French Translation (The History of Britain Revealed)

[alincthun]

[alincthun]

Some informations about Granier de Cassagnac:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Granier_de_Cassagnac

He has ever been anti-republican.

He's been an influential adviser to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, and took an active part, at least as a journalist, in the coup d'Etat of December 2, 1851. Of course, his friendship with Victor Hugo became aversion.

He demanded the restoration of Roman Catholicism as state religion.

A journalist, he opposed the laws in favor of the press.

Finally, I prefer to call him a chauvinist, as you do.

He has also written a History of the Origins of the French Language.

[alincthun]

IX
IDENTITY OF THE OLD-TIME CELTIC IDIOMS AND OF TODAY'S ONES

Thus we know that before the formation of Latin, a Gallic or Celtic language was spoken in Gaul, in Spain, in Italy, in Illyria, in Thrace and in Asia Minor.

This Celtic language had, in Gaul, at the time of Caesar, various distinct idioms. The Celtic spoken by the Aquitanians differed from the one being spoken between the Garonne and the Marne ; the latter differed from the Celtic spoken between the Marne and the Rhine; the Celtic spoken in the countries that one calls Lower Brittany differed from all the others.

Let's add that what happened two thousands years ago was exactly what we see nowadays.

It remains now to establish that these Gallic or Celtic idioms, ascertained by the ancient historians, were the same as the ones people speak nowadays.

A first proof: Several words, reported as Gallic by the ancient authors, still belong to patois or to French. Some examples:

Diodorus of Sicily, who lived at the time of Caesar, say that the Gauls, when they fought, used a kind of pike which they called lance (lankia). Varro, then Aulus-Gellius say the word lancea is Spanish. That means that this word is Celtic and used on both sides of the Pyrenees.

Suetonius says that the word meaning bec de coq (cock bill) in Tolosian patois was becco. The words bec and coq, of pure Celtic origin, existed at the Ist century AD.

Pliny says the Celts called bracelets viriolae.The word virole still means ring, circle; hence the French word virer and the Aquitanian biroula, to turn.

Pausanias says that the Gauls who entered Grece called a horse marca. In Lower Breton, a horse is still called march.This word also belonged to the Celtic patois of the conquest. The Bavarian law expresses itself in this way: "If it is a horse that we call march." From march came maréchal (and marshall).

Pliny says that the lark, called in Latin galerita, was named in Gaulish alanda. It's still named in France, depending on the idiom, alauso, lauzetto, alouette.

Quintilianus says that the Spaniards called canthus the iron wrathe which unwrapped a wheel. Du Cange records that in XIVth writings one said canta to translate the patois chante, from which the French jante is derived, which is said canso in Aquitanian patois. (Alincthun is glad to learn the origin of the phrase -- mettre de chant --, to set on edge (a plank, for instance).)

The Digest : -- The property which the Greek called paraphernal, and that the Gauls name peculium, pécule. --
(Paraphernal property = a wife's estate which doesn't belong to the dowry and that is her exclusive property.)

Plutarcus ( ?) says that the French town of Lyon has got its name, Lugdunum, from the words lug and dunum, which in Gaulish mean the first crow and the second hillock. We don't feel obliged to believe him, but dune still means hillcock and lug still means crow in Lower Britain.

We could multiply the examples.

Re toponyms and patronyms : at the time of Caesar and of Strabo, Paris was called Paris, Auch Ausk, the Tech Tecum, the Var and the Jura Var and Jura, the Garonne Garouna, which is its current patois name.

If one studies the names of Gallic chiefs who invaded Italy, Grece and Asia, shall we not find the current names in the names of Bellovesus (bellov�se), which is Belb�ze or Beauvoir ; Epossognat, Cassignat, Clondic, Cogentiac and so many others, quoted by Caesar and Livy ?

The shape of the words and the pronunciation, remained the same, prove the identity of the French current idioms with this ancient Celtic language that Septimus Severus names the Gallic language, lingua gallica, in a law of the Digest . In the year of 387, saint Jerome told that Galatae, who had settled in Asia Minor, between the Taurus and the Hellespontos, six centuries before, still spoke a language completely different from Greek, and near to the Trier language, i.e. to the Celtic spoken by Belgae, which was the language of their fathers. We shall show that the military colony settled by Trajanus in Dacia, with Gallic soldiers, and separated for more than sixteen centuries from the Latin world, still speak the tongue of Languedoc and of Aquitaine.

[alincthun]

X
PATOIS AT THE TIME OF TRAJANUS

With the exception of Herculanum and Pompeii, we don't know any more curious and more instructive extraction than this one: southern patois brought to Dacia by the Trajanus... soldiers, patois that have been preserved intact for eighteen centuries under the thick bed of the idioms of the invasion, and that reappears today in the form and the pronunciation which they had at their departure from Auch, Toulouse and Narbonne.

