous deus, pour montrer qu¢ l'un
e lautr¢ apartien¢t a m~m¢ chos¢, e sont d¢
mt,m¢ natur¢, origin¢ e sinificacion. Autant
<t_t il d¢ ces moz "Temps, Temporel": La ou
pour la mr_m¢ rtson, 1¢ "p" tt necesser¢ an
tous deus, comBien qu'il n¢ s¢ prononc¢ point
au pr¢mier.
(Dialogu¢, pp. 50-51)
3.
"Distinction," or the need to distinguish homo-
nyms, such as "conte," "comte," and "compte," which though
pronounced the same, must be spelled differently:
Outr¢ c¢la, on m~t aucun¢fo~s des l~tr¢s pour
sinifier la diferanc¢ des moz: . Comm¢. sont
"compt¢" e "cont¢": dequez 1¢ pr¢mier apartient
·a nombr¢, e l'autr¢ a signeuri¢.
Itam "croix"
e "croiz" ... "grac¢" e "grass¢" ... e plusieurs
23
atitr¢s: Lequez, quat qu'iz s¢ prononc¢t d¢
m~m¢ sort¢, si do~u¢t iz ~tr¢ ecriz diuers¢mant, pour les r~sons particulier¢s qu¢ j'e
alegue¢s, e pour la r~son general¢, qui ~t
l'intelig'anc¢ du sans.
(Dialogu¢, p. 51)
Meigiet argues with considerable sarcasm against suchpractices
~hen
he says that supporters of tradition applytheir
principles of "rapprochement" and "distinction" not
systematically, but only when and where it suits them,
and without any regard to the proper use of letters:
Parquo~ come homes de plus gran' e subtil'
entrep~inze, ilz ont p~ns~ f~re q~lqe ~hoze
pl'. amlrable: come de montrer~ 1~'
derluezons,.
L
~
~ differ~ntes d~' vocables, no pas de tous:
mLs de ceus qe fion leur s~mble, sans auo~r
egart ao' puyssan9es dt_' lEC_ttres, ne ao deuoEC_r
de l'ecritture.
1Gramm~re, fol. 4r)
4.
The need to distinguish words which due to
·hasty penmanship could be misinterpreted.
ment see p. 19, above.
For this argu-
Many years later in his own De
Francicae Linguae Recta Pronunciatione Tractatus (15S4)
....
.
de Beze agaln defends the practice:
/
/
/
....
.
... "x" a souvent ete employe pour "s" ala fln
de certains vocables. apr~s les diphthongues
"eu; au"; on ~tait ainsi amen8' 13: distinguer
"ceux, lieux, mieux," de "cens, liens, miens,"
que l'~criture cursive des Fran~ais, confondant
"n" et "u" ne permettait pas de distinguer.
Par suite, l'usage s'est introduit d'~crire
/\
"chevaux, maux," pour empecher qu'on ne lut
"chevans, mans," etc.
(trans. Livet, p. 518)
....
5.
The need to distinguish le~rned writers from
semi-literate ones.
n·e B~ze is essentia.lly saying here
that writing should show evidence of scholarship by way
of letters which must be learned through study and
24
kno~ledge
of Latin because they are not represented irt
sound:
Il faut qu'il i et quelqu¢ diferanc¢ antr¢
la manier¢ d'ecr.tr¢ des g'ans doct¢'s e des
g'ans mecaniqu¢'s: Car s¢'ro~t c¢' r~son d'imiter
1¢' vulguer¢, ·lequel sans jug¢'mant metra aussi
tot un. "g" pour un "i" e un "c" pour uri "s,"
cornrn¢' un mot pour un autr¢':
brief, qui n¢'
gard¢ra ni regl¢' ni grac¢' an son Eciitur¢', non
pl~s qu'an son parler ni an ses f~z? ~t c¢'
rtson qu'un Artisan qui n¢' saura qu¢' Iir¢ e
ecrir¢, ancor¢s assez maladroet, e qui n'an
antant ni les rtsons ni la cokgru~te, so~t estime
aussi bien ecrir¢ cornrn¢' nous qui l'auons par
etud¢, par regl¢ e par exc~rcic¢? S¢'ra il dit
qu'a un¢ farnrn¢ qui n'zt po1nt aut:¢mant lttrt¢,
nous concedons l'art e Vrey¢ prat1qu¢' d¢
l'Ortograf¢?
(Dialogu¢, p. 52)
Peletier is neither
~xaggerating
nor distorting the op-
position for, over 100 years later while preparing the
Dictionnaire de l'Acad~mie (1694), M~zeray wrote:
La Compagnie declare qu'elle desire suiure
l'ancienne orthographe qui distingue les gents
de lettres dauec les ignorants et les simples
femmes, et qu'il faut la maintenir par tout,
hormis dans les mots ou un long et constant
usage en aura introduit une contraire.
(Cahiers de remarqu~s sur l'orthographe
frangoise, quoted by Beaulieux, I, 353)
Needless to say, the well-educated rarely neglected to
use letters for any of these purposes, but see below for
what Peletier has to say about the "erudite" spelling
"sravoir ....
6.
·Finally, the need to endow words with a "je ne
sais quai de plus ~laboure'," an argument used in support
of those previously mentioned:
25
Outr¢ c¢la, qui dout¢ qu 1 il n'i ~t non seul¢mant an Fran~o~s, m~s aussi an tout¢s Langu¢s
vulguer¢s, plusieurs l~tr¢s qui n 1 i sent
aplique¢s pour i s~ruir, ni pour c¢ qu ~l¢s
i sot_t necesser¢s·: · mts seul¢mant pour i
donner grac¢? ... 1 1 Ecritur¢ do~t tousjours
auo~r j¢ n¢ se quo~ d¢ plus elaboure, e plus
acoutre, qu¢ non pas la prolacion, qui s¢ PECrd
incontinant.
(Dialogu¢, pp. 50-52)
1
Many years later in his Dictionaire des rimes (1596; rpt.
1624), Lanoue observed an excessive and unnecessary use of
"y":
"Il y a beaucoup de mots qu 1 on fait terminer en
1
Y1
qui n'ont point de necessit~ de le receuoir plustost que
1 1 1 i,
1
eluded:
comme 'aussy, voicy, ainsy,
1
etc."
And he con-
"La coustume l 1 y entretient sans aucune raison
particuliere .... Qui le fait, il semble que ce doiue estre
plustost pour 1 1 ornement de 1 1 escriture que pour autre
chose" (p. 462).
Although most of the additions were at least etymologically justified, errors were not uncommon.
Ignorance of
such previous phonological developments as intervocalic
voicing, the influence and assimilation of palatal elements, or the Old Frenth vocalization of "l" lead to
spellings .like "veufve;." "faict," and "aultre"; animaulx," "chevaulx," "choulx," and the like were doubly
redundant, as the "x" itself had earlier represented "us,"
resulting, quite literally, in "animauuu.s," and so on.
Writers went further and made a number of false analogies:
"envieus" and other "-us" words, which had never had an
"1," were remodeled on those above, hence, "envieulx,"
26
but the article "aux" remained to distinguish it from
"aulx," plural of "ail."
"Sis," from Latin "sex" became
"six"; then "dis," although from "decem," became ;'dix" by
analogy with "six."
Some words were remodeled on the basis of words
thought to be etymons but which actually had no relationship:
"poi s" <. La tin' "pens urn"
fluence of "pondus";
>
"poids" under the in,...
"lais" from Old French "laissier,"
incorrectly attached to Latin "legare," >"legs"; and
"savoir"
<
"sapere," mistakenly assumed to be from
"scire," was written "sceavoir."
Regarding this spelling
Peietier comme.nted scornfully:
Tous les ecriueins frantots, pour s¢ montrer
beauco~p sauo~r e pour garder a tout¢ rigueur
leur etimologl¢ ont tous obstinemant ecrit c¢
mot "st_ci.uoir" par un "<c" an la pr¢mier¢, pansant
qu'il virit d¢ "scire," combien qu'il viegn¢
regulier¢mant e au vrei d¢ "sapere" ... einsi
qu'on peut vo~r par l'italien, qui dit mtmes
"sapere" an l infinitif pour sauotr."
(Dialogu¢, p. 95)
.
Beaulieux tells us that in the n~xt century M~zeray, again
speaking for the "Academie," declares the etymology
"sapere" a certainty, but that the word must nevertheless
be written "s<cavoir," "parce que c'est l'usage"
(I, 318).
·. A few words escaped remodeling altogether because
they w~re overlooked or because their Latin origin wasn't
perceived.
Further complications arose because learned
words and recent borrowings maintained Latin spellings
27
and native doublets were only sometimes made to conform.
Though most of the more outrageous excesses of the Renais,...
sance were subsequently eliminated (debte from older
dete
>
>
dette, faulx
>
faux, recepvoir
>
recevoir,
s~avoir
savoir), many remained (sept, doigt, poids) and under
the influence of spelling in an increasingly literate
society the additions, etymologically justif£able or not,
sometimes came to be pronounced:
ovier·> obvier, sculter
ajectif
> sculpter,
seaume
> adjectif,
> psaume.
(For many more examples of this see Darmesteter, Le
Seizieme si~cle, I, 222.)
All this tampering with the spelling was still quite
possible in the 16th century.
In the absence of standards
spelling was largely an individual and capricious matter
and words were spelled in a variety of ways (benoit,
benoist,
benoict~
cognoistre, congnoistre, connoistre;
escripre, escrire, ecrire).. "Par c¢ qu¢ j¢ vot," says le
Seigneur Sauvage, another participant in Peletier's
Dialogu¢, "qu¢ d¢ tous ceus qui ecriu¢t Franfors, chac;r
ortografi¢ a sa guis¢"
(p. 67).
Further on Peletier adds:
Com¢ quand il trouu¢ ecrit an un¢ impression
"debuoir" e "recepuoir" autq "b," e "p": e an
l'autr¢~ "deuoir" e "receuoir" pur¢mant: an
l'un¢ "datter," an l'autr¢ "dacter," e an
l'autr¢ "dabter" (car il s'ecrit an tro(s ou
quatr¢ sort¢s).
(p. 78)
If tradition was nevertheless responsible for maintaining certain general tendencies or
habits~
these clear-
ly had no universal acceptance nor any authority with
·I
28
which they could be imposed.
A few writers, in fact,
seem to give the impression that any attempt to curtail
freedom of choice in matters of spelling would be thought
little less than tyrannical.
Once again de Beze champions
the status quo in this matter:
ME(S S 1 iz voulol(t cro~r¢ coseilh,
iz d¢urOEC_t un
peu mieus e plus a lbesir panser, quel perilh
c 1 tt d 1 introduir¢ nomYeautez:
lequel¢s an tez
cas plus qu 1 an autr¢ andrott, sont deprisabl¢s
e odieus¢s ... Car c¢ n 1 tt pas p¢ti t¢ chos¢ qu¢
d 1 antr¢prandr¢ contr¢ tout un peupl¢, qui an
tel cas ECt possesseur d¢ tout tans immemorial ...
Dauantag¢, les. anseign¢mans d¢ l 1 0rtograf¢ n¢
sont pas comm¢ d 1 un¢ Filosofi¢ moral¢: qui·
montr¢ qu 1 il n 1 i a qu 1 un¢ vor¢ qui sott bonn¢,
qui ~t l¢ milieu antr¢ deus extrem¢s. Si un
homm~ ecrit a sa mod¢, e un autr¢ a la sienn¢:
il peut ctr¢ qu¢ tous deus ont leur r~sons, e
qu¢ tous deus n¢ falh¢t point ... Quant aus
P¥rsonnag¢s qui sont d¢ sauo{r e d 1 esprit, il
n¢ leur faut point d 1 autr¢ metod¢ qu¢ c~l¢
qu¢ l 1 erudicion e l¢ jug¢mant leur aport¢.
(Dialogu¢, pp. 63-68)
The idea of one and only one way to spell a w.ord was
still an unfamiliar concept to most people and would remain so for a long time.
The process by which one variant
eventually triumphed over its rivals took place gradually,
often without any apparent predictability as to the final
outcome, hence the many exceptions in today 1 s spelling.
Attempts to Reform Spelling
A few individuals were beginning to recognize the
wholesale use of letters for almost everything but their
original purpose as a debasement.
No longer, it seemed,
29
were letters viewed as symbols to represent sound but
were tossed about freely to suit the whim of the individual
writer.
To some reformers, simplification of spelling was
of ·concern only for the instruction of
foreign~rs.
To
others the situation called for a complete overhaul.
For
these individuals it was important to render French as
pure and regular as they perceived the Latin, from which
it came, to be.
The earliest reformers were Geofroy TOry and Etienne
·nolet.
Both were printers and both sought to make some
sense out of chaotic practices by the regular use of
auxiliary signs, but their spelling was otherwise traditional.
Here Tory complains that French is deficient in
accents (diacritical marks) because it has not yet been
provided with a set of rules as have Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin:
En nostre langage Francois nauons point daccent
figure en escripture, & ce pour le default que
nostre langue nest encores mise ne ordonnee a
certaines Reigles comme les Hebraique, Greque,
& Latine. Ie vouldrois quelle y fust ainsi que
on le porroit bien faire ... En Francois, comme
iay dit, nescriuons point laccent sus le 0
vocatif, mais le pronunceons bien comme en disant
0 pain du Ciel angelique. Tu es nostre salut
vnique. En ce passage daccent, nous auons imperfection a la quelle doiburions remedier en
purifiant & mettant a Reigle & Art cert~in
nostre lague qui est la plus gracieuse
quon.
r
sache.
(Champ Fleury, fol. 52 )
Similarl~,
Dolet encourages printers to use accents to
enrich their
lan~uage
and to show that they are not
30
ignorant of its rules:
Ce sont ces preceptions, que tu garderas quant
aux accents de la langue Francoy~e.
Lesquelz
aussi observeront touts diligents Imprimeurs:
car telles chases enrichissent fort !'impression,
& demonstrent, que ne faisons rien par ignorance.
(Les Accents; rpt~ Beaulieux, II, 131)
Peletier also felt that reform was necessary to raise the
dignity of French:
"C'~t
1¢ vrei moyen d¢ paru¢nir ou
nous aspirons, qui tt d¢ randr¢ notr¢ Langu¢ r¢commadabl¢
anutrs les nacions etrang¢s"
c¢1~
(Dialogu¢, p. 14).
"Car par
nous donn¢rons a connottr¢ aus etrangers qui la
gout¢ront qu¢ c'tt un¢ Langu¢· qui s¢ peut regler et
qu'E[l¢ n'tt point barbar¢"
(p. 80).
Meigret feared that
foreigners would ridicule French if something weren't
done about its spelling:
Car come l'ecriture ne sott qe la vray' imaje
de la parolle, a bone r~zon on l'estimera faos'
£. abuziue, si.elle ne luy EC_t conforme par vn
ass~mblem~nt de ltttres conuenantes ao batim~nt
der vo~s .... Come quo~ donq, nous sauueron'
nous de moqeri' tn 1 ecritture d'estoient, vu
q'onqes Fran~o~s bien aprins n'y pronon£a s,
ne i, ne n:
~ aoqtl l'ecrittur' ~t de huyt
l~ttres, la ou la pron?ntia£ion n'~t qe de
.
c1nq voes:
car nou' d1zons etoet . . (Grammgre,
fol. 3r-cv) ·
<Meigret's concerns were for the present.
He believed on
principle that writing should be a faithful image of
speech (see below) .
But for Peletier the most important
reason for reform was not concern for the present but
for posterity.
He believed, as we do today, that the
essence of language is in its spoken form; to him, writing
31
is mere dressing and hence cannot touch the fundamental
structure of the language and that from this point of
view it is quite irrelevant how words happen to be
spelled.
He cites the uncertainty and constant discus-
sion over the pronunciation of Classical Greek and Latin;
and if he gives himself the task of writing French according to the way it is spoken, it is because he must envision the possibility that French like Latin and Greek
could survive his own age, and because he hoped to spare
future generations any rincertainty about the pronunciation
of 16th-century French:
C ~t
1
donq principal¢mant pour 1¢ tans a v¢nir
qu il faut policer notr¢ Langu¢.
Nous pouuons
antandr¢ qu 1 t.l¢ n 1 EL_t pas pour durer tousj ours
an vulguer¢ nomplus qu¢ 1¢ Greq e Latin.
Tout¢s chos¢s peric¢t sous 1¢ Ciel, tant
s 1 an faut qu¢ la grac¢ des moz puiss¢ tousjours viur¢.
