The Gaulish language ended up contributing very little to the vocabulary of modern French. Only about a hundred Gaulish words survived the centuries, mostly rural and agricultural terms such as bouleau (birch), sapin (fir), lotte (monkfish), mouton (sheep), charrue (plow), sillon (furrow), lande (moor) and boue (mud)—that’s eight percent of the total. However, Gaulish is still relatively well-known, partly because it left many place and family names in northern France. For example, the name Paris comes from the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe, and the word bituriges (which meant “kings of the world”) produced the names Bourges and Berry (the difference comes from whether the original name was pronounced with a Latin or a Gaulish accent). Linguists believe that Gaulish also contributed to development of the peculiar sonority of French, and that it was at the root of some important linguistic variations in what would become French. But, contrary to what some people believe, modern French is not Latin pronounced with a Gaulish accent.
The Roman occupation spawned a new language that would play an important role in the formation of modern French. In the Roman province of Gaul only one percent of the population was literate, and those who wrote used Latin. The rest of the population spoke a rustic, popular “street” Latin that would come to be known as Gallo-Roman. By the fourth or fifth century CE, Gaulish had all but disappeared, though a few speakers stuck it out in Normandy until about the ninth century. (The Celtic language spoken in Brittany today was actually imported by Celts who fled to Brittany from Britannia in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, to escape the barbarian invasions.)
Gallo-Roman went on to have more lasting power than the Roman Empire, which crumbled in the fifth century CE. Germanic “barbarians” (a Greek term referring to peoples who don’t speak Greek; any other language sounded like “bar-bar” to them) had already been invading Gaul for a century. Tribes including the Wisigoths, the Franks, the Burgundes and the Vikings all settled in different areas of France, where they inter-married with the inhabitants. Curiously, although the invaders left important traces of their language wherever they settled, they all picked up the local Gallo-Roman dialect. This created a galaxy of different dialects across what would become French territory, all of which shared many words and characteristics. The last barbarian invaders, the Vikings, spoke Norse, and were called Norsemen or Normans. At the beginning of the tenth century they settled around the mouth of the Seine, where they established the powerful Duchy of Normandy. Like other invaders, the Norsemen were soon speaking a Gallo-Roman dialect, and Norse donated only a few sea terms to modern French, including crabe (crab), homard (lobster) and vague (wave). But the Normans would have a profound impact on the future of French, thanks to a Norseman who would conquer England.
Of all the invaders, it was the Franks who had the greatest impact on the evolution of French, at least inside France. This tribe from northern Germany filled the power vacuum left by the crumbling Roman Empire. In 430 the Franks created a federation they called Francia, in today’s Belgium. After the sack of Rome in 476, they moved into the province of Gaul, establishing themselves around Lutetia (now Paris). Under king Clovis I, the Franks seized large sections of southern France and Spain, subdued rival tribes and consolidated their control all over Gaul. Clovis founded a dynasty that lasted three centuries. In French political mythology he is considered the first king of France, and many French kings who followed him used a modern variant of his name—Louis. The political influence of the Franks would rise and fall, but even so it lasted seven centuries.
The Franks, like all the other invaders, quickly picked up Gallo-Roman, although the Frankish kings remained bilingual (in German) until at least the tenth century. Because of their political power they contributed more words to modern French than any of the other Germanic invaders. Roughly ten percent of modern French words come from Frankish, including words describing home life, clothing, war and emotions, such as fauteuil (armchair), gant (glove), robe (dress), champion, guerre (war), muraille (wall), falaise (cliff), émoi (emotion), honte (shame) and orgueil (pride). Although eighty percent of the words in modern French have Latin or Gallo-Roman roots, the Frankish influence explains why French went on to become the most Germanic of Latin-based languages. The Franks also created a strong “brand”—until the tenth century the king in Paris was called King of the Franks. Germans to this day call France Frankreich (empire of the Franks). Over the centuries the language of the Franks gradually came to be known as Françoys.
