Abstract
This chapter presents the historical background to what Rebecca Posner has described as ‘an uneasy half-way house between the regular enchaînement of the sixteenth century and a foreseeable complete disappearance of Old French word-final consonants’ (Sect. 3.1). Final syllable erosion in the post-Roman period is sketched in Sect. 3.2, while resistance to change and preference among high-status groups for a conservative, etymological norm for writing and speech is described in Sect. 3.3. The tension between ‘natural’ phonetic change and elite conservatism finds strong echoes in Kroch’s model as outlined in Chap. 1 (Sect. 3.4).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Time periods in the development of a language are notoriously difficult to define and are at best approximations offered for general guidance. For expository convenience here we follow Ayres-Bennett (1996) in defining the Old French (OFr) period as encompassing the tenth to the thirteenth centuries CE.
- 3.
Cf. Darmesteter (1910: 118):
M est tombée dès les premiers temps de l’Empire, à la fin de tous les mots, sauf de quelques monosyllabes. Le latin populaire disait rosa, muru, omine, fructu, die, en face du latin littéraire rosam, murum, hominem, fructum, diem.
- 4.
There are some exceptions, for example the accent d’insistance (C’est IMpossible!), and as Herzog (quoted by Ewert (1966: §148) observes, in the case of disyllabic words ending in
, where stress shifts to the penultimate syllable (e.g. Vous avez RAIson!). Ewert, however, writing originally in 1933, sees this pattern as marginal for disyllabic words and not relevant for trisyllables. Certainly in Modern French A la maiSON appears at least as natural as A la MAIson. - 5.
See Ferguson (1959).
- 6.
This could of course be taken too far: the pompous overuse of Latinate terms by individuals seeking to assert status is pilloried for example by Dolet and Rabelais (see Pope 1952: §71).
- 7.
- 8.
Cf. Pope (1952: §688): ‘In France, as in England, despite the bold bid for supremacy made by the phoneticians of the sixteenth century, it was the traditionalists that carried the day, almost all along the line’.
- 9.
In this connection, Picoche and Marchello-Nizia’s (1989: 212) observation that ‘Un des grands obstacles à la réforme de l’orthographe est que, limitée, elle est toujours contestable et que, radicale, elle est impossible’, remains as pertinent today as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- 10.
‘La Compagnie s’est attachée à l’ancienne Orthographe receuë parmi tous les gens de lettres, parce qu’elle ayde à faire connoistre l’Origine des mots.’ (quoted by Pope 1952: §713 and Brunot IV/I: 143).
- 11.
Women were not schooled in Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and are thus crudely aligned with ‘les ignorants’ here. As Lodge (2004: 130) points out, the role of Parisian women in leading final consonant deletion both in preconsonantal and in prepausal position draws explicit criticism from Tory (1529: f.57). On women’s supposed ‘ignorance’ and its consequences for language, see Ayres-Bennett (2004: 120–23).
, where stress shifts to the penultimate syllable (e.g. Vous avez RAIson!). Ewert, however, writing originally in 1933, sees this pattern as marginal for disyllabic words and not relevant for trisyllables. Certainly in Modern French A la maiSON appears at least as natural as A la MAIson.References
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Hornsby, D. (2020). A Brief History of French Final Consonants. In: Norm and Ideology in Spoken French. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_3
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