Et partant, i~ nous f~ut eforcer
d¢ la reduir¢ an art:
non point pour nbus du
tout, mts pour ceus qui viuront lors qu 1 tl¢
n¢ s¢ trouu¢ra plus t~l¢ qu ~1¢ et d¢ presant,
sinon d¢dans les Livr~s.
Pr¢nons exampl¢ a
nous mem¢s.
Nous nous d¢batons tous les jours
a qui prononc¢ra mieus la langu¢.Grecqu¢ e
Latin¢:
l 1 un dit qu¢ tel¢ lttr¢ s¢ prononc¢
1
einsi, l autr¢ d 1 un¢ autr¢ sort¢, e l 1 autr¢
d 1 un¢ autre.
E si n 1 auons qu¢ 1 1 Ecritur¢ sur
quot nous puissions asso~r jug¢mant: Car 1¢
vulguer¢ ~t peri.
(Dialogu¢, p. 79)
1
Another reformer was Honorat Rambaud..
A school
teacher in Provence for 3B years with a sincere affection
for children, " ... la chose plus precieuse qu 1 ayez en ce
·monde"
(La Declaration des abvs, p. 3), he was not in-
valved in any of the intellectual disputes of his day,
but suffered rather to see so many of his pupils give up
their studies in frustration because they couldn't learn
to spell, " ... il ne se faut pas esrnerueiller si lon
apprend ~ lire et escrire auec grand' difficult~, veu
que l'alphabet est si corrornpu"
(p. 20).
He believed that
everyone ought to have a chance to learn to read and write,
"iusques
~ux
laboureurs, bergiers, et porchiers ... puis que
tous en ont besoing"
(p~
346) and that reforming the
alphabet was thus of concern to all:
Mais voy~nt que l'irnperfection de l'alphabet
interessoi t tous hornrnes, femmes, & enfans,.
·presents & aduenir, & rnesrnes les bestes, les
arbres, & herbes, cornrne entendent ceux qui
ont bon iugernent, ay laiss~ de rernedier a rnoy~esrne & ~ rna rnaison, pour (rnoyennant l'aide de
Dieu) rernedier ~ l'irnperfecti6n de l'alphabet ...
auec desir & bonne intention de prbffiter ~
la posterite.... Vostre humble & tresobeissant
seruiteur Honorat Rarnbavd, plus affectionne ~
vos enfans qu'a soyrnesrne.
(pp. 2-3)
His system, good intentions notwithstanding, was quite
extraordinary, and no one seems to have paid any attention
to i t whatsoever.
It comprised an entirely new set of
characters of eight vowels and 44 consonants and may have
been a very good phonetic alphabet, for:all I could tell,
but it wasn't likely to change anyone's habits.
What may have given pause for thought and had the
potential, at least, of being a far more persuasive argurnent for reform, were it not intended as sarcasm, is this
curiosity found in the editor's "Advertisement sur
l'orthographe de M. Ioubert":
33
En quay certainement i l y a.grand'epargne de
lettres: et par consequent profit a la Republique, entant que les liures imprimez de
cette fa£on, seront ~ melheur march~, au
mains de la dixieme part. Car il y a bien
autant de lettres rabbatues.
Ce qui et fort
considerable, attedu la multiplicite des·
liures qu'on ha pour le iourd'huy, par
benefice de l'Imprimerie:
lesquels il seroit
bon de reduire en plus petit volume, et
imprimer en mains de lettres qu'on pourroit,
voire qu'une signifiast tout un mot, ou une
sentence: a l'imitation des lettres hierogly~
phiques des Aegyptiens (chose bien inuetee)
affin ·qulon en peust iouyr ~ meilleur march~.
(Seconde Partie des Erreurs Populaires,
Laurent Joubert; rpt. Catach, p. 264.)
The excesses of French spelling, then, had led to a
reaction no less extreme, and while the reformers did
bring to the attention of many the irrationalities of
French orthography, they also, by their very overzealousnes~,
inspired much animosity.
Dissenting voices
of conservatism began to be heard everywhere, and while
some writers were indifferent and simply preferred to
continue in their old ways, others were frankly hostile.
Traditionalists had a number of reasons for opposing
reform.
De B8'ze, in Dia1ogu¢', expresses the belief that
any reform would be too difficult to impose and doubts
anyway that it would be. worth the bother.
For one thing,
French has sounds which no Latin characters adequately
represent (p. 48), and for another, pronunciation varies
so much, how is one to decide on the particular spoken
dialect to which writing should conform?
langu¢' nous pronont;ons e ecriuons
---
-------
" .•. an notr¢'
diu~rs¢mant
an beaucoup
34
d 1· androE(:Z, la ou tous 1es plus sutiz reformateurs du
mond¢ ne saurott donner ordr¢ (p. 56).
over~
The French, more-
were used to their way of writing; to take it away
now would only confuse them:
Car les Fran£o~s, pour etr¢ d¢ si long tans
acoutumez, assurez e co~firmez an la mod¢
d 1 ecrir¢ qu 1 iz tien¢t d¢ presant, sans jam~s
auoer oui parler d¢ compleint¢ ni reformacion
auc~h¢:
s¢ trouu¢ront tous ebahiz, e pans¢ront
qu 1 on s¢ veulh moquer d 1 eus, d¢ la leur voulotr
oter einsi acoup .... Tel¢mant qu 1 au lieu d¢ leur
gratifier, vous les m¢trez an pein¢ d¢ desapraridr¢
un¢ chos¢ qu 1 iz trouu¢t bonn¢ e ~se¢, pour an
aprandr¢ un¢ fascheus¢, longu¢ e dificil¢,
e qui n¢ leur pourra aporter qu¢ confusion,
trreur e obscurite. (p. 45)
But in speech, argues
nized and understood.
Peletier~
words are generally recog-
Language does not reside on paper,
he insists, but in speech; its understanding is not in the
eyes, but in the ear.
Of what use, then, are superfluous
letters which are merely the object of sight (pp. 80-81)?
Meigret puts forth the same argument in his Grammzre:
Ao demourat je ne voEC_ pott q 1 EC_n tenat propos
lt_s vns auz aotres, nous vzions de qelqe note
de difff!:ren£ 1 aotre qe luzaje de parler nous
1
a introduit:
~ toutefo~s nou
nous rntrtnttndons
bien:
e si ~tlle qe ~eus ~ font par l t 1 ltttres
superflues eto~t rtzonabl 1 ~ ne~ess~re nou 1
.
pourrions dir 1 ~n SC(_mblable qe la SUpE(_rfluite' de
vots seroEt_t bien seant 1 a la parolle pour denoter
1
1
l~s diffencn~es:
t~llemr_nt q il faodra q un
1
saj ecouteur sott aosi auize de ne preter ·
(fol. 4v)
l 1 0rE[ll 1 ao 1 vo{s superflues.
But pronunciation is continually changing, observed de
B~ze; must writing, then, be constantly revised?
If so,
someone would.have to be found who had no other task but
35.
to inform the public of the new spellings, and what is
worse, before one had a chance to adjust to them, they would
be changed again:
E puis qu¢ j¢ suis tombe sus 1¢ chang¢mant,
chacun set qu'antr¢ les Fran~o~s la prolacion
chang¢ d¢ tans an tans.
Partant si nous
voulions tousjours donner nouu~l¢ Ecritur¢
a la nouu~l¢ Prononciacion, c¢ ~ero~t a tous
cous a r¢commancer: E faudro~t qu'1l s¢
trouuat tousjours quelcun qui n'ut autr¢
charg¢ qu¢ d'ag'anser l'Ortograf¢, e la publier
tout einsi qu¢ les ordonnanc¢s, e les criz d¢
vii¢. M~s qui pis tt, auant qu'on ut u 1¢
lotsir d~ panser a cet¢ mod¢ nouu~l¢, la
·
~~o~~fion sero~t desja change¢.
Dialogu¢,
Th~
idea of a changing orthography didn't seem to have
bothered Meigret, however, who in his debates with Guillaume des Autels, his principle adversary, repeatedly insisted that as pronunciation changes, writing, which is
merely its image, must foll6w ~uit (Deftnses, sig. A4r.
I
For more on this topic, see Reponse a la Dezesperee
repliqe de Glaomalis de Vezeltt).
Des Autels, however, had his own solution to the
whole problem.
To him! nothing was wrong with spelling;
speech, rather, was deficient; and far from removing letters from writing, it seemed more sensible to him to
pronounce everything that was written.
I
·
Meigret quotes
I
Des Autels' Replique aux furieuses defenses de iouis
Meigret:
Cela premis je viens a la question de l'orthographe qui est de ce que nostre prononciation
ne s'accorde pas auec l'escripture. Ceulx cy
36
trouuent cela fort estrange, & je le trouue
vn peu mal gracieux: mais ils veul~t reigler
l'escripture selon la prononciation, & il
sembleroit plus conuenant reigler la prononciation selo l'escripture: pource que la prononciation vzurpee de tout le peuple auquel le plus
grand nombre est des idiots, & indoctes, est .
plus facile a corrompre que l'escripture propre
aux gens scauants .... Et par ce moye je pourrois
r'abbatre leur argumet de superfluite, en disant
qu'il n'y en a po1t en l'escripture, mais que
plustost il yen a en la prononciationj ... il
vault mieux pronocer
r-v tout ce qui est escript.
(Def~nses, sig. Bl
)
Such nonsense, of course, deserves Meigret's criticism:
Voyez irY la folle, t aoda~ieuze ~~tize de
Ee Gyllaome Voulant corropre le Vlf pour
satisf~r' ala portr~tture./ .... tu nou' veu'.
tous forcer a pronon~~r t~' l~ttres ~uperflues/
.... Par cc_e moyen messleurs lts courtlzans, t tous
aotres qi font profession de bien parler, aoront
dortnauant a prononter/escripre, recepueur,
doiouent, estoient, eulx, t infiniz aotres
vocables, aotant etranjes, ~ diffi9iles a
prononfer qe teus EY=
s'il ne veuTet ~ncourir
la ~~nsur' ~ maoutze gra~e du trrsextell~nt
Gyliaome docteur en jargonerie.
(sigs. Blv-
.B3 v)
t
Somewhat more sober are Pasquier's arguments against
reform:
"Quant a' l'orthographe que l'on dit n'estre bien
/
formee entre nous, vous vous abusez si vous le pensez.
Celuy que l'anciennet~ nous a produit est.tres bon".
("Lettre 'aM. de Tournebu," Oeuvres, II, col. 8).
In a
letter to Ramus he defends his position eloquently and at
length.
Here are just a few
excerpt~
from it:
Car je stay combien il y a de braves Capitaines
qui so~t.de vostre party .. Je stay qu~ vostre
proposltlon est tres precleuse, de prlme
recontre; ... Mais je ~ous dy que quelque
diligence que vous y apportiez, il vous est
impossible a tous de parvenir au dessus de
37
vostre intention. Je le cognois par vos escrits:
car combien que decochiez toutes vos fleches
un mesme blanc, toutesfois nul de vous n'y a s~eu
attaindre: ayant chacun son orthographe particuliere, au lieu de celle qui est commune.~ la
France. Qui me faict dire que pensant y apporter
quelque ordre, vous y apportez le desordre:
parce
./
que chacun se donnant le mesme liberte que vous,
se forgera une orthographe particuliere. Ceux
qui mettent la main
la plume, prennent leur
origine de divers pais de la France, et est
mal-ais~ qu'en nostre prononciation il ne demeure
tousjours en nous je ne S£ay quoy du ramage de
nostre pals~ A tant puis que nos prononciations
sont diverses, ·chacun de nous sera partial en son
escriture ...• Je ne dy pas que s'il se trouve
quelques choses aigres, l'on n'y puisse apporter
quelque douceur et attrempance, mais de bouleverser en tout et par tout sens dessus dessous
nostre orthographe, c'est, ~ mon jugement, gaster
tout. Les longues et anciennes coustumes se
doivent petit~ petit denouer, et suis de l'opinion
de ceux qui estiment, qu'il vaut mieux conserver
une loy en laquelle on est de longue main habitu6
et nourry, ores qu'il y ait quelque defaut, que
sous un pretexte de vouloir pourchasser un plus
grand bien, en introduire une nou~elle, pour les
inconveniens qui en adviennent auparavant qu'elle
ait pris son ply entre les hommes.
(II, cols.
a
.
a
55_;57)
Failure of Reform
That the movement for reform would fail was probably
to be expected.
Habit, respect for tradition, practical
considerations, "la routine et les privileges des
bureaux" (Caput, La Langue franEaise, p. 123), and the
Latinizing tendencies of the .Renaissance proved forces too
powerful to overcome.
At a time when only a small minor-
ity could read and write and comparatively few books had
been printed, reform would have been easier than at any
_. _____
:_______
___
~
---~
~
38
time since; and yet this same literate minority, simply
by choosing to write in one style over another, was to deterrnine the future of French orthographic practices.
For
these individuals, almost all well-educated and wellversed in Latin, a learned and etymological spellingsystem was scarcely an inconvenience.
The reformists themselves weakened their case by
disagreeing as to how French was spoken, hence as to how
it ought to be
r~presented
in writing.
Philosophical and
methodological differences also interfered with their
ability to put up a united front.
prudent approach.
Peletier adopted a
He-believed that change must come
slowly, "qu¢ tel¢s nouueautez au depouruu sont mal re<(_u¢s"
(Dialogu¢, p. 7).
To him, a perfectly phonetic system
was unrealistic, and only spellings which caused·error and
con£usion needed to be changed:
" ... qu'auons nous aftr¢
d¢ reformer un¢ chos¢ qui n¢ caus¢ point d'erreur?"
13).
Thus he spelled all plurals with an "s":
cet¢ parol¢,
(p.
"cornrn¢ an
'Tous hornrn¢s e farnrn¢s ont a mourir'" even
though "la ll(tr¢ sonn¢ cornrn¢ ton 'z,' quad le mot suiuant
cornrnance par voyele" · (p. · 13).
On the other hand, he c.on-
tinues:
... il sambl¢roct qu¢ la d<Z:rnier¢·d¢ 'outil'
s¢ pronontat comrn¢ c~l¢ d¢ 'sutil':
la
.
dcrnier¢ d¢ 'vill¢' cornrn¢ la d~rnier¢ d¢
'ch¢uill¢'" e tout¢fot,s il i a diferanc¢
manifest¢ .. .. C¢ sont les moz,. Lou1s £.1eigret,
-qui merit¢t reformacion, non pas ceus qui
s'ecriu¢t d'un¢ sort¢ qui et tousjours
39
samblabl¢ a soe, et qui james n¢ s¢ demant.
c¢ sont ceus qt.¢ nous d¢tios{.tascher a restituer."
(pp. 13-14)
What Peletier seems to be· reaching for, I think, though of
course he lacks the technical vocabulary to say so, is an
orthography which identifies distinctive differences but
not every allophonic variation.
Meigret, on the other
hand, is after a perfectly phonetic
~yste~
and, unlike
Peletier, he rejects a moderate approach:
~
qit ao conseil qe tu me propozes de tant
seulem~nt corrijer l~s sup~rfluyt~s dt l~ttres,
~e n'~t q'entretenir ~ nourrir tousjours vne
fieurej ... ~Ao demourant pour te satisf~r' ~n t~'
remontrancc.es pleines de creinte, je s~ys d auis
qe qi a peur d~' feulles, ne v£rze po~t ao bots/
····t qant a ton moyen pour ganer pet1t a pet1t,
t. finablem~nt f~re.le sot tout de gre, situ le
trouue'bon, f~'Ie:
car qant a mot je ne pretEt_n'
par mon ecritEure qe pourtr~re le plus exactemtnt
q'il me sera possible la pronon2i~£~on FranEo~ze .
.... sans ao demourant f~r' etat_ s1 Je serey suyu1,
ou non.r (Reponse a l'Apolojie de Iaqes Pelletier,
fols. 3 -4 )
·
·
To Meigret's rigorous and uncompomising attempts at perfection, Peletier replies:
Crot mo~, Meigret, nous n¢ f¢rions qu¢ nous
i ropr¢ la tet¢, sans pouuopr rien meriter ni
pour nous, nl pour les autr~s, ... Mr.s c¢la
s'aptl¢, s¢lon 1¢ proutrb¢ vulguer¢, decouurir
seint Pifrr¢ pour couurir seint Pol.
(Dialogu¢
. p. 15)
Of capital importance in the failure of spelling reform was the Dictionaire· francais-latin (1539) .of Robert
Estienne, which codified and gave authority to traditional spellings.
This dictionary, its re-editions and
abridged editions, though still bilingual, was for a· long
40
time the only French dictionary available.