All languages have three parts: phonetics (pronunciation), grammar and a lexicon (vocabulary), and each part changes constantly. The lexicon changes the most quickly because of exposure to other languages and because of erosion (words tend to lose sounds or syllables), while pronunciation and grammar evolve more slowly. Because of their relative stability, grammar and phonetics form the skeleton of a language. It was Frankish influence on the Latin spoken in Gaul that gave it a new grammatical and phonetic skeleton, making it distinct from Latin (Italian, Spanish and Romanian became distinct much later). Linguists have found convincing evidence that, by the eighth century, even the Latin-speaking clergy in France were speaking a new language. In that century (the exact date is unknown), some monks in Picardy produced a small glossary, known to posterity as the Gloses of Reichenau, which translated some 1,300 Latin words into the vernacular, which had little to do with Latin. The word for ewe appears as berbice, a term much closer to the modern French brebis than the classic Latin ovis. The liver was called ficato, a word closer to the French foie that had very little resemblance to the Latin jecur. By then nobody said forum (market), arena (sand), liberi (children) or uvas (grapes), but mercatum, sabulo, infantes and racemos.
It didn’t take long for a new label to be applied to this proto-French. In 813 the Council of Tours encouraged priests to preach in rusticam romanam linguam (the rustic Roman language). It was the first clear indication that people outside of the Church spoke not Latin, but Roman. In English this language is often referred to as Romanic and more generally as Romance, derived from romanz, as it was spelled in Romance. The term actually applied to all the Latin-based languages being spoken in France at the time. They are also called Gallo-Romance languages to distinguish them from the Romance languages of Spain, Italy and Romania (Basque and Breton do not fall into this category).
The first complete text to appear in French Romance was Les serments de Strasbourg (the Oaths of Strasbourg), a treaty struck between two grandsons of the Frankish Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (742–814), Louis the German and Charles the Bald, in 842. One version of the text is in Romance, the other is in a German vernacular called Francique. According to the treaty, Louis took his oath in Romance in front of his brother’s men, who spoke Romance, while Charles made the same pledge to Louis’s men in Francique. However, since the document that survives is a transcription of the original document made a century later, no one knows for sure what the Romance version actually looked like. A later Romance text, the Cantilène de Sainte-Eulalie (a twenty-nine-verse lyrical poem about the saint’s martyrdom, dated 880 or 881), is a more reliable example of Romance.
When we compared the two texts, we were struck by the differences between them. The Serments de Strasbourg is written in language that is diplomatic and official, and the Latin influence is clear. It takes a specialist to recognize that the sentence “In o quid il mi altresi frazet” (“under the condition that he does the same to me”) is not Latin. However, some sentences taken from the Cantilène are almost intelligible to modern readers of French:
Buona pulcella fut eulalie.
Bel auret corps bellezour anima.
Voldrent la veintre li deo inimi.
Voldrent la faire diaule servir.
Eulalie was a virtuous maiden.
She had a beautiful body and a soul even more beautiful.
God’s enemies wanted to conquer her,
wanted to have her serve the devil.1
Despite their differences, both texts show clear signs that Romance
had grown a new linguistic skeleton and was no longer Latin. The main change was the erosion of the system of inflection. Inflection involves changing the end of a noun to show its function in the sentence—a feature typical of Latin and Old English that is still used in modern Russian and German. Rosa (rose, in Latin) is a subject, but rosam is a direct object, and the endings reflect these functions no matter where the words fall in the sentence. In all, Latin nouns have six inflected cases that correspond to the six functions of a word in a sentence (subject, addressee, direct object, possessive, indirect object and adverbial). In ninth-century Romance the inflections were simplified; only two cases survived, one for the subject and the other for the object. The name Romance, for example, was written as romanz when it was a subject and romanans when it was an object.
This erosion of the inflection system did not end there, and during the ensuing centuries French nouns lost their variety of cases. The position of words in a sentence became the primary way of marking their grammatical functions—the subject usually comes before the verb, and the object after the verb. However, modern French vocabulary has retained some traces of the old case system. For example, the French pronoun me was the accusative (object form) of the Latin ego (I). Modern English has retained even more features of the old inflection system. The apostrophe S—as in “my father’s”—is a hangover from the genitive (possessive) case in Latin. And who, whom, whose and whence come from cases in Old English or Germanic languages and are still used as such today. Whom and whose are the accusative and genitive cases of who (nominative); and whence is the dative of when.
By and large, French got rid of most of those complications over the years, although it did develop some of its own. The progressive erosion of the Latin inflection system explains why French articles multiplied at the same time. In Latin the word endings varied not only according to sentence function, but also according to gender and number. When cases disappeared, speakers needed new markers to indicate gender and number, so they created definite articles—li, lo and la—and indefinite articles—un, une, uns, unes, des—features that were totally absent from Latin.
By the tenth century France was a patchwork of duchies, marches, counties and baronies (the estates of different orders of nobles) where a galaxy of vernaculars was spoken that mixed Latin, Frankish and other Germanic languages. By the fourteenth century, Romance dialects belonged to two broad categories. Those in which “yes” was pronounced oc—mostly south of the Loire River—were called langues d’oc (oc languages). Those in which speakers said oïl for “yes”—in the north—were called langues d’oïl, a term which came to be used interchangeably with Françoys. Oïl and oc are both derivatives of the Latin hoc (this, that), which at the time was used to say yes. In the south they simply chopped off the h. In the north, for some reason, hoc was reduced to a simple o, and qualifiers were added—o-je, o-nos, o-vos for “yes for me,” “yes for us” and “yes for you.” This was complicated, so speakers eventually settled for the neutral o-il—“yes for that.” The term was used in the dialects of Picardy, Normandy, Champagne and Orléans. Other important langues d’oïl were Angevin, Poitevin and Bourguignon, spoken in Anjou, Poitiers and Burgundy, which were considerably farther south of Paris. Scholars debate who created the designations langues d’oïl and langues d’oc. The poet Dante Alighieri, in his De vulgari eloquentia of 1304, was one of the first to introduce the term langue d’oc, opposing it to the langue d’oïl and the langue de si (Romance from Italy). A fifth important langue d’oïl was Walloon, the dialect of the future Belgium.
The langues d’oc attained their golden age in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when groups of wandering musicians, or troubadours, travelled from city to city spreading a new form of sung poem that extolled the ideal of courtly love, or fin’amor. This new poetry was very different from the cruder epic poems of the north, the chansons de geste, and it enjoyed great literary prestige that boosted the influence of two southern rulers, the Count of Toulouse and the Duke of Aquitaine. Even many Italian courts adopted the langue d’oc, which is also known today as Occitan. Wandering poets of the north, the trouvères of Champagne, also borrowed and popularized the song-poems of the south.
The influence of the langues d’oc and d’oïl produced a situation in which French had started exporting itself even before it had become a fully developed language with a coherent writing system. Between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, Romance impressed itself on Europe as the language of worldly business, helping to relegate Latin to the religious sphere, although the latter did remain a language of science and philosophy for many more centuries. In the Mediterranean region, fishermen, sailors and merchants used a rudimentary version of langue d’oc mixed with Italian that people called the lingua franca (“Frankish language”), and over time this spoken language soaked up influences from Italian, Spanish and Turkish. (Today a lingua franca is any common language used in economics, diplomacy or science, in a context where it is not a mother tongue.)
The Mediterranean lingua franca never evolved into anyone’s mother tongue, which is why there are very few written traces of it. A rare rendition of it appears in a seventeenth-century comedy by the French playwright Molière, who had been a wandering actor before he entered Louis XIV’s Court. In his Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman), Molière creates the character of a fake Turk who speaks in lingua franca (for obvious comical effect):
Se ti sabir, / Ti respondir;
se non sabir, / Tazir, Tazir.
Mi star Mufti / Ti qui star ti?
Non intendir, / Tazir, tazir.
If you know, / you must respond.
If you don’t know, / you must shut up.