Its wide dif-:-
fusion in France and abrbad, and the stability of its
orthography in the midst of diversity contributed to its
sUcce~s
over the constantly changing systems of the re-
formers i
" ••• et
en furent imbus"
bon gre mal gre taus ceux qui etudiaient
(Beaulieu~
I, 346).
Influential, too, in the defeat of reform were the
·positions taken_ by Du Bellay and Ronsard.
Du Bellay,
while sympathetic to the cause, was unwilling to commit
himself to it in practice:
/
" ... voyant que telle nouueaute
·desplaist autant aux doctes comme aux indoctes,. j'ayme
beaucoup mieux louer leur intention que la suyure, pource
que je
~e
fay pas imprimer mes oeuures en intention qu'ils
seruent de cornets aux apothicaires, ... " (L'Olive, 2nd
Preface~
in Oeuvres, ed. Chamard).
Complaints, rididule,
a cool reception by the public were understandably discouraging. ·
Ronsard gave more .serious consideration to reform
than d{d Du Bellay, and for several years practiced some
modest simplifications in his writing.
He was followed
in this by the other poets of the Pleiade, except Du
Bellay.
For several decades, in fact, there seems to
have been two orthographies, a traditional one for prose,
and a simplified one for poetry.
Ronsard's role has
generally g6ne unrecognized and would have been entirely
without consequence had not certain of his innovations
41
been taken up by printers in Holland, who throughout the
17th century flooded France with books, thus habituating
the public to the changes.
Overwhelming usage
eventu~lly
forced the "Acade'rnie Franr_aise" to incorporate some of
these changes in its Dictionnaire ·(1694).
The more irn-
portant of these included the use of "i" and "u" exclusively for vowels; the replacement of plural "z" with "s,"
although "x" was retained (Ronsard had also used "s" in
the 2nd person plural of verbs, but here the Academy retained "z"); and.the elimination of some superfluous consonants, such as vocalized "1" (faulx > faux), and "c" in
such words as "sainct," "droict," and "diet."
Otherwise,
however, the Academy did little other than sanction and
make official the spellings of Robert Estienne.
Printers were also instrumental in the failure to
reform the spelling system.
They weren't used to the new
spellings, and their efforts to print them were often haphazard and halfhearted.
An apology or a complaint con-
cerning its orthography prefaces almost every major 16thcentury publication.
Here is an example:
Amy Lecteur, ie dois bien. estre excus~ enuers
toy, attendu rna bonne volant~, si i'ay en plusieurs endroits fally contre l'orthographie de· M.
Iovbert, d'autant qu'elle rn'ha est~ fort
nouuelle ~ ceste fbys, & difficile ~ irniter.
Dequoy ie t'a~ bien voulu aduertir, affin. que
tu n'irnputes a l'auteur, quelque deffaut en
l'obseruation ~e ses reigles~ ou de n'estre
par tout sernblable ~ soy.
I'espere de faire
rnieux vne autre fois, si i'ay cest hC>neur
d'irnprirner encores de de ses oeuures Francoises:
-----------
----
42
te priant ce pandant de corriger toymesme les
fautes plus notables, & qui peuuent troubler
le sens (lesquelles me sont eschappees) comme
s'ensuit.
("L'Imprimevr av Lectevr de bonn'ame,"
Seconde Partie des Erreurs Populaires, L. Joubert; rpt. Catach, p. 264.)
Meigret, eventually unable to find a printer who would
ac~
cept his spellings, was forced to abandon reform altogether:
Au demeurant, si le batiment de l'escriture
vous semble autre et different de la doctrine
qu'autrefoys je mis en auant, blamez-en
l'imprimeur qui a prefere son gain
la raison
esperant le faire beaucoup plus grant et auoir
plus prompte depesche de sa cacographie que de
mon orthographie .... ("Preface", Discours
touchant la creation du Monde; rpt. Catach,
p. 286)
a
The resistance of printers is understandable.
It
took a certain amount of courage to print the new systems:
special characters had to be engraved and public
hence a considerable decrease
certainly to be,expected.
~n
rejectio~
revenue, was almost
Writers nevertheless, and also
understandably, complained about the liberties printers
took with their manuscripts .. Peletier, like Meigret, expressed dismay over the nonchalance with which his spellirigs were regarded:
"·... il m¢ sembl¢ qu¢ quand on aport¢
quelqu¢ Liur¢ a un Imprimeur, 1¢ moins d¢ gracieus¢te
.qu'il puiss¢ fer¢, et
d¢ suiur¢ la minut¢ d¢ c¢lui qui
(,_
.l'a ftt, e qui 1¢ lui donn¢"
.....
(Dialogu¢, pp. 36-37).
.
But
de Beze thought Peletler should be grateful, for had his
work (Oeuvres Poetiques, 1547) been printed as he had
43
wished, no one would have read it:
Vous vous pleignez .... Mts il m¢ sambl¢ qu'iz
vous ont f~t grand pltsir: Car il i a b~aucoup
d¢ Lecteurs qui usset difere a lir¢ votr¢
Liur¢, s'il ut ete ecrit a votr¢ mod¢: par
c¢ qu¢ c~la les ut gardez d'antandr¢ plusieurs
passag¢s: e pareinsi iz s'an fuss¢t faschez.
(p. 37)
Pe1etier thought
oth~rwise;
his
spellings would have
amused men of leisure, always curious for novelty:
M~s
j'uss¢ panse qu¢ votr¢ opinion ut ete tout
au contrer¢, qu¢ si on l'ut imprime s¢lon mon
intancion, c¢la ut ete caus¢ qu¢ meinz homm¢s
d¢ lo~sir, e curieus d¢ nouueautez, s¢ fuss¢t
.amusez a 1¢ lir¢, plus pour l'Ecritur¢ qu¢
pour la sustance du suget.
(p. 37)
·
Conflicts between author and publisher were common, and
many more instances than those presented here could be
cited.
The
~revalence
in many cases of the preferences of
the publishers is an indication of the authority they·had
already acquired.
But printers, if they had done little
to help the cause of reform,.· were of primary importance
in the development of uniform standards.
It was in print-
ing, in fact, that the need for order began to be felt
most strongly.
While at first different spellings were found useful
in keeping margins even, it soon became apparent that consistency was far more convenient.
Printers cared less
that spelling be phonetic than that everyone spell the
same way, and they welcomed Robert Estienne's Dictionaire
44
as an authority against which to correct, in good conscience, the diversity of spellings in the manuscripts submitted to them for publication.
Typographical necessities
led, moreover, to many auxiliary innovations.
The con-
ventions which existed were those developed throughout the
Middle Ages for copying manuscripts, but the demands of
print were being found to be quite different.
ventions,
wh~ch
These con-
we now take for granted--the design of
ls~
ters, equalization of spacing, punctuation, capitalization,
pagination, careful editing, elimination of arbitrary
variations--were not hit upon all at once, but took
several generations to develop.
Pasquier and Du Bellay
.excused misprints as inevitable:
... quel liure peut on imprimer de nouueau qui
n'y soit infiniement sujet? L'on enuoie a
l'Imprimeur ses copies les plus correctes que
l'on peut.
Qui passent premierement par les
mains du Compositeur. Ce seroit certes vn
vray miracle, que sans faute il peust assembler
toutes les lettres ... (Pasquier, "Lettre a
Loisel," II, col. 282)
Situ treuues quelques faultes en l'impression
tu ne t'en dois prendre ~ moy, qui m'en suis
rapport~
la foy d'autruy.
Puis le labeur de
la correction est tel, singulierement en vn
oeuure nouueau, que tous les yeux d'Argus ne
fourniroient J voir les faultes, qui s'i
treuuent.
(Du Bellay, L'Olive, 2nd Preface,
in Oeuvres, ed. Chamard)
a
And Peletier here provides us with an indication that
printers were only beginning to learn their craft:
E mtm¢s les Apostrof¢s qui ont ete trouue¢s d¢
notr¢ tans, m¢ sambl¢t bien propr¢s: combien
qu'il i ~t des Imprimeurs qui n¢ font cont¢
45
d'an vser: Mes j¢ cro~ bien qu¢ c'ft par c¢
qu'iz n¢ sau¢t a quo~ ~ll¢s sont bon¢s, ni la
ou tll¢s s¢ dotu¢t appliquer.
(Dialogu¢, pp.
105-106)
The inconsistency and confusion to be seen everywhere
in 16th-century print are thus understandable.
And yet,
by the end of the century a single, generally·accepted
system of spelling was beginning to emerge in printed
texts.
It was learned and etymological, having responded
to these forces in the course of its history; and the
alphabet inherited from Latin, in spite of the reformers'
efforts to introduce new symbols,remained intact.
An
orthography already archaic by the end of the Middle Ages
had thus been preserved, and Estienne Pasquier, by 1596,
could already write of its struggle as history:
Car comme ainsi soit que le temps eut alors
produit une pepiniere de braues poetes, aussi
chacun diuersement prit cette querelle en
main, les aucuns estans pour le party qu'il
falloit du tout accorder l'escriture au parler,
s'y rendans mesmement extremes. Les autres
nageans entre deux eaux voulurent apporter
quelque mediocrite entre les deux extremitez.
Ce nonobstant, apres plusieurs tracassemens,
enfin encores est-on retourn~ ~ nostre vieille
coustume, fors que dE! quelques paroles on en
a oste les consonantes trap esloignees de la
prononciation, comme la·lettre de "p" des mots
de "temps, corps" et "escripre."
(Recherches
de la France, in Oeuvres, I, col. 756)
CHAPTER 3
PRONUNCIATION
Th~
problem, then, for today•s historical linguist
becomes one of determining 16th-century pronunciation in
spite of 16th-century spelling.
Which of the spellings
corresponded to standard pronunciation?
Which were
particular to certain social strata or milieux and not to
others?
Which represented sounds in the process of chang-
ing or sounds long lost?
Which were mere decoration?
Finally, which were those of the author?
Which of the
printer?
The descriptions of early writers are important to
our ability to piece together the phonology of previous
centuries.
Yet they have to be interpreted cautiously,
for while they have the advantage of being direct, and are
the only direct evidence we have, they are at the same
time inevitably subject to varying degrees of bias and
error.
In those first decades, when the analysis of the
vernacular was just getting underway, perceptions were
understandably confused.
They were often limited to the
writers' bwn social group of educated speakers and could
combine insight and nalvete" with peculiar and disconcerting unpredictability.
Host widespread was the tendency to confuse sound
with its graphic representationr resulting in unclear,
46
47
often completely incorrect statements.
Peletier seems to
have been more aware than most of the other phoneticians
of the difference between speech and writing, and seems to
have made a constant, if not
differentiate the two.
alw~ys
successful, effort td
This makes his testimony among the
more reliable, but he did not write about every l6thcentury p h oneme.
~ober
. l'lens
Desaln
and reliable witnesses.
4
was a l so among t h e more
But, again, his coverage
of l6th-cehtury pronunciation was selective and he often
said nothing about those areas most in doubt.
Although the present work is concerned primarily
with direct statements, occasional reference is made to
the spellings themselves either to support the statements
or to supplement them when they are scarce.
No attempt
is made to examine every 16th-century phoneme.
Rather,
the focus is on those sounds in the process .of rapid
change or which gave rise to controversy and doubt.
4
claude Desainliens (also known as Claudius a Sancto
Vinculo and Claud Hollyband) was a French Huguenot who
fled to England in 1564 to escape persecution. There he
became a respected school teacher and established his
own school which specialized in teaching the French
language. He laid particular stress on the good pronunciation of a foreign language and prided himself on
his own students' ability to speak French well. He wrote
De Pronuntiatione to serve as a textbook for his school.
48
AU ) 0
Of the Old French diphthongs, only /au/< /al/ + consonant ("aube"
<
"alba") srirvived to the 16th century.
While cultivated speakers held ori to the
d~phthong
well
into the century, it had probably begun to be leveled to
/o/ somewhat earlier in popular speech.
many reflects the changing usage.
Conflicting testi-
Palsgrave compared the
sound to the English diphthong "aw":
"Au" in the frenche tonge shal be sounded lyke
as we sounde hym in these wordes in our tonge,
"a dawe, a mawe, an hawe" 5 .... Except where a
frenche worde begynneth with this diphthong
"au," as in these words, "aulcun, aultre, au,
aussi, aux,. aucteurs," and all suche lyke, in
wiche they sounde the "a" almost lyke an "o."
(L'Eclarcissement, p. 14)
Meigret claimed to hear, and consistently wrote, "ao" for
"au":
Un' aotr' [diphthong] ~n ao, come, aotant, aos,
loyaos: pour laqE(lle l'ecritture Frantotz'
~buze de la diphth~ge au, qe la pronon£ia2ion
ne conott point.
(Grammtre, fol. 8v)
Des Autels ·objected to Meigret' s "ao" and insisted on the
pronunciation "au," as in Latin, "autem," to which criticism Meigret retorted acidly, first in his Deftnses centre
ly;s gensures
C calonies
de Glaumalis du Vezeltt:
5A more thorough investigation than the pre~ent one
would, of course, attempt to establish exactly what "a
dawe, a mawe, an hawe" sounded like in Palsgrave's day.
The same is true of "a boye, a f royse , coye" ·in the
passage quoted below.
49
Ie ne crot pas q'il SOEft horne si dehont~
ayant l'ex~eritnte de ~a Iage Fran~O@Z~, qi oza
afft:rrner o1r ut a la f1n de vaut corn' 11 ftt
~n veut, t q'il ne conf~sse oir pluto~ o~ par
o ouutrt tn vaot: ny n ~t la pronont_la£lOn
de la diphthonge ao aotre t_n, aosi ne, <en aotat.
Bref tous Eeus qe nous auons de couturne d'ecrire
par au se trouuer~t.faoz:
car _il ny ~st aocune
rn~n2iori de l'u.
Parqo~ monsieur rn~tre Gyllaorne
sl vou' n'auez le Etrueao bie troubl~ d'opiniatret~,
vou' trouuerez q'tn introduizant la diphthonge,
ao, je ne fts q'accorder l'ecrittur' a la prono2ia£ion.
(sig. Dlr)
and then again in Reponse a. la.Dezespere'e repliqe de
Glaornalis de Vezelt.,t, transform~ t,n Gyllaorne des Aotels:
Si ltt:s ant_iens Latins l'ussent pronon£_~ come
nou' fE£:zons aosi, il' vsse[n]t ecrit "aotern":
att~ndu qe le plus opiniatre sourdaot du mode
ne saro~t nier q'il.n:oye tD aosi vn a, puis
vn o, q1 luy r_t conJOlnt ~n vne·rn~rne syllabe.
(p.
54)
Peletier also disputed Meigret's "ao" but, unlike Des
Autels, the sound he heard was closer to "o":
... la Diftongu¢ compose¢ d¢ la pr¢rnier¢ e
cinquiern¢ voy~l¢, qui t_t "au": pour laquele
tu rn<c_z "ao." An quot_ a pein¢ puis j ¢ irnaginer
r~son qui t'~t rnu, ... Car sans point d¢ faut¢
ir t'ut autant valu rnr.tr¢ un "o" sirnpl¢.
(Dialogu¢, pp. 16-17)
And although he did admit the following, -he nevertheless
always spelled it "au":
Cornbien qu¢ notr¢ prononciacion tournat plus
sus "ao, " qu¢ sus "au" ( c¢ qu¢ j ¢ n' apptr£_U
jarnts) ancor¢s n¢ seror.t c¢ qu¢ curiosite
a tot, d¢ chtrcher les chos¢s d¢ si pr~s.
(pp. 17-18)
Theodore de Beze also identified "au" with "o":
"La
dipthongue 'au' ne diff~re pas sensiblernent de la voyelle
'o':. ainsi 'aux'
(allia),
'paux'
(pali),
'vauxi
(valles)
50
ne semblent pas avoir un autre son que 'os,'
pas.'"
'vos,'
'pro-
Although Heigret was Lyonnais, de Beze mentioned
only the Normans as pronouncing "a-o" for "au":
"Les
Normands la prononcent en faisant entendre distinctement
'a,o':
disant 'a-o-tant' pour 'autant'"
(De Francicae,
trans. Livet, pp. 520-521).
EAU
>
0
The triphthong "eau," also from the vocalization of
"1" before a consonant (beaus < bellus), survived as
I -a ao/ to the beginning of the 16th century, but was. soon
reduced to I -a o/ and then, by the end of the century, to
/o/.
Heigret transcribed it as "eao":
... come
~n
veao, beao, moreao.