I am the Mufti, / who are you?
I don’t understand; / shut up, shut up.2
It was the Crusades, which were dominated by the French, that turned lingua franca into the dominant language in the Mediterranean. More than half a dozen Crusades were carried out over nearly three centuries. Many Germans and English also participated, but the Arabs uniformly referred to the Crusaders as Franj, caring little whether they said oc, oïl, ja or yes. Interestingly, Arabic, the language of the common enemy, gave French roughly a thousand terms, including amiral (admiral), alcool (alcohol), coton (cotton) and sirop (syrup). The great prevalence of Arabic words in French scientific language—terms such as algèbre (algebra), alchimie (alchemy) and zéro (zero)—underlines the fact that the Arabs were definitely at the cutting edge of knowledge at the time.
The greatest export of langues d’oïl was to England, and it happened almost accidentally. The English king Edward the Confessor had promised his crown to two men: William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold Godwinson, a duke who had become his right-hand man. When Edward died in 1066, William sailed to Hastings and quickly put an end to any confusion by defeating Harold in battle and seizing the English crown. He made his langue d’oïl dialect, Norman, the language of the English Crown and inaugurated a succession of French-speaking kings that lasted three and a half centuries. The first English king to speak English as a mother tongue was Henry IV (ruled 1399–1413), and his successor, Henry V, was the first to write official documents in English.
French might have foundered in England if William had not been such a competent ruler. He settled his people everywhere, established a new feudal system and instituted an efficient administration that made England the first centralized regime of Europe. The English nobility, civil servants, employees of the palace and Court, and merchant class quickly fell into line and started speaking the language of the king, even those who were born in England. St. Thomas Becket was known in his time as Thomas à Becket, and the ancestors of the poet Chaucer were chaussiers (shoemakers). The mixture of a solidly established Romance aristocracy with the Old English grassroots produced a new language, a “French of England,” which came to be known as Anglo-Norman. It was perfectly intelligible to the speakers of other langues d’oïl and also gave French its first anglicisms, w
ords such as bateau (boat) and the four points of the compass, nord, sud, est and ouest. The most famous Romance chanson de geste, the Song of Roland, was written in Anglo-Norman. The first verse shows how “French” this language was:
Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes,
set anz tuz pleins ad estéd en Espaigne,
Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne…
King Charles, our great emperor,
stayed in Spain a full seven years:
and he conquered the high lands up to the sea…
Francophones are probably not aware of how much England contributed to the development of French. England’s court was an important production centre for Romance literature, and most of the early legends of King Arthur were written in Anglo-Norman. Robert Wace, who came from the Channel Island of Jersey, first evoked the mythical Round Table in his Roman de Brut, written in French in 1155. An Englishman, William Caxton, even produced the first “vocabulary” of French and English (a precursor of the dictionary) in 1480.
But for four centuries after William seized the English crown, the exchange between Old English and Romance was pretty much the other way around—from Romance to English. Linguists dispute whether a quarter or a half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Part of the argument has to do with the fact that some borrowings are referred to as Latinates, a term that tends to obscure the fact that they actually come from French (as we explain later, the English worked hard to push away or hide the influence of French). Words such as charge, council, court, debt, judge, justice, merchant and parliament are straight borrowings from eleventh-century Romance, often with no modification in spelling.
In her book Honni soit qui mal y pense, Henriette Walter points out that the historical developments of French and English are so closely related that anglophone students find it easier to read Old French than francophones do. The reason is simple: Words such as acointance, chalenge, plege, estriver, remaindre and esquier disappeared from the French vocabulary but remained in English as acquaintance, challenge, pledge, strive, remain and squire—with their original meanings. The word bacon, which francophones today decry as an English import, is an old Frankish term that took root in English. Words that people think are totally English, such as foreign, pedigree, budget, proud and view, are actually Romance terms pronounced with an English accent: forain, pied-de-grue (crane’s foot—a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession), bougette (purse), prud (valiant) and vëue.
The Story of French Page 3