Dont je
m'em~ru~lle de £eus qi premiers ont termin~ £ete
tripthong ~n u: vu qe la pronon£:_ia£ion ne tient
rien de l'une, mtmes de l'ou clos, qi a qelq'
affinite au~q l'u. Brief je ne vat point de
lieu ou l'o sott prononc~ si ouu~r~, q'tn la
diphthonge, ao.
(Grammt;re, foL 9 )
Peletier always wrote "eau," which for him was equivalent
to "eo," and Desainliens spelled it "au" in his transcriptions (De Pronuntiatione, pp. 93-97), thus "beaucoup" like
"-c-auze."
In popular Parisian speech "iau" (/iau/ or/io/), perhaps of dialectal origin, appeared in the 16th century.
Both Peletier and de Beze made note of it and denounced it.
Peletier referred to " ... le vic¢ des Parisiens, qui au
lieu 'd'un seau d'eau,' dis¢t 'vn sio d'io"'
(p. 17), and
51
de B~ze warned, "il faut e'viter la faute grossiere des
Parisiens qui
dis~nt
Livet, p. 523).
'liau' pour 'l'eau,' etc."
(trans.
In the 17th century /iau/ became /jau/
and persisted as such in popular speech to the 19th
century.
OI
> WA,
~
6
The Old French.diphthong /oi/ (</ei/ <Vulgar Latin
/e/
< Classical
Latin "e,"
the end of the Middle Ages.
"r",
"oe") had become /w~/ by
But in the 16th century three
pronunciations existed for the spelling "oi":
and
/~/-
/w~_/,
/wa/,
Its subsequent history furnishes an excellent
example of the confusion wrought when grammarians began to
int~rfere
with the natural tendencies of the language.
The pronunciation /f(_/, characteristic of some western
dialects and encouraged by the large number of provincial
immigrants to Paris (von Wartburg, Evolution et structure,
p. 156), developed directly from /ei/, that is, without
going through the /oi/
>
/wt/ stage.
It was already a
feature of Parisian speech by the 15th century and had become common in the Court by the 16th.
Grammarians and
purists reacted vigorously against this "unsophisticated"
pronunciation and succeeded in establishing
fw(/
in many
words, first in polite society and later among the people.
6
For convenience, I am using /7;_/ for open "e" instead of the IPA character lei·
52
Henri Estienne ridiculed the pronunciation If[/=
On n'oseroit dire 11 Francyois 11 ni 11 Fran<t:_oise, 11
~ur peine d'estre appelie pedant; mais faut.
dire."Frances" et "Franceses," comme "Angles"
et "Angleses"; pareillement j' 11 estes, 11 je
11
faises ," j e "dises, 11 j "' alles," j e 11 venes,"
non pas j"'estois, 11 je 11 faisois," je 11 disois,"
j'"allois, 11 je "venois," et ainsi es autres
il faut user du mesme changement.
{Deux
Dialogues, p. 22)
-He blamed this unacceptable pronunciation on the many
Italians at the French Court who pronounced
words, and he also blamed it on women:
que ceci est venu
•
22).
"Il est certain
'Fran2ois, Anglois'
Geofroy Tory earlier observed that
•
in these
premierement des femmes qui avoient
peur d'ouvrir trop la bouche en disant
(p.
/~/
-v
Llonnolses pronuncet souuant 'a' pour 'e.'
"~
.. les Dames
Pareillement
r
les Normans 'e' pour ·' oy' " (Champ Fleury, fol. 39 ) .
De
Beze attributed /~/ to the people of Paris as well as to
the Normans and to Italian influence:
/
.
... ainsi les Normands ecrlvent et prononcent
"fai," pour "foi," et le peuple parisien dit
"parlet, allet, venet" pour "parloit, alloit,
venoit"; les imitateurs de l'italien prononcent
de m@me "Angles, Frances, Ecosses" pour
"Anglois, Francrois, Ecossois."
(trans. Livet,
p.
522)
While the Italians did not introduce the pronunciation
It/, they may very well have contributed to its popularity
and hence to its permanent establishment in manywords
where /wcr_l might otherwise have prevailed.
At the same time that /t/ was gaining ground over
/w'(_l, /wa/
<
/wf(_/ was developing as a feature particular
53
to popular Parisian speech.
Palsgrave reported it as
early as 1530:
"Oi" in the frenche tonge hath II diverse
soundes, for sometyme it is sounded lyke as
we sounde "oy" in these wordes "a boye, a
.froyse, coye," and such lyke, and somtyme they
sounde the "i" of "oy" almost lyke an "a."
If 11 s," "t" or "x" folowe next after iloy" in
a worde of one syllable, in all suche the "i"
shalbe sounded in maner like an "a," as for
"boys, foys, soyt, croyst, uoix, croix" they
sounde "boas, foas, soat, croast, uoax,
croax," and in like wyse, in wordes of many
syllables if "oi" be the last vowels of the
wordes, havyng "s" or "t" folowyng them, all
suche shall sounde theyr "i" of "oi 1•1 lyke an
"a," as "aincoys, francoys, disoyt, lisoyt,
jasoyt" shalbe sounded "aincoas, francoas,
disoat, lisoat, jasoat," also whan so ever
"oy" cometh in the meane syllables of a worde
havyng "r" or "l" immediatly folowing hym,
the "i" of "oy" shalbe sounded almost lyke
an "a," as "gloyre, croyre, memoyre, uictoyre,
poille, uoille, poillon" shalbe sounded
"gloare, croare, memoare. uictoare, poalle,
uoalle, poallon," and so of all other.
(p. 13)
This pronunciation, too, was condemned, and eschewed
by cultivated speakers.
"Une faute tre"s·grande des
Parisiens," wrote de B~ze, "c 1 est de prononcer
( ou 'verre 1 )
,
1
foirre, '
1
trois, ' comme
1
1
voarre, '
'troas,' et meme 'tras'" (trans. Livet, p. 522).
voirre 1
'foarre, '
Desain-
liens taught only the pronunciation "o~ 1 " .saying that
"moyne, moy, toy, loy," and other words with "oy" are
.,_
" loe,
....
Roe, foe," and that
pronounced "mo~ne, moe, toe,
words with "oi," such as "oiseau, droit," must ·likewise
.
'
'
be pronounced
"oeseau,
droet"
(p. 63).
Peletier and
Meigret consistently transcribed "oi, oy" as "or·," although Peletier noted, "Aujourdhui les uns dis¢t 'Rein¢,'
54
'Ro~n¢.'
Mccm¢s a la plus part des Courtisans
dir¢,
all~t,
les autr¢s
vous
iz
orr~z
v¢~o~t'"
'iz
(p. 85).
iz
v¢n~t':
pour,
'iz
alo~t,
As educated speakers, Desainliens,
Peletier, Meigret, and others were doubtless recording the
pronunciation of the class to which they belonged, and the
.one they recognized as best.
For a long time there was hesitation and c6nflict
between Icc_/, the direct outcome of./ei/; /wa/, the specifically Parisian development of /wt/; and
/w~/,
the con-
sciously cultivated pronunciation of the upper classes.
The effect of the grammarians' meddling was to postpone
the inevitable takeover of the popular forms /wa/
and/~/,
and to secure /wa/ in a number of words which would otherwise have acquired
placed
/w~/
1[1·
The form /wa/ only slowly dis-
in those words in which
successfully imposed, and
lr/
/w~/
had been more
continued where it had been
too firmly established to revert to /wf[/, in the endings
of the imperfect and conditional and in scores of other
words, "monnaie," "craie," "faible," "~pais," "paraitre,"
and so on.
The pronunciation /Wf[/ lingered until the
Revolution, which dispersed the.court.
Vdn Wartburg tells
us (p. 229) that when Louis XVIII returned to France in
1814 and proclaimed, "C'est rowe le rwe," he had to be
told told that the last "rwe" was Louis XVI and that he
could no longer be anything but "le rwa."
The spelling "oi" for /wa/ remains to this day,
I
55
though the pronunciation /oi/ disappeared in the 12th
century, and for
lei'
"oi" persisted until 1835.when the
"Academie" adopted "ai. " "Fran<(ais, ... "Frant:ois"; "frais,"
"froid"; and "Anglais" and "Hollandais" beside "Danois,"
"Suedois," and "Hongrois" are among the many survivors
bearing witness to the conflict.
0 and OU
Another difficult situation arose out of the hesitation between·"o" /o/ and "ou" /u/.
This controversy
reached major propor.tions in a long quarrel which lasted
throughout the 16th century and well into the 17th between the "ou'istes," who favored "ou" /u/, and the "nonoulstes," who liked "o" /o/ better.
Apparently the con-
flict between a very close /o/ and a very open /u/ had
been going on for some time, but in the 16th century the
popular tendency to close /o/ to /u/ was countered by
the literate population which, influenced by othography
and by
Latin~
was
~nclihed
to pronounce words as spelled,
and /o/ ~as thus retained in many cases where it might
otherwise have become /u/:
"cSte" beside "coute,"
"couteau"; "dormir," but "tourment"; ·"rosee," which vied
/'
with "rousee"; and so on.
Confusion prevailed for a long time even among the
educated, who as a rule favored /o/ and rejected /u/ as
popular or dialectal.
Peletier reproached Meigret for
56
confusing the two sounds and writing "troup" and "noutres,"
but "doleur ," "coleur":
. . . . qui t 1 acord¢ra qu 1 on doE[u¢ prononcer,
"troup, noutr¢s, coute, claus, nous anciens,"
par diftongu¢ "ou"? au lieu d¢ "trop, notr¢s,
cot¢, c.los," e "nos anciens," par "o" simpl¢?
Au contrer¢, a qui as tu oui dir¢, "coleur,
doleur," par 1¢ m~m¢ "o" simpl¢, qu¢ tu
apt,l¢s "o" ouur_rt?
(p. 22)
Provincial pronunciations further complicated the
matter, which Brunet called one of the most confused of
16th-century French phonology (Histoire de la langue
.frantaise, II, 251).
Meigret was from Lyon where
"l 1 ou'isme" was widespread, but other dialects favored /o/:
a
... dans le Berry,
Lyon et en plusieurs
autres lieux, on prononce "nostre, vostre,
le-dos," comme "noustre, voustre, 1e dous"
... en Dauphine, au contraire, et en Provence,
on supprime 1 1 "u" de la diphthongue "ou," et
l 1 on prononce "cop, beaucop, doleur, torment,"
pour "coup, beaucoup, douleur, tourment"
.., ....
Il faut se garder de prononcer comme a Lyon
"ou" pour "o" (comme "nous" pour "nos"), et
comme dans le Dauphine et la Savoie "o" pour
"ou": tels "cop" pour "coup," ""oi" pour "oui,"
etc.
(De Beze, trans. Livet, p. 522)
Peletier indicted the pronunciation of still other
lects:
1
I 1 e trouue qu¢ c ~t 1¢ vic¢ d¢ cirteins pals,
comm¢ d¢ la Gaul¢ Narbortnocs~, ~lonno~s¢~ e
d¢ quelqu¢s andrott_z d¢ l 1 Aqulteln¢: ou lZ
dis¢t 1¢ "haut bot, un huis ouert, du vin
rog¢": Au contrer¢, "un mout, un¢ chouse,"
e des "pourreaus." I 1 e trouue an quelqu¢s
Liur¢s, d¢ l 1 Tmprim¢ri¢ d¢ Librer¢s autr¢mant
corncz e dilig 1 ans, "loang¢, rejoir, torner,
oi, morir, e voloir": Au contrer¢, "ourront,
1¢ voul, e 1¢ mout"~ chos¢ c!rt¢s ridicul¢.
(pp. 22-23)
dia~
57
Henri Estienne derided the "ou"lsmes" he found too popular
among the members of the Court:
Si tant vous aimez les "ou" doux,
N'estes vous pas bien de grands fous,
de dire "chouse" au lieu de "chose"?
De dire j'"ouse" au lieu de j'"ose"?
(Deux Dialogues, "Remonstrance," pp.
14-15)
There is probably some truth in Meigret's explanation that
for certain
wo~ds
at least the pronunciation is neither
"o" nor "ou" but something in between:
~
qant a coleur,
.~
doleur si tu vsses bien re-
gard~ ~e qe j'ey dit de l'o, tu vsses trouu~
qe lt' Fra£ots ont dr' vocables ambigues ....
de sorte qe nou' ne proferon' pas couleur come
couureur:
ne douleur, come dous, t doulltt,
aosi ne dizo' nou' pas coleur come col, ne
doleur come dol.w.on pourra aosi dire qe nous
ecriuons mal Rome, conduire, compozer~ come,
com~nt/ .... ~ pourtant a faote de charactere
_moy~n, il 1~' faot lrsser ao bo pltzir de
l'ecriuein:
combien q'il doECt auizer de suyure
<z:eluy dont la pronontiar_ion appro<c_he le plus.
~Reponse a l'Apolojie de Iaqes Pelletier,
fol. 7r v) .
Needless to say, educated spelling rarely reflected a
pronunciation /u/, which makes the transciptions and descriptions of educated speakers particularly valuable.
"O" /o/ survived in most learned words ("volume,"
"moment.," ,;colonne") and in a number of popular words
which came under the influence of grammarians or of the
reforms in the pronunciation of Latin ( "soleil"
<...
Old
French "souleil," "rosee," "fosse'," "colombe," ''commencer").
"Ou" /u/ prevailed in many other words, either
by analogy, especially in verb forms and derivations
58
("ouvre" and "coule" by analogy with "ouvrir," "couler";
"epoux" and ''jaloux" by analogy with "e-pouser," "jalousie")
or because they escaped the grammarians' influence
("coussin," "tourment," "fourmi").
Because such inter-
ferences resulted in many.irregularities, exact rules are
hard to give, and the reasons for the survival of one form
over another often.remain obscure.
EU and U
Debates also arose out of the hesitation between
"eu," /re/ or/(/;/, fromLatin
ly:
11
oeuf"
<
"ovem,
11
"heure"
"o"
<
and
"o,""u"
-
7
respective-
.
"hora" ; and "u 11 or "eu,"
/y/, jgyj, from the loss of an intervocalic consonant:
"sur" < "seur"
spelling
11
<
"seciirum.
11
These were complicated by the
eU 11 which represented both categories of sounds,
by.dialectal pronunciations which invaded the capital,
again by the interference of grammarians, and finally, by
the fact that, while nothing significant happened to the
first category, in the second/By/ was giving way to /y/
but was not yet universal for all speakers.
Acc6rding to Brunot, poetry is of little help in
7
The tendency for /re/ to appear in closed syllables
and /(/;/ in open. is a more recent development; ·the distinction is blurred, however, in unstressed positions.
Spellings with "o" ("oeuvre," 11 oeuf," "boeuf," 11 noeud, 11
"moeurs," etc., are etymological, or result from a desire
to distinguish homonyms.
59
~orting
out the distribution of these sounds, for poets
simply chose the form which suited their rhyme.
Most
writers, moreovei, clung to the spelling "eu" regardless
of their pronunciation.
Thus the phoneticians' observa-
tions .are in this case of particular value and usefulness:
"C'est ici l'un des points ou, suivant moi, le t~moignage
direct·des th~oriciens doit pr~valoir sur l'observ~tion
des rimes"
(II, 264).
For Peletier /9 yj had already reduced to a simple
vowel:
... la prolacion d¢ ces moz "conneu, d¢ceu, veu,
peu" e les autr¢s, qu¢ nous prononcions
naguer¢s par diftongu¢ an la dtrnier¢ so~t
change¢ an. "u" simpl¢.
(pp. 86-87)
But de B~ze considered the sound a diphthong, and attrib~
uted the pronunciation "u" /y/ to Picard influence:
Les Francais i~itent quelquefois les Picards,
en ce qu'ils prononcent par "u" simple les
mots "seur" ("securus") et ses derives,
"seurete, asseurer, asseurance";
"meur"
,
( "maturus" ) , "meurete," et en general taus
les noms en "eure," comme "blesseure, casseure,
navreure" ("vulneratio"), 11 rompeure" ( 11 ruptura"), etc.; il en est de m&me dans les
participes passes passifs, masculins ou
feminins, termines en "eu, "eue," comme "beu,
beue, deu, deue, leu, letie~" etc.
(trans.
Livet, pp. 521-522)
~
/
He also criticized-as a Picardism: the pronunciation "u"
/y/ for "eu" /m,
~/:
Dans cette diphthongue on n' en tend ni 1' "e,"
ni 1' "u," mais un son qui tient de 1 'un et
de 1' autre:
"beuf, neuf, peu" ( "paucum") ,
"seur" ("soror"), "veu" ("votum"), et un grand
nombre d'autres que les Picards prononcent
60
souvent "u" simple, disant "Diu, ju," pour
"Dieu, jeu."
(p. 525)
Indeed, joe,¢/ did not exist in the Picard dialect, in
which /y/ was the phoneme used instead.
As Parisian speech
was considerably influenced by invading regional pronuncia tions, many words hesitated between /¢, oej and /y I:
"heurter," "hurter"; "meure," "mure"; "fleute," "flute";
"beurre," "burre"; etc.
Peletier, for example, took issue
with Meigret 1 s pronunciation of "queue" and· "heurte":
"Di mot, j ¢ t¢· pri, Meigret, qui t¢ pourra consantir qu¢
1
lon dotu¢ prononcer
lieu d¢ 'keu¢ 1 e
1
cue,
1
1
heurt¢ 1 ?"
hurte,
1
par
(p. 22).
1
u
1
tout nu au
Meigret replied to
the criticism, more or less, but explained very little:
~
pour satisfer 1 a £e qe tu demandes, qi sera
£eluy qi me constntira q 1 on dotue prono~er
hurte, ~cue, pour heurte, e ceue? Ee sera
£eluy qi voudra vzer d 1 un lt'gaje gra<(_ieus ~
d 1 une prola<eion EC_zee.
(Reponse a l'Apolojie
de Iaqes Pelletier, fol. 6r)
Grarrunarians intervened, and on the authority of
spelling (some things never change) condemned "u" /y/ as
popular or <Iialectal, sometimes even where it was etymologically correct.
Thus it came about that the "-heur" of
"bonheur," "malheur," and "heureux," pronounced /yr/ in
the 16th century (" ... 1 1 ·1 e
1
est inutile encore dans le
mot 'heureux' qui se prononce
/.
/
derive de
1
heur,
1
1
hureux,
1
bien qu'il soit
....
ou s 1 entend la diphthongue 'eu 1
••• ".
[De Beze, trans. Livet, p. 525]) became /oer/ by the 17th,
whereas /yr/ would have been the expected development of
61
"augurium."
A false assoc:Lation with "heure" favored the
outcome and alsri accounts for the unetymological "h."
·E, Closed, Open, and "Muet"·
Although Renaissance French had the same three "e"'s
in its repertoire as does modern French,
lei,
1~1,
I a I, their distribution differed considerably.
~nd
They were
also far less stable, and were shifting from one category
to another during the course of the century.
Regional,
social, and individual di£ferences added to the fluctuation, disturbing the classification still further.
It is
not surprising then that 16th-century phoneticians were
unable to arrive at a consensus· concerning the nature,
distribution, notation, or even the nlirnber of sounds
rep~
resented by the.letter "e."
Etienne Dolet recognized only two "e"'s, "e masculin,
II
(/el)
nature and
1
and "e feminin,
be~avior
II
(/
el)
o
He described their
in his Lea Accents:
La letre appellee, e, a double son, & prolation en Francoys. La premiere est dicte
.masculine:
&
feminine.
La masculine
. l'aultre
.
/
.
est. nommee a1ns1, pource que, e, mascul1n a
l~ son plus uirile, plus robuste, & plus fort
sonnant. D'aduantage, il porte sur soy une
uirgule ung peu inclinee
~ main dextre, comme
_,.
est
l'accent
appelle
des
Latins aigu, ainsi,
/
e. Exemple.
Il est homme de grand' bonte,
priuaulte, & familiarite:
plus, il diet
tousiours uerite ....
/
/
Maintenant il te fault noter diligemment
deux choses.
C'est que cest~ letre, &, estant
masculine iamais ne uient en collision: c'est
62
a dire, qu'estant deuant ling mot commencant
par uoyelle, elle ne se perd poinct.
Exemple.
Il a este homme de bien toute sa uie:
& n'a
meri b~ ung tel oul trage.
En apres il fault entendre, que ceste letre,
./
e, est aussi bien masculine au plurier nombre,
qu'au singulier. Et ce tant en noms, qu'en
uerbes~
Exemple des noms.
Les iniquite"s, &
meschancet~s, desquelles il estoit rempli,
l'ont conduict/ ~ ce malheur.
Aultre exemple..
.
Toutes uoluptes contra1res a uertu ne sont
louables.
Ie te ueulx aduertir en cest endroict d'une
mienne opinion. Qui est, que le, 6, masculin
en noms de plurier hombre ne doibt recepuoir
.
ung, z~ ma1s
une, s, & d 01'b t estre marcque/
de son accent, tout ainsi qu'au singulier
nombre.
Tu escriras doncq uolupte-s, dignite's,
iniquite's, uerit~s:
& non pas uolupt~z,
dignit~z, iniquit~z, uerit~z. Ou sans ~
marcqu~ auec son accent aigu tu n'escriras
uoluptez, dignitez, iniquitez, ueritez.
Car,
z, est le sign~ de, ~, masculin au plurier
nombre des uerbes . de seconde .I personne:
&
ce sans aulcun accent marcque dessus.
(rpt.
Beaulieux, pp. 125-126)
Dolet is here reacting against the common practice of
using "z" as a plural instead of "s" to indicate a preceding closed "e" /e/.
He continues:
Sur ce propos ie scay bien, que plusieurs non
bien congnoissants la uirilit~ du son de le,
~' ~asculin trouueront estrange, que ie repudie
le, z, en ces mots uoluptts, dignitds, & aultres
semblables. Mais s'ilz le trouuent estrange,
il leur procedera d'ignorance, & mauluaise
coustume d'escrire:
laquelle il c6nuient
reformer peu ~ peu.
L'aultre pronunciation de ceste letre, e,
est feminine:
c'est a dire de peu de son, &
sans uehemence.
Estant feminine, elle n~
repcoit aulcun accent. Exemple. Elle est
notable femme, de bonne uie, de bonne rencontre, & aultant prudente, · & sage, que femme,
qui se trouue en ceste contree.
63
Note aussi, que quand ceste letre, e, est
feminine, elle est de si peu de force, que tousiours elle est mangee, s'il s'ensuict apres
elle ung mot commencant par uoyelle.
(p. 126)
Like Dolet, f1eigret recognized only two "e" 's, but un- ·
like Dolet, he was quite mistaken in their classification.
·To Meigret, the
lei of "bonte" and the I a I of "bonne"
were one and the same "e clos," which he distinguished
"~
from
ouvert."
Here.· is what he said about it in his
Reponse to DesAutels, who had objected to Meigret's
ana~
lysis, asserting that French had not two but three "e" 's: ·
re
Or
j~ntil Philozophe ~n la re2h~r£he d~s e
me propoze qe je n'inore pas qe notr' e a
troECs diuEt_rses puissan£es.
Si frc_s Gyllaome:
car je n'~n treuue en notre lange qe deus, si
differ~s ~n leur pr~non~ia£i5, qe l'vn ne peut
rtre pron5ge pour l'aotre, com assez je l'ey
montre. Qi sont l'e clos, t 1'~ ouuert ....
M~s tn tant qe con2~rne la qantit~, nous ~n
pourrons assiner qatre: qi sont l'e clos
/
/
long, come £eluy de bonte, ~hastete:
l'aotre
brief, come fame, bone. ~ si to~ ou aotre
veullez dire qe l'e brief eyt/qelqe differanre
formtlle dau~q laotre, efforce vous de le
pronon£er long: ~ lors vou' vtrrez voutr'
abus .... De m~mes aosi auon' nous l'y_ ouu~rt
long, com' il ~t en la t~rminalle de tous 1~'
pluriers, come bo~~s, vall~s:
etant ao
contr~re br~f tn leurs singuliers:
come,
bonet,
vall~t .... Si tu vsses prins garde a
l..
•
•
~e' propr1etes ~ d1ffer~n£es, come do~t tout
home qi se m~le de deuizer d'vne doctrine, tu
n'vsse' pas parle- einsi confuzemE(nt, qe l'e a
trot puissantes.
(pp. 30-31)
Meigret's other adversary, Peletier, likewise accused
~·1eigret
of confusing
f~s qu¢ deus
d~rnier¢ edicion.
Tun¢
lei and I<) I:
sort¢s d'"e" an ta
L'un a keu¢, duquel
nous parlons, qu¢ tu ap~l¢s e ouutrt (qui
plus propr¢mant s'aptl¢rott e cler ... ).
64
L'autr¢ sans. keu¢ l¢quel tu ftz seruir d¢
deus ofic¢s: qu¢ tu n¢ saurots nier (sans
dir¢ rien d¢ plus ~gr¢) etr¢ chos¢ d'imprudanc¢ e d'omission. Car tu sez qu¢ nous
an auons tro~s:
lequez tu sans an c¢ mot
"Defxr¢." Vo~la ou il m¢ sambl¢, qu¢ tu as
notaol¢mant falhi, .... Eta faut¢ s¢ vott
an ces moz "ecrir¢, deduir¢, per¢":
la ou
tu n¢ myz poi,nt d' 'ie" diferant pour les
pr¢mier~s e pour les dLrnier¢s· silab¢s.
(p. 24)
'
Further on Peletier described the nature of his
three "e"'s.
His goal was to render these as distinct in
writing as they were in speech, and indeed he was the
first to do so in every instance:
Pr¢mier¢mant, j¢ vous di qu¢ nous auons an
Fran<c.ots trots sort¢s d' "e," comm¢ desja a ete
·obst,rue par autr¢s: E tous tr~es s¢ connoEC_ss¢t
an c¢ mot "Fr:rm¢te." E di qu'1l 'rt necesser¢
d¢ les f~r¢ valo~r tous tro~s an ~critur¢, ni
plus ni moins qu'ari Prononc1acion. L'un s¢ra
pur, e s¢lon la pr¢mier¢ puissanc¢ qu'il a du
Latin:
l¢quel les Poet¢s Franto~s ont nomme e
Masculin. Sus c¢tui n¢ b¢soin d¢ m~tr¢ un
accant .... L'autr¢, qui sonn¢ cler¢mant j'acord¢
au~c Meigrtt qu'on met¢ un¢ keu¢ pour an frr¢
la distinccion. L¢ tiers qu¢ les FranEors apel¢t
e Feminin, nous 1¢ f¢rons tel qu'il s¢ trouu¢L
an quelqu¢s impressions a la fin d'un mot,
quand 1¢ suiuant commanc¢ par voycl¢, pour
sinifier qu'il s¢ perim¢:
l¢quel, si bien
m'an souuient, les Compositeurs d¢ 1'Imprim¢ri¢ aptl¢t e Barre. Pareinsi, iz s¢ votrront
tous tro~s an ces moz "defr_r¢, f<crm¢te,
arr~te¢."
(pp. 108-~09)
Still, Meigret refused to be convinced:
~·
qant ao' trots e qe tu dis qe je s~ns
uiffertns ~n ee vocable defEC_re, je n'us
jam~s le nes si ~on qe j'y.tn susse stn~ir
plu de deus, etas le prem1er t le dern1er
d'une mr.me natur' t. qatite, t le secod E(
ouu~rt.
Trouue' tu qe la voytlle de la
prep~ziti~n de, dont deftr' ~~ compoze soet
~n r1en d1ffer~nte de la dern1ere de
65
(Reponse a Pelletier, fol. 8r)
~his
passage is revealing, for it tells us that not all of
the disagreements among 16th-century phoneticians were due
to faulty perception.
One of the Erasmian reforms of the
pronunciation of.Latin substituted /e/ for /a I in pretonic position.
This had important repercussions on
French, first on the pronunciation of learned words, and
.
.?
/
later on many popular ones; hence, "present," "desir;"
/
/
/
"peril," "seduire," "benin," and so on, formerly pronounced with /a j, ·now proriounced with /e/.
The reforms
thus encouraged a pronunciation /de/ in.words which until
then had /da /; and, although
Meigr~t
did not distinguish
/e/ from /a I in his orthography, it seems likely from his
comment that he was pronouncing "d~fere" in the old
manner, while Peletier was clearly pronouncing it in the
new.
Fluctuations in pronunciation induced other disagreements.
Peletier complained about Meigret's excessive use
of "[ a keu¢," that is
Ire/:
Qui t'acord¢ra qu¢ 1' e" qu¢' tu ap~l¢s "e"
·
.
ouuert conuiegn¢ an ces moz, "nagu~r¢,.pourtr~r¢,
contrEC_r¢, necess~r¢, 11 pour "naguer¢, pourtrer¢,
necesser¢'?''
... E ancor¢s c¢ci m¢ sambl¢ autant
ou plus etrang¢ qu¢ tu ecriu¢s si grand nombr¢
d¢ moz par 1' "t_" a keu¢.
{pp. 2 2-24)
11
But tonic /e/ was at the time giving·way to
positions:
1[/
in certain
where followed by a final consonant, closing
the syllable, words of the type "tel 11
;
and in words where
the disappearance of final unstressed I e/ also resulted
66
in a closed syllable, thus /pe-rQ
I>
/prr/.
Here, then,
it was Peletier who was pronouncing words in the old manner, and Meigret in the new.
Meigret had a supporter in
Desainliens, who also prounounced "e" as open in this
position:
fr~re"
'
'
'
'
"espe-ce, Lucrece,
tu me bleces,
... pere,
mere,
.
(p. 14).
Another source of variation arose out of a popular
Parisian innovation which replaced
versa, especially before /r/.
It/
with /a/ and vice
The tendency began as early
as the 14th century and had become very common by the 16th,
as numerous spellings reveal:
"bizarre," "bizarre";
"asperge," ·"asparge"; ·"merque," "marque"; "perfect,"
"parfaict"; "lermes," "larmes"; and so forth.
The two
vowels must haVe been very close at the time, for Ronsard
noted that, " ... 'e' est fort uoisine de la lettre 'a,'
uoire tel que souuent, sans i penser, nous les confondons
naturellement
(Oeuvres~
II, 481).
Tory reported that the
ladies of Lyon, influenced by the many Italians at the
fairs, affected Ha" for "e," while the ladies of Paris
pronounced "e" for "a":
A la cause de quoy, pour la frequentation des
diets Italians, qui est aux ferez & bancquez
de Lion, les dames Lionnoises pronuncent
gracieusement souuent A pour E quant elles
disent "Choma vous choma chat affeta" & mille
aultres motz semblables, que ie laisse pour
breuete. Au cofttraire les Dames de Paris, en
lieu de A pronuncent E bien souuent, quant
elles disent "Mon mery est a la porte de
Peris, ou il se faict peier" en lieu de dire
"Mon mary est a la porte de Paris ou il se
67
faict paier."
Hesitation between /a/ and
If./
continued well into the
17th century when the issue was finally settled in favor
o-f one form or the other.
of the shift are "larme"
Among the irregular survivors
<
"lerme" and "asperge"
<.
"asparge."
The disappearance of unstressed ja I which had begun
earlier continued throughout the 16th century.
We saw
this in final position in words such as "p~re," where the
preceding vowel was also affected.
positions as well.
It occurred in other
In hiatus, /a I had begun to be lost
as early as the 14th century ( "ve-oir"
>
"voir") .
It re-
mained longer between consonants, but by the 16th century
I
.
it too was disappearing ("p'lote," "ch'min," "sur' te") .
Final unstressed
I e I, pronounced and syllabic in Old
French, suffered a slow and sporadic demise extending_over
several centuries.
vowel ("eauen
Its· loss in hiatus after a tonic
> "eau,"
"soucie"
>
"souci") was becoming
generali after a consonant, final /a I continued to be
pronounced throughout the Middle Ages but disappeared from
popular speech in the 16th century, sometimes taking the
consonant with it "not'," "les aut'," "une let'").
Whether following a vowel or a consonant,· final I
aI
tended to survive longer in cultivated speech than in
popular, and in verse when necessary to the meter.
The extent of the leveling produced by the loss of
68
unstressed
181
in its various positions, which entailed
syl.],.abic loss as well, began to worry a number of people.
Aided by orthography and by the reforms in the pronunciation of Latin, pedagogues and erudites were succes~ful in
halting and in many cases reversing the trend in initial
syllables
(se~
~bove,
pp. 64-65).
Less successful were
efforts to save medial /8 / in hiatus ( "hardiement" >
"hardiment," · "vraiement"
sonants (acheter" /
>
"vraiment") and between con-
"ach'ter," "developper"
lopper," "souverain"
"dev'-
> "souv'rain"), except when required
as a supporting vowel ("tremblement").
final
>
But the loss of
I -8 I was delayed before a pause and in careful
speech until well into the 17th century.
An important
consequence of its temporary survival was the preservation of the preceding consonant ("notre," "lettre,"
';raide," "vide") ; after a consonant plus liquid blend
final I e/ continues to this day, except in liaison
("fenetre," "notre").
One of thE;! squabbles between Peletier and Meigret
illustrates the role of final I 8 I in 16th-century French.
Meigret' s practice was to replace final I
pronounced with an apostrophe.
eI
when not
He would write, for ex-
ample, "tell'," "puiss' ," and "peupl'" before vowels, but
"telle," "puisse," and "peuple" before consonants.
Peletier took issue with this system because if one paused,
he said, the tendency \vas to pronounce the vowel regardless
69
of the following word:
Sans rrson tu ot¢s 1'¢ feminin, au lieu
duquel tu m~z un apostrof¢ a la fin des
diccions, quand 1¢ mot suiuant s¢ commanc¢
par voyf[__l¢. B c¢ qui 1¢ m¢ ftt dir¢, @t
qu¢ lon s¢ peut arrtter, ancor¢s qu¢ 1¢
point n'i sorct pas: e an s'i arrfC_tant,
c'EC_t fore¢ d¢ prononcer 1'¢.
(p. 18)
His practice, therefore, was to bar every unstressed "e"
I a/ whether pronounced or not and thus to allow for the
fluctuation.
Earlier, in 1530, Palsgrave was still rlescribing
final /8/, albeit not to clearly, as having a definite
syllabic value:
"E shall in that place be sounded almoste
lyke an "o" and very moche in the noose, as
these wordes "homme, femme, honneste, parle,
hommes, femmes, honnestes, auecques" shall
have theyr laste "e" sounded in manner lyke
an "o," as "hommo," "femmo," ... so that, if
the reder lyft up his voyce upon the syllable
that commeth nexte before the same "e," and
sodaynly depresse his voyce whan he cometh
to the soundynge of him, and also sounde hym
very moche in the noose,·he shall sounde "e"
accordyng as the Frenche men do.
(p. 4)
But.in 1584 Desainliens was teaching something quite
different.
He repeatedly stressed the utmost
importanc~
of liaison in order to avoid a rough and un-French sound
(pp. 20, 31, 33-34).
When a word ending in "e feminin,"
he explained, is followed by a word beginning with any
vowel~
the "e" must not be heard and.the two words are
pronounced as one.
Thus, "Ma tante a dishe," becomes
70
"rna tanta disne,u8 and
11
)<.
becomes
11
Mon pere et ma mere ont soupe,"
!1on pe ret)(. rna me.ront><. soup~," and these are best
spoken with a single continuous emission of breath, as
....
.......
/
.
"Mon peretmamerontsoupe."
"
He added, however, that an im-
)(.
In
portant exception occurs in inversions.
appelle-il? comment
s'appelle~elle?
~
not only is the "e
11
11
comment s•
>'-
comment l'appelle-ort? 11
~
retained, but many speakers, in order
to avoid the shock of two consecutive vowels, say "s'
appelle-til, s'appelle-telle, l'appelle-ton,
11
11
a-til disne?
for
)(.
11
a-il disne?"
X
and likewise
He gave his students the
choice of pronouncing this epenthetic
17th century it became universal.
11
11
t
11
or not; in the
Unlike Palsgrave, what
Desainliens was teiching his students was a final /a/,
whose role scarcely differed from that of Modern French.
Final Consonants and the Unity of the Phrase
Clearly the pronunciation or omission of final I ;o I
was becoming primarily a matter of its position within the
phrase.
sonants.
The same became.increasingly true of final conIn Old French, words had a large.degree of
indep~ndence,
but by the 16th
~entury
the individuality of
the word had been lost to the unity of the phrase.
Though
the disappearance of final consonarits was not new to the
8
oesainliens uses small crosses to show his students
which letters are silent.
71
16th century, no longer was it merely a question of their
being final.
The following transcription of Henri
Estienne's was written to show that final
~onsonants
were
to be pronounced before a word beginning with a vowel or
before a pause, even a slight one, but not before a consonant:
Vou me dite toujours que votre pays est plu
grand de beaucoup et plus abondan que le notre,
e que maintenan vou pourrie bien y vivre a
meilleur marchl que nou ne vivon depui troi
mois en cette ville: mai tou ceux qui en
viennet, parlet bien un autre langage:
ne
vou deplaise.
(Hypomneses, p. 94, quoted
by Brunot, II, 268-269)
Estienne's rules are the same ones Desainliens taught,
stressing as in the case of final I 8 I the unity of the
phrase and the importance of liaison.
He provided his
students with an abudance of examples showing where final
consonants are silent and where they must be detached and
linked to the following word in order to obtain a smooth,
natural pronunciation.
In French, he explained, because
of the softness of the language, one does not pronounce
two successive consonants but almost always omits the
first.
Thus, in "belles paroles m'ont beaucoup serui,"
X.
><:.
"'
"s," "t," and "p" are silent because of the follow·ing consonant.
On the other hand, in "levez vous, car il en est
heure." the final consonants must be detached as follows:
"levez vous, ca ri len nes teure," and even more approx
~
priate is to emit the second phrase as a single word,
.I
72
"carilenesteure."
.,_
What Desainliens is saying is that
final consonants within a phrase behave in the same manner
as do medial ones within a word.
This was much less true
of Old French, but it is very much the case in Modern
French.
Desainliens went on to say that these rules are
essential to the beauty and grace of the French language,
and that.while the English may complain about it, they
forget that they themselves say "ittis madin ningland" for
"it is made in Eng lande·, " and even "much goudi ti" for
"much good may it do vnto you," "godi goden" for "God geue
you a good eueninge," and "god bou'i" for "God be with you."
But those Frenchmen, continues Desainliens, who say ·" avoo
disne" rather than "avez vous disn~" areindeed very much
)f.
in error.
~
Also at fault are those who imitate Italians
and say "stome," "ste fame," and "astheure.," for "cest
'-
home,11 "ceste fame," "a ceste heure" (pp. 34-37, 66-69,
91) .
A number of contractions no longer made today were
in fact common in the 16th century.
vous 11 ("qu•avez-vous"), 11 n'a-vous"
For example, ''qu • a("n'avez~vous"),
"sca-vous" ("scavez-vous 11 ), among others.
and
These came to
be frowned upon, however, and were successfully eliminated.
Other grammarians agreed v7i th Desainiiens and
Estienne•s rules.
Palsgrave was quite definite about it:
If a frenche worde ende in a consonant, the
next worde folowyng begynnyng with a vowel
or diphthonge, all the vowels, diphthortges
and consonantes shall have theyr distinct sounde
.... Every frenche worde comynge next unto a point
73
or comma, or virgula shal sounde theyr last
letters distinctly, and so sh~l all the last
wordes in the lynes of suche thinges as be made
in ryme .... If a. frenche worde ende in a consonant or consonantes, the next worde folowyng
begynnyng also with a consonant or consonantes,
"m" "n" and "r" shall never lese their sounde.
And if the worde goyng before ende in any other
consonant, .he shall lese his sounde .... "Sans
cause, soubz couleur, ung combat tel, faictz
plaisans, suis sayn" shall be red and sounded
"san cause, sou couleur, un comba tel, fai
plaisans, sui sayn." And so of all 6ther,
though XX suche wordes both endyng and begynnyng with consonantes shulde fortune to folowe
one an other in a sentence.
(pp. 39-40)
Peletier also remarked that final consonants are omitted
within a phrase and that a phrase when spoken without
stopping is rather like a word of many syllables:
Comm¢ quand nous disons, "Les Francro'Cs sont
g'ans bien hardiz":
la ou si vous prononcez
l'or~son continu¢ chacun set qu¢ les d~rnier¢s
l~tr~s d¢ tous les moz n¢ sonn¢t point, fors
c~l¢ du d~rnier .... L'or~son qui s¢ prononc¢
tout d'un tryt, n'a EC_l¢ pas tel¢ natur¢ e
fore¢ an proferant les moz sans s'arr~ter,
comm¢ peut auo~r un mot seul d¢ plusieurs
silab¢s, qu'on prononc¢ tout aucoup?
(p. 58)
Further on he explained that if he nevertheless continues
to write final consonants it is because when one pauses
they are pronounced:
Car combien qu't_l¢s n¢ s'antand¢t comm¢ point
an pronontant les moz tout d'un trein:
tout¢fo~s par c¢ qu'il n'tt pas defandu d¢ s'ar~ter
a quelqu¢ mot, e vu mEC_m¢s qu'on s'i arrECt¢
assez. souuant, ~l¢s i sECr';l¢t pour ttr¢ pronon . . .
ce¢s an tel cas:
c~t a dlr¢, quand on voudra
proferer les moz distinct¢mant l'un aprrs
l'autr¢.
(p. 119)
The rules we have been discussing
universal.
~ere
not, however,
In popular speech the disappearance of final
74
consonants was inclined to occur not only before a consonant' but before a pause as well' as ccim be seen in the
following passage in which Geofroy Tory chides Parisian
women for leaving out too many
11
s"'s:
Les Dames de Paris pour la plus grande partie
obseruent bien ceste figure poetique, en
laissant le "s" finalle de beaucop de dictions: quant en lieu de dire, Nous auons
disne en vng Iardin & y auons menge des
·Prunes blanches et noires, des Amendes doulces
·& ameres, des Figues molles, des Parnes, des
Poires, & des Gruselles. Elles disent &
pronuncent, Nous auon disne en vng Iardin
& y auon menge des prune blanche & noire, des
amende doulce & am~re, des figue melle, des
pome, des poyre, & des gruselle.
Ce vice leur
seroit excusable, se nestoit quil vient de
femme a home, & quil se y treuue entier abus
de parfaictement pronuncer en parlant.
(fol.
57r)
·
And Henri Estienne observed that "le peuple ... a le tort
de prononcer 'toujou'; de meme il ne prononce pas le ' t '
final de Jviennent,'
'parlent,' que tous ceux qui pronon-
cent bien font sonner, et avec raison, pour distinguer le
pluriel du singulier"
(Hypomneses, trans. Livet, pp. 381-
382) •
The trend to lose consonants, however, was now complicated by the tendency to hold on to them in the
literate population and by the efforts of grammel:rians to
restore those already lost.
in fact, becoming
cruc~al
The learned influence was,
to the future of French conson-
ants (see in particular the section on clusters below).
The grammarians' efforts, aided by orthography, massive
75
learned borrowings, and the widespread reaction against
the large number of monosyllabic homonyms which had arisen
through phonologic leveling, did indeed result in partial
restoration, but fluctuation between popular and learned
tendencies nevertheless continued throughout the 16th and
17th centuries.
To a lesser degree it continues to this
day, in "pas encore" and "tandis que," for example, in
which careful speech retains·the "s," while casual speech
omits it.
The loss and restitution of final consonants was
responsible for some confusion in street names, which in
the 16th century, in the absence of signs, were transmitted orally (Beaulieux, I, 202-203); Dauzat, p. 75).
Thus, "rue aux Oues" ("Oies") became "rue aux Ours,"
because "ours" was then pronounced "ou"; "rue des JeuxNeufs" became "rue des JeG:neurs," "jeux-neufs" and "jeGneurs" also sounding alike; and "rue St-Andre-des-Arcs"
was remade into "rue St-Andre-des-Arts," because, says
·Dauzat, "des
1
L /1/ and /1'/
Final "1"
arcs 1 n 'existaient plus."
9
/l/ had disappeared in popular words some
time before the 16th century ("choul," "saoul," "gentil,"
"fusil," "peril," "avril"), but under the influence of
9
For convenience, I am using /1'/ and /n'/ for pala. tal "1" and "n" instead of the IPA characters /A/ and !r-1·
76
learned words, which preserved it ("calcul"), and the in.sistence of pedagogues, it was sometimes restored ("peril,"
"avri.l") .
Then again' sometimes it wasn It ("chou'
"gentil," "fusil").
pronounce
"No~''
for
II
II
soul,"
Desainliens taught his students to
"No~l";
today we say
/nJ~l/.
For "la
solde" and "il mohstre le cul ' " he said "la soude" and
)(.
"le cu."
Today it is
/s.:>ld(~)/
and some people say /cyl/
"Solde," incidently, shows also a reversal
(pp. 65-66) .
of the earlier vocalization of /1/ to /u/.
After "i," because in spelling "il" represents both
"i + 1" /il/ and "i" + palatal "1" ("1 mouille" or
liquid "1," /il'/), confusion arose as to which consonant
to repronounce.
"Fil," /fi/ <"filum," correctly regained
/1/, but "cil" <"cilium," /si/</sil'/, also acquired
an /1/ rather than the etymologically correct /1'/, and
"fils," /fi/
<
"filius," became /fis/ (to avoid confusi.on
with "fille" perhaps?) .
The pronoun "il'' was pronounced /il/ in the 16th
century only before a vowel, as in "il a" /ila/ and "il y
a" /ilia/.
fait" /ife/.
L
Before a consonant·, the "1" was silent, "il
Usually only the "s" was retained·in the
plural, regardless of the following sound.
transcribed "ils" everywhere as "iz":
soECt" (p. 106).
"iz
But testimonies differed.
Peletier
alo~t ...
e 1z
For de Beze
it was the "s" that was always silent:
Dans "ils," suivi soit d'une voyelle, soit
d'une consonne, "s" ne se prononce jamais;
77
ainsi pour "ils ont droit, ils disent,"
prononcez "il ont droit, i disent."
(trans.
Livet, p. 529)
The prononciations/i/ for "il" and /i/ or /iz/ for ":lls"
were widely condemned in the 17th century, regardless of
position, and while the grammarians' campaign was successful as· far as standard French is concerned, in casual
speech one still hears "i fait," "iz ont," "i font."
Intervocalically usage also varied.
During the
Renaissance a shift from palatal "1" /1'/ to /j/ began as
a feature of popular Parisian speech ( "maille," /mal' e
/maj/; "brailler," /bral 'er/
>
/braje/) .
I>
But /j/ was also
denounced in the 17th century, and until the 19th was considered unacceptable in polite society.
Today, of course,
it is universal, and French has lost the phoneme /1'/.
R
By the 16th century final "r·" was pronounced only
where it had previously been followed by another consonant
("hiver"
<
"hivern~"
"fer"<. "ferr," "enfer"
<
"enfern").
It was saved from subsequent loss in these words, again
through the efforts of grammarians and erudites, and was
restored in many others, in "-ir" and "oir" infinitives
("finir," /fini/
>
/finir/), and in the endings "-our,"
"-ir," and "-eur" ( "plaisir," /plt:zi/
fr~re," /loo frer/
/l~rzami/).
> /plcrzir I;
"leur
> /loerfre.Jf; "leurs amis," /loe zami/
For no apparent reason, but perhaps because
78
their loss was more universal, infinitives in "-er" and
most substantives and adjectives in "-er" and "-ier"
escaped remodeling, resulting in the inconsistent system
o~
existing today with respect to the pronunciation
final
"r."
Popular literature, unlearned spellings, and poetry
(aithough license was more rampant than it would become in
the next century) tell us more about the loss and
restora~
tion of final "r" than do the statements of grammarians,
almost.all of whom either took it for granted that the
"r"
~as
pronounded or found that in their
circles it was indeed pronounced:
o~n
learned
"If a frenche worde
ende in a consonant or consonantes, the next worde folmvyng
begynnyng also with a consonant or consonantes,
and 'r' shall never lese theyr
~ounde''
'm,'
'n,'
(Palsgrave, p. 40).
"Cette lettre, soit au commencement, soit
a la
fin des
syllabes, conserve toujours sa prononciation naturelle"
(De Beze, trans. Livet, pp. 516-517).
Medially between vowels a shift of /r/
reciprocally /z/
>
>
/z/ and
/r/ was noted as early as the 14th
century in certain regions and had become common in popular Parisian speech by the 16th.
A number of grammarians
attested to its existence and almost unanimously con- .
demned it:
La quelle mode de pronuncer est auiourdhuy en
abus tant en Bburges, dou ie suis natif, quen
ceste noble Cite de Paris; quat pour R bien
79
-v
souuat y est pronunce S, & pour S, R.
Car en
lieu de dire Iesvs, Maria, ilz p~onunc~t Iervs
Masia .... Ie ne dis cecy pour les blasmer, car
il y en ya qui pronuncet tresbien, mais ie le
dis pour en auertir ceulx qui ne prenet garde
ne plaisir a bien pronuncer.
(Tory, fol. 55r)
"They of Parys," observed Palsgrave, "sounde somtyme 'r'
lyke 'z,' saying 'Pazys' for 'Parys,'
'Parisien,'
'chaize' for 'chaire,'
suche lyke"
(p. 34).
'Pazisien' foi
'mazi' for 'mary,' and
Further on, concerning the "Parysyen"
pronunciation "je gasouille," he said, "The right worde
after the latyn shulde be 'je garrouille,' but the
Parysyens tourne 'r' into's,' whiche betwyne two vowels
hath the sounde of 'z'" (p. 456).
A half-century later de
Beze noted the same phenomenon:
Les Parisians et bien plri~ encore les habitants
d'Auxerre et ceux de rna ville Vezelay, changent
souvent- "s" en "r" et "r" en "s," disant "courin,"
"Hasie," "pese," "mese," "Theodose," pour
"cousin," "Marie," "pere," "mere;" "Theodore."
(trans. Livet, p. 517)
The upper classes, as usual rejecting any change not coming from their own milieu, refused to accept this "common/'
"patois" pronunciation,·and the movement was successfully
reversed.
A-survivor of the shift is "chaise," which now
shares with its doublet "chaire" the original meaning.
GN/n/ and /n'/
For intervocal "gn" 16th-century usage was split between a pronunciation /n'/ and /n/
< /n'/.
Numerous
rhymes and unlearned spellings indicate that a
80
pronunciation /n/ must have been very common, but examination of them has. shown inconsistent results for individual
words.
Direct statements, moreover, are incomplete and
often unclear, and
al~o
very much in disaccord, such that
it is difficult to say which pronunciation was the more
widespread or in
~hich
words /n/ or /n'/ predominated.
Meigret. adopted the spelling
"n"
.for /n' I to avoid the
confusion of "gn":
vrey qe qant a l, ~, n, il y peut auo~r
Iapronon<z;ia<2ion FrafOE(Ze qelqe diuersite ....
Par 2e q 1 outre leur comune prola~ion nous Cn
fezons :rne mo~lel sre nc;._z an<(_iens ont d 1 une
lourd 1 ~nu~ntlon f1gure, chacune de trot'
ltttres: qi sont ill, pour l molle ~ ign 1 pour
~ molle, sans auo~r auiz~ a la confuzion qi
s'z:n t:nsuyuo~t.
\Grammytre 1 fol. .13v)
Il
y~
~n
He consistently wrote "sinifie," "sinificatif 1
cation," "dine"
("digne")
1
but "aneau"
"sinifi-
"
("agneau").
Pele-
tier used the traditional "gn" for /n'/, "par c¢ qu 1 il
n'i a point d¢ lttr¢ Latin¢ qui puiss¢ exprimer tel son:
e aussi qu¢ les Italiens an us¢t comm¢ nous"
1
and pro-
nounced it in "' gagner, guign¢, vign¢, b¢songn¢ 1
'
lequez
nous pronont_ons comm¢ l 'Espagnol prononc¢ l.a doubl¢
'nn,
1
ou
1
n"' 1
";
he added that ''nous otons le 'g 1 des moz
ou il n¢ s¢ prononc¢ point:
·signifier, regner, dign¢,
For de B~ie:
1
Comm¢ d¢ 'cognor_tr¢,
e les samblabl¢s'"
(p. lll).
"Le 'g' n'a aucun son devant 'n' soit
mouille comme dans
1
gagner,' soit ferme comme dans
'signe; signer, regne, regner 1
'
qui se prononcent 'sine,
81
siner, rene, rener'"
(trans. Livet, p. 527).
Desainlien's
pronounced with "gn" /n'/ "montagne," "champagne,"
"gaigner," and "baigner," but "cognoistre ," "eigne," and·
)<.
"regnard," he said, are exceptions and "signe" and
"agneau" are ambiguous and therefore may be pronounced
either way (pp.
(The "g" in "cognoistre" >
61-63)~
"connaitre" was purely orthographic and never reflected
a pronunciation /n'/.)
Complications arose because in learned words, Latin
words, recent borrowings, and unusual words a pronunciation "g-n" /gn/ was. usual ("diagnostic," "stagnant"), and
later grammarians unsuccessfully attempted to impose this
pronunciation in common words.
The traditional spelling
"gn," however, favored a pronunciation /n'/, with which it
was strongly
a~sociated.
Thus, while /gn/ continued in
learned words, /n'/ prevailed over /n/ in most popular
words.
"Signet" still hesitates between /sine/ and
/sin'e/, with the latter gaining ground.
Denasalization of Vowels and Loss of Nasal Consonants
Loss of vowel nasality before intervocalic /m/, /n/,
and /n:/ may have begun during the Middle
Ages~
but there
seems to be no evidence of it until the 16th century, at
which time the following changes appeared:
("flamme," "femme"),
If/
/jE[/ ("tiennent"), and
/~/
>
jaj
:>If[/ ("peine," "aime"), /j~/
/f'/ > /?_/ ("homme).
>
When, on the
82
other hand, the
n~sal
consonant was final or was followed
by another consonant, it disappeared, and the preceding
vowel retained its nasality.
#
Thus, jan/> /a/ ("grand,"
..._,
"an," "temps"), lrnl > If[! ("main," "plein," "crainten),
/j
in!
>
/j
f./
("bien," "vient") , /on/
"ombre"), and /wfin/
>
> /o/
("son," "pont,"
/wf/ ("coin," "pointe").
Sixteenth;_
century phoneticians, however, appear not to have addressed
themselves to these important changes, and our evidence
for them is largely
indirect~
What did give rise to considerable discussion was the
pronunciation of "en."
The pronunciation /a/ ("temps,"
"science," "souvent") in most words spelled with an "e"
represents the Old French shift !({!
> /a/.
Orthography
which usually retained "en" (though not always:
"langue,"·
"sans'') is probably responsible for /en/
C.. /a/ in "ennemi"
(_
and "~trenne," while words used primarily in learned contexts before being adopted by everyone retained /tn/ or
/e/ without ever having become /a/ ("examen," "abdomen").
Peletier was perhaps the first to have recognized
that the spelling "en" usually had the pronunciation /an/
or /a/, and to have consistently spelled it as such:
Mts mon auis tt d¢ d¢uo~r ecrir¢ tout¢s tel¢s
d1ccions plus tot par "a" qu¢ par "e." Car
d¢ dir¢ qu'il i ~t diferanc¢ an 1a prolacion
des deus dE[.rnier~s silab¢s d¢ "amant" e
"firmamant," c'E[_t a fer¢ a ceus qui r¢gard¢t
d¢ trap pr~s, ou qui ~eul¢t parler trap mignonn¢mant:
Samblabl¢mant antr¢ les penultim¢s
d¢ "conscianc¢" e "alia:r).c¢." .... Brief l'"e"
qu 'on mtt vulguer¢mant an· "scienc¢" sonn¢
83
autr¢mant qu¢ l"'e" d¢ "scientia" Latin:
la
ou propr¢mant il s¢ prononc¢, cornm¢ an Franzo~s
c¢lui d¢ "ancien," "sien," "bien." (p. 25)
Further on Peletier gave an explanation for the shift
/e/
>
/a/.
While it cannot today be taken seriously, it
is something of a curiosity and does shed light on how
early linguists attempted to discover the causes of
linguistic change:
E tandis qu¢ j¢ suis ici, j¢ dire la r~son
pourquocr_ nous pronon~ons autr¢mant, "sciance"
an Francr.oT..s, qu¢' "sc1entia' n¢' s¢' prononc¢' an
Latin.
Les m~tr¢'s d'Ecol¢' du tans passe,
disott "omnam hominam veniantam in hunt: mundum":
Duquel vic¢, notr¢' France a pein¢' s¢'
pourra j'amts guer¢'s bien purger.
E par c¢'
qu¢' les prE[_tr¢'s auoE(_t tout 1¢' credit 1¢' tans
passe (qu'on ap¢'lo~t 1¢' bon tans) e qu'il n'i
auo~t guer¢'s qu'eus qui sut qu¢' c'etot:t qu¢'
d¢' Latin (cornm¢' la barbari¢' e puis la literatur¢'
rtn¢'t par vicissitud¢' an tous pais du mond¢') e
qu¢' tous les jeun¢'s anfans tant d¢' vil¢' qu¢' d¢'
vilage, pa~so~t par leurs meins:
Dieu set commant iz etoE(_t instruiz.
E c¢' pandant, ces
sauans montreurs, qui etott estimez cornm¢'
dieus, an matier¢' d¢' scianc¢' donno~t form¢
C: notr¢' Langu¢': d¢' sort¢ qu'aup~ts du vulguer¢',
lZ parlo~t plus souuant leur Latl~, qu'a~tr¢
. langag¢'.
Parquoe 1¢' vulguer¢' apr1nt a d1r¢
"scianc¢', consciknc¢, dilig'anc¢," par "a."
Vot:_r¢ d¢ sort¢ qu'aujourdhui c¢ nous EC_t un
patron~ qui no~s d¢meu~e~a a jamts:
E si ~ous
profer1ons "sc1enc¢, d1l1genc¢" par 1¢ vrt1 "e"
Latin, nous nous f¢rions moquer. E combien
qu'aujourdhui la prolacion Latin¢ sott un peu.
eclerci¢, s'il au¢no~t tout¢fots qu¢ nous prinsioks la libE[_rte d¢ tirer quelqu~ mot nouueau
du Latin an cet¢ tE(rmintson ou samblabl¢ (comm¢
pour exampl¢, si nous d1sions "reminiscentia,"
e nous an voulussions former "reminiszanc¢")
nous n¢ l'os¢rions proferer autr¢mant qu¢ par
II a
II
( pp
12 0 -121)
0
o
Peletier expressed dismay that Meigret would write
"en" for what he, Peletier, clearly heard as "an"
(p. 25).
84
Perhaps the spelling irifluenced Meigret, but more likely
it was his native Lyon dialect, in which /e/ was still common.
His Reponse a Pelletier shows him to be unconvinced
by Peletier's arguments:
Ou ~t le Fran£o~s qi pronon~era la premiere de
stmbla£lemtnt d'un' aosi gra~d' ouutrture come
la secode ... vourrot' tu pronocer <(mbler, come
ambles: E( tmplir, come ample? ~ qant a '(_e qe
tu dis qe £e seroet regarder de trap prts, ~
parler/ trap mino~emt_nt:
il me st:mble q'il
vaodrof(t mieus ·parler minonem%"t qe de s 'efort:EC_r
centre l'usaje de la parolle de proferer (come
l'on dit) a gE(ule behe'e.
(fol. 9r-v)
Desainliens, like Peletier, identified "en" with "an."·
He said that "attentivement," "entendement," and similar
·words·in "en" and "ent" are pronounced "attantivemant,"
"antandemant."
He added that an important exception to
this rule is to be found in words with "ien,"."yen," and
"ient," as in "mien, tien, sien, bien, convient, moyen,
terrien"; these words should be pronounced as written,
that is, with "e."
Peletier and Meigret also used the
spelling "ien" for such words.
Because of the preceding
high vowel, /e/ in this position did not lower to /a/.
H
Germanic "h," called aspirated to distinguish it from
·Latin "h"
(which was called mute because it disappeared
much earlier), was lost in the Middle Ages.
But in the
16th century some, particularly well-educated, speakers
began pronouncing it in Latin words and then in learned
85
French words.
Fortunately this was only a passing fancy,
..
for Scalinger observed
11
qu'on ne sait plus prononcer
l'h et que ceux qui veulent ~mettre ce son le font d'une
/
facon
forcee, cornme s'ils aboyaient 11
L
75).
(quoted by Dauzat, p.
11
Purists nevertheless attempted to restore
h 11 in
Failing that, they imposed th~ arbi-
French generally.
trary rule prohibiting liaison before Germanic "h" and
11
requiring it before Latin
h,
11
thus maintaining an arti-
ficial distinction between the two.
11
hamez.on," though its
and Latin
11
h~ros"
11
They then classified
h 11 is Germanic, in the Latin group,
(but not
11
hero"ine 11 )
in the Germanic,
this in order to avoid confusion, which must have been
frequent, between
17th century
11
11
les h8"ros 11 and
huit 11 and
11
11
/
.
les zeros ...
In the
onze" also came to be treated
as though they began with aspiration ("le huit,
11
"le
onze"), probably by analogy with "le deux," "le trois,"
and so forth.
If one were to believe the statements of 16th century grammarians, ·one would surely conclude that /h/ survived at least to the end of the century, but since the
reporters almost always confused aspiration with mere lack.
of liaison it is difficult to know what they were actually
talking about.
Palsgrave. distinguished two classes of
French words in which "h" was written. ·In one "h" is pronounced, he said, just as in English "have, hatred, hens,.
hart, hurt, hobey"; in the other it is no more pronounced
86
than in English "honest, honour, habundance, habitacion"
(p. 17).
In his treatise on accents Dolet gave several
examples of aspirated and unaspirated "h," as well as some
pointed criticism:
Et si d'aduanture il se commence par, h, cela
n'ernpesche poinct quelcquefoys l'apostrophe:
car nous disons, & escripuons sans uice, l'honneur, l'hornrne, l'hurnilite:
& non le honneur,
le hornrne, la hurnilite.
Au contraire nous disons
sans apostrophe le haren, la harendiere, la
haulteur, le houzeau, la housse, la hacquebute,
le hacquebutier, la hacquenee, le hazard, le
hallecret, la hallebarde.
Et si ces mots se
proferent sans grande aspiration, la faulte
est enorme.
De laquelle faulte sont pleins
les Auuergnats, les Prouuencaulx, les Gascons,
& toutes les prouinces de la langue d'oc. Car
pour le haren ils disent l'aren:
pour la harendiere, l'arendiere:
pour la haulteur, l'aulteur:
pour le houzeau, l'ouzeau:
pour la housse,
l'ousse: pour la honte, l'onte:
pour la
hacquebute, l'acquebute:
pour la hacquen~e,
l'acquen~e:
pour le hazard, l'azard:
pour
le hallecret, l'allecret:
pour la hallebarde,
l'allebarde.
Et non seulernent (qui pis est)
font ceste faulte au singulier nornbre de telles
dictions, rnais aussi au plurier.
Car pour des
harens ils disent des arens:
pour les hacquene'es,
/
les acquenees, pour rnes houzeaux, rnes ouzeaux:
pour il me fault, ou ie me uois houzer, il me
fault ouzer.
Or ie laisse le uice de ce~ nations,
& reuiens a rna matiere.
(Les Accents, rpt.
Beaulieux, II. 127-128)
Dolet's
state~ent
about the southern dialects is correct
in that Germanic "h," which entered Francien when the
Franks invaded Gaul, appears not to have survived at all
in "la langue d'oc."·
Later in the century, de Beze gave
what may be a hint that aspiration was on its way out:
Les Fran~ais adoucissent autant qu'ils
peuvent l'aspiration, sans toutefois, quand
·
elle existe, la supprimer enti~rernent, except6
87
'
en Bourgogne, en Berry, a' Lyon, en Guyenne, ou
l'on prononce "en ault, l'acquenee, l'azard,"
pour "en hault, la hacquenee, le hazard."
(trans. Livet, p. 515)
.
Consonant Clusters
Several factors carne together in the Renaissance to
reverse the tendency to simplify consonant clusters:
1)
reforms in the pronunciation of Latin which stipulated
repronunciation of all consonant groups; 2) numerous Latin
borrowings which contained these groups, and which by analogy favored repronunciation in French words; 3) attempts
of granunarians to Latinize the pronunciation of French;
4) Latinization of the spelling of French words which furth~r
encouraged repronunciation; and 5) the loss of atonic
./8 I between consonants which reintroduced new clusters
(see above).
These events had the effect of
farnili~rizing
the French with groups of consonants, of considerably
modifying speech habits, and of favoring the eventual
survival of many learned and etymological pronunciations
which might otherwise have been merely temporary, had they
occurred at all.
Nevertheless, the assimilation of adjacent consonants
is a general tendency from which French did not become an
exception, and in popular· words in particular the loss of
supporting consonants continues today as it always has.
To this must be added other forces which arose in opposition to the conservative influence of orthography and the
88
prescriptions of grammarians.
For one thing, masses of
people remained for a long time unaffected by the goingson of the literati, and for another repronunciation did
not occur in every case, even among the educated.
Common,
frequently used words in particular tended to remain unaffected.
Thus conflicts and differences arose between
natural and learned tendencies, and side by side with
~e­
pronunciations were a number of losses.
Be that as it may, the pronunciation of consonant
clusters underwent profound modifications in the 16th
century.
Until then the first of two successive con-
sonants was almost never pronounced, be it in French or
in Latin; by the end of the century scores of them were,
and the 17th and 18th centuries would continue to see many
more reappear.
·Because almost everyone was writing letters for
sounds they were not pronouncing, traditional spellings
tell us little in most cases about the actual pronunciation of consonant groups in the 16th century; here in
particular much has been learned by piecing together the
descriptions and transcriptions of the early phoneticians ..
Of course c6nsiderable hesitation existed before outcomes
were fixed in favor of one or another pronunciation, and
it is not surprising that final results for individual
words have been highly irregular and unpredictable.
"B,".restored in spelling in the prefixes "ab-,"
89
"ob-," and
11
sub-," began to be repronounced in the 16th
.century, assimilating to "p" before a voiceless consonant
("absolu," "obvier,n "substituer"; but "subject" and
"subjection" became "sujet" and "suj~tion").
Peletier
pronounced "obstinemant;" de Beze "ostin~"; Meigret wrote
"substance," Peletier "sustance" and "sutil."
De Beze
tried to lay down some rules (learning where and where not
to pronounce these consonants must have been something of
a nuisance for foreigners):
La consonne "b" ne finit de syllabes qu'autant
qu'elle est suivi, 1) d'un "s":
"absent,"
"obseques," et alors elle se prononce; 2) de
"sc," comme "obscur," et alors elle ne se prononce point ' et
l'on dit "oscur"·' . 3) de "st , "
/
comme · "obst.ine," ou elle ne se prononce pas, .
et "abstenir," ou elle se prononce aussi peu
que possible; 4) de "j" consonne, comme 11 0bject,"
et alors on l'entend; 5) de "v" consonne, comme
"obvier,"
elle n'a aucun son: d'ou ce jeu
de mots latins fran<c,ais "omnia malo vie" ou "on
i a mal obvie."
(trans. Livet, pp. 526-527)
.
ou
(This last remark, incidentally, says something about the
pronunciation of 16th-century Latin.)
"D," reintroduced in writing in the prefix
with only moderate success in speech.
11
ad-," met
It was repronounced
in some words ("admirer," "adjectif," "admonition, ..
"adversaire 11
tage").
)
but not in others ("avocat,
11
"avis, .. "avan-
Out of the hesitation arose such pairs as "aver-
sian" and "adverse," "avenir" and "advenir."
Peletier
criticized as superfluous the "d" in the spelling
"aduocat, aduis, aduantag¢, adu¢nir, adjoindr¢"
(pp. 114-
90
115) .
He also pronounced without "d" "aurrb¢," "awcrsite,"
"ajectif."
Meigret wrote sometimes "adjectif," sometimes
"ajectif," but I could find only the spelling "autrbe."
"Cette consonne~" said de B~ze,
"ne se prononce pas devant
' j , ' co:rrune 'adjuger, adjurer, adjourner, adjouster'; ni
devant 'm,' comme 'admonester'; exceptez 'admirer'; ni
devant 'v' consonne, comme 'adviser, advis'"
(trans~
Livet,·
p. 527)
The group "c" /k/ + consonant had always existed in
spelling ("bienfaicteur," "object," "practique," "sanctifier"), but rarely was i t pronounced, until the 16th
century when i t began to be used in some words, a process
that would affect many more in the 17th ("affecter,"
"sanctifier," "diction,n "infect").
~\There
it remained
silent, it was eventually removed from spelling; hence
"pratique," "bienfaiteur," "objet," "auteur"..( "aucteur."
Again, according to de B~ze:
Le 11 C 11 ne se prononce pas:
1) avant le "q,"
et on pourrait l'effacer des mots "acquerir,
acquitter, 11 malgre l'etymologie; 2) avant le
"t" ala fin des mots, comme "object, faict."
Toutefois dans le corps des mots on prononce
nettement le "c" et le "t" comme "acte, action,
actif, detracteur." Exceptez "traic·ter" et
"diction," ou "c" n'a aucun son.
(trans. Livet,
p. 528).
De Beze's "diction" /disjo/ has since become /diksjo/.
Palsgrave, curiously, said that the prefix "ex-" is
pronounced
n· euz·"
:
.•. this worde "ex" hath ever an "v" sounded,
though he be nat written, bytwene the "e" and
91
"x" ... "euzemple, euzperience, euzecuter."
And note that "x" shall never be sounded in
frenche lyke as he is in latyn, or as we
wolde do in our tonge, in no wyse, but lyke
an "z."
(p. 38)
But Peletier always spelled it "es" ("escus¢," "escuser")
and Meigret "ex 11
("extmple").
The learned pronunciation
/eks/ <. /es/ ("excellent," "extraire") and /egz/ <fez/
("examen," "exemple") soon became general for this prefix.
Though it continued to be written, "s" before a consonant had disappeared from speech as early as the 13th
century.
While purists campaigned for its repronuncia-·
. tion, refor'mists urged its removal from spelling.
Pele--
tier felt certain he would be ridiculed were he to say
"monsieur nostr¢ maistr¢":
rott on d¢
maistr¢,
1
mo~,
"Donq a bonn¢ rt,.son s¢moqu¢-
si j¢ disot aujourdhui,
1
mon~ieur
nostr¢
an ftsant tout valotr, comm¢ nous presumons
qu 1 iz ftsort ancienn¢mant" {p. 86).
Meigret seemed to
think, however, that the loss of this "s" was quite re;;De fE[t, nou 1 dizios n 1 a pas long tECms, hon~Cstet~,
cent:
honrste pour honE(tete, e hohE[te" (Gramm(re, foL 96v).
Peletier explained its loss as being due to the fact that
the French had become more soft-spoken since being at
peace:
E croe qu¢ noz anciens diso~t "best¢, honnest¢,"
e "me~tier" par "s." E n 1 ~·t chos¢ qui n¢ so~t
croyabl¢, par c¢ qu¢ c¢ pais ici a ete autr¢foECs
habite par g 1 ans qui auo~t la Langu¢, tout einsi
qu¢ la manier¢ de viur¢, plus robust¢ qu¢ nous
n 1 auons aujourdhui. M~s d¢puis qu¢ les Francots ont ete an pts, iz ont commance a parler
92
plus douss¢mant, e, si j'osot;, dir¢, plus
mol¢mant. (p.· 84)
Because usage was evolving, many
in the grarrunariarts' transcriptions.
"sudit,"
11
For Meigret, it was
SatifTre, n·.lljuques"; for Peletier,
11
11
patift_re,
11
trarrun~tre,"
exist
contrad~ctions
"satifaccion," but "jusques.
11
11
SUdit,
II
Peletier wrote
but Desainliens said that the "s" in the pre.,..
fix "trans" is pronounced in all its compositions (p. 45),
and while he preferred "satisfaire, 11 he conceded that some
people omit the
11
s" . (p. 4 4) .
He explained to his students
that although it is true that "s" is often silent within
words, "beste, feste, hoste, gouste, mesme, estudier,
X
X
;.<
X.
x
;.<:
estuuer," one is always correct in pronouncing it in prox.
per names, "Auguste, Sebastien, Espagne"
(except
"Chri~t,"
which has since re-acquired "s" in "le Christ" /krist/, but
not in "J~sus Christ" /kri/
.
,
"Escoce
" and "Estienne
"); in
~
I
X
the names of sects, "Anabaptiste, Ath~1ste, latiniste";
in the ending "....;.isme," "barbarisme, cathe:chisme,
juda1sme"
')(
(except
"abi~me")
;·and in a very large number of words
taken from Latin, such as "austere," "celeste," and
"histoire"
i-
(pp. 40-44).
The 1740 edition of.the Dictionnaire de l'Acad~mie
eliminated "s 11 before a consonantwherever it was silent,
sometimes replacing it with a circonflex accent over the
preceding vowel, but its continued presence in writing
until that time led to its repronunciatidn in "blasph~me,"
93
11
jusques," "restraindre," "satisfaire," "susdit," and
countless other words.
CONCLUSION
Inevitable difficulties arise in the
atte~pt
fine linguistic analysis to a particular century.
to conFor one
thing, phonological changes are indifferent to our calendrical divisions of time; for another, changes do not
occur uniformly across oialects and social strata at any
given moment.
This was at least as true of the 16th
. century as it is of any other.
l·Je saw that many of the
changes in the popular speech of the f.1iddle Ages were only
beginning to be felt in the cultivated speech of the 16th
century, and that many popular 16th-century innovations
did not become universal until much later; and that while
the speech of the majority of the
p~ople
continued to
evolve more or less spontaneously, forces of resistance began to organize against popular innovations and phonological erosion.
Within the growing classes of literate
speakers natural tendencies began to be appreciably modified as extra-linguistic factors took on a greater and
greater role in determining the direction of linguistic
change, and in slowing down that change.
The French language; no less than French society,
was in the 16th century in a state of transition coinciding with and
intim~tely
interwoven with the philosophic,
aesthetic, and scientific movements of the Renaissance.
94
95
Out of the struggle and diversity which spanned the
period came a language with a new shape modeled on Latin
grammar, Latin spelling and, to some extent, Latin pronunciation.
Though still characterized by a degree of
freedom, the latter part of the century saw a standard
and a tradition beginning to emerge.
Patterns of pronun-
ciation, as of grammar, were beginning to congeal, spontaneity was giving way to stability, enthusiasm was being
tempered by rigorous demands for clarity of expression,
and the preoccupation with richness was developing into a
concern for·refinement and polish.
As enthusiastically as the 16th century encouraged
indeed~
innovation, the 17th century denounced it;
the
extraordinary verbal inventiveness which characterized the
Renaissance came to be held in contempt.
Malherbe severe-
ly criticized what he saw as irresponsibility and negligence, insisted on the elimination from the language of
the excesses it had acquired, and urged ·a simple, clear,
disciplined style based on logical thought.
Of course,
what the 17th century did, and with remarkable success,
was trade one excess for another.
If the 16th century
had begun to seek guidelines, the 17th century made them
obligatory.
It was then that grammatical rules acquired
their absolute character, and that sobriety, fastidiousness, and voluntary constraint came to replace individual
caprice and looseness of style.
Brunot called Malherbe
96
and his fellow arbiters of usage the worst of
France'~
literary iconoclasts (III, 95), but for them it was an act
of purificatibn.
There were, of course, dissenting voices,
those who saw even poetry losing its license, but like the
orthographic reformers of a century earlier, their voices
did not prevail . . Needless to say, none of this would
hav~
been possible without a strong center of power and influence, and the printing press.
The authority of Paris was
by then unquestioned; its dialect was adopted throughout
the country by all those aspiring to position and prestige.
And when, in the 16th century, the intellectual community
began to
~ake
use of printing to exchange ideas, the
spread of knowledge, and the standardization of that knowledge could occur on a scale previously impossible.
·There is little doubt that since that time the rate
of linguistic change in France has decelerated appreciably;
we knbw that this is so because since the b~ginning of the
17th century changes have been relatively minor compared
to what had come before.
Nor can the loyalty of the
French toward their language be questioned.
What is per-
fect, or so the argument went in the 17th century, can
only change in one direction; h?nce the preoccupation with
fixed standards.
It is universally recognized that 17th-
century French became "classical" and refined, and took on
those characteristics so admired today.
Renaissance
whic~
But it was the
provided the fabric, the wealth of
97
forms from which to choose, and the inspiration for the
development of Modern French.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sixteenth-Century Authors
Ba.if, Jean Antoine de.
Evvres en rime.
Ed. Ch. ~-1-arty­
Laveaux.
Paris: Lemerre, 1881-90. Vol. V.
Desainliens, Claude (Hollyband). De Pronuntiatione Linguae
Gallicae.
Londini: T. Vautrollerius, 1580; facs~m. ·
rpt. Menston:
Scolar, 1970.
La Maniere de bien traduire d'une langue
Dolet, Etienne.
en aultre, D'aduantage de 1a punctuation de la langue
francoyse, Plus des accents d'ycelle.
Lyon: Dolet,
1540; rpt. Paris: · Techener, 1830.
Du Bellay, Joachim.
La Deffence et illustratioh de la
langue francoyse.
Paris: A. l'Angelier, 1549; rpt.
Ed. H. Chamard. Paris: Fontemoing, 1904.
---------Oevvres fran2oises de Ioachim Du Bellay.
Ed.
Ch. Marty-Laveaux.
2 vols.
Paris: Lemerre, 1866-7.
----------.
/
.
Oeuvres poet1ques.
Corn~ly, 1908.
Ed. H. Chamard.
Paris:
Estienne, Henri.
Deux Dialogues du nouueau langage Frankoi~ italianize et autre~ent desguize.
Geneve:
H.
st1enne, 1578: rpt. Par1s:
Lemerre, 1885.
---------La Pr~cellence du langage fran2ois.
Paris:
.Patisson, 1579; rpt. Ed. Huguet.
Paris: Colin, 1896.
----------
Traicte de la conformite du langage frantois
le grec.
Gen~ve, 15S5; rpt. Ed. Feugere.
Paris:
Delalain, 1853.
~uec
Lanoue, Odet de.
Le Grand Dictionaire des rimes frantoises. Cologny: M. Berjon, 1624.
Meigret, Louis.
Le Trette de la rammere fran oeze.
1550;
La Reponse de Louis Meigret a L'Apolojie e Iaqes
Pelletier.
1550; Defenses de Louis Meigret tovchant
son orthographie fran~oezer contre les censures e
caH5nies de Glaumalis de Vezelet, e de. ses adherans.
1550; Reponse de Louis Meigret a la dezesperee repliqe de Glaomalis de Vezelet, transforme en Gyllaome
des Aotels. 1551; facsim. rpt. Menston:
Scolar,
1969.
Palsgrave, John.
L'Esclarcissement de la langue
98
99
francoyse.
1530i rpt. Collection des Documents
Inedits. Ed. Genin. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,
1852.
Pasquier, Estienne. Les Oeuvres d'Estienne Pasquier.
2
vols. Amsterdam: Compagnie des Libraires Associez,
1723.
Peletier du Mans, Jacques.
Dialogu¢ d¢ l'ortograf¢ e
prononciacion fran~o~s¢.
Lyon: Ian d¢ Tourn¢s,
1555i facsim. rpt. Gen~ve: Droz, 1966.
Rambaud, Honorat. La Declaration des abvs qve lon commet
en es.criuant.
Lyon: J. de Tournes, 1578i facsim.
rpt. Menston: Scalar, 1970. ·
Ronsard, Pierre de.
Oeuvres. Ed. Ch. Marty-Laveaux.
vols. Paris: Lemerre, 1887-93.
6
Tory, Geofroy. Champ Fleury, auquel est contenu l'art et
science de la deue et vraye proportion des lettres
attiques. Paris: ·Tory et Gourmont, 1529i facsim.
rpt. Paris: Ch. Bosse, 1931.
General Bibliography
Beaulieux, Ch. Histoire de l'orthographe francaise.
vols. Paris: Champion, 1927.
2
Bannard, Henri. Synopsis de la phonetique historique.
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1975.
Brunot, Ferdinand. Le Seizieme Siecle. Vol. II of
Histoire de la langue fran9aise des origines a 1900.
2nd ed. Paris: Colin, 1922.
---------La Formation de la langue classiqu~ (16001660) . Vol. ~II of Histoire de la. langue ~rant.aise
des origines a 1900.
2nd ed. Par1s: Col1n,
922.
Caput, Jean-Pol. La Langue frany,ai se: Histoire d'une
institution: Tome I:
842-1715. Paris: Larousse,
1972.
Catach, N. L'Orthographe fran£aise ~ l'~poque de la
Renaissance. Auteurs, imprimeurs, ateliers d'imprimerie. Gen~ve: Drozt 1968.
100
Darmesteter, A., etA. Hatzfeld.
Le Seizi~me Si~cle en
France. Tableau de la litterature et de la langue,
suivi de morceaux choisis.
3rd ed. Paris: Delagrave, 1886.
Dauzat, A.
Phonetique et grammaire historiques de la
langue fran£aise.
Paris: Larousse, 1950.
Ewert, Alfred. The French Language.
Faber, 1969.
London:
·
·
·
d u XVI e s1ec
· ' 1 e.
Huguet, E. D1ct1onna1re
Champion, 1925-68.
Faber and
7 vols.
Paris:
Livet, Ch. La Grammaire fran~aise et les grammariens au
XVIe siecle. Paris: Didier et Durand, 1859.
Santillana, Giorgio de. The Age of Adventure: The
Renaissance Philosophers. New York: Nev1 American
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Wartburg, Walter von. Evolution et structure de la langue
fran£aise.
8th ed. Berne: A. Francke, 1967.