The military colony settled by Trajanus on the banks of the Danube in the countries named today Walachia and Moldavia (these two countries have been united in the year Cassagnac's book has been published and became the Romania two years later) has remained, since Aurelianus, isolated from the mother country. The Goths invaded it and occupied it; and after the Goths, the Huns, the Avars, the Bulgars, the Petchenegs, and so on. However, the primitive tongue of this colony of Gallic origin, which is called nowadays langue roumane, and which calls itself Romanesc, when stripped of the foreign elements which have penetrated it, is nothing else than the Under-Pyrenean patois. It has not been given and could not have been given any debris of Latin; it has remained as it was in the mouth of the soldiers who brought it to Dacia; and it is, for us, an irrefutable evidence of the identity of the Celtic patois in the first century AD with the southern patois spoken nowadays.

A long comparative list follows (65 examples from A to G).

3 columns
French/Romanesc/Aquitanian patois
Abonner/Abona/Abouna
Aboyer/Latra/Layra
Accommoder/Acomoda
Acoumouda
Acheter/Coupara/Croumpa
Adieu/Adio/Adiou
Adjuger/Adjoudica/Adjudica
Adopter/Adopta/Adopta
Affront/Affrount/Affrount
Aider/Aouta/Ajuda
Aisé/Comod/Comodé
Allée/Aleiou/Aleo, aléio
Allié/Aliat, unit/Aliat, unit
Ami/Amic/Amic
Apercevoir/Descoperi/Descoubri
Appel/Appel/Appel
Attaquer/Ataca/Ataca
Attribuer/Attribui/Attribua
Bal/Bal/Bal
Banc/Banca/Banca,banco
(To be continued.)

[alincthun]

I jump the end of the previous chapter and begin to post the last one, which I'll try to translate almost in full. I should be annoyed if Mick missed a part of it.

XI
CONCLUSION

If it's an established fact that the Celtic or Gallic language was formed and was spoken in the whole of Europe before Latin appears, that its various idioms of today existed before the Roman invasion, and that they have not noticeably changed for two thousand years, we're forced to conclude that its origins are national, and that one would lose oneself in searching for the etymology its fundamental terms in foreign languages.

Ruled and often blinded by pedagogic prejudices, we insufficiently know the high level of culture of moral culture where our ancestors have reached at the time when Caesar knew them and subjected them. They had not the fine arts of Greece; but what Caesar writes about the knowledge and the philosophy of the Druids, who were the sacerdotal body of the nation and its supreme political leaders, shows us that they were much higher than the schools of Rome and Athens, and that they had the civilisation of the ideas, which is the true civilisation. They used, Caesar writes, the Greek alphabet in the composition of their poems and in the management of their public and private affairs, though the scholar Petrus Ramus, or Pierre de la Ramée, claims that this alphabet was Gallic, and that Father Grégoire de Rostenen presents an alphabet used by the ancient Bretons, taken from ancient monuments ; but the poetry and the theology of the Druids had, everywhere in Gaul, a proper character; and it is to the Druids that we notably owe the creation of this religious mendicant order that we find later in the organisation of pagan Rome.

Therefore, such a nation had its language, far more developed than one commonly imagines; and one conceives, when studying its relative precocity, that it must have largely come into the formation of the Latin language. The latter, as we have seen, formed artificially, as did Rome itself, originally a refuge of all the Italian exiles, and the various peoples of Latium shared one same language only when they had one common country. This fact had not escaped Virgil, who had made Jupiter himself promise:

"And I shall make the Latins speak with only one voice"

The strangest idea which has ever been conceived is that the Romans imposed Latin on the Gauls. Has anybody the power to impose a language on a nation? Is such an enterprise physically feasible? We can conceive that the English have compelled the Scots to wear hose after the battle of Culloden; in order to adopt a clothe, you just have to wear it; but to adopt a language, you must study it for a long time and be clever enough to understand it.

Seven years are necessary to teach Latin to our children at school, and even then they have an imperfect knowledge of it; and a single edict, published to the sound of a horn, in all the Gauls, would have been enough to teach it to the peasants, to the ploughmen, to the shepherds, to the maidservants, to these million of poor people who spend their lives taken up by country works! Verily, this is disarmingly ridiculous!

One will agree that the French government exerts its influence over the provinces as strongly as the Roman government; it covers them with all kinds of officials of any rank; all these officials speak and write in French; every peasant talks to his justice of peace in French and receives a taxation statement in French from his tax man. French books and newspapers inundate the country, and yet people still speak patois in the provinces of which patois are the mother tongues.

Languedoc has been united to the Crown since 1271; Guyenne, since 1453; Provence, since 1481; Brittany, since 1532; Roussillon, since 1642, and Alsace, since 1648: thus, policy exerted by the French government over these provinces has been as long and a hundred times more direct than the one the Roman government was exerting over Gauls; and nevertheless, if the French language has established itself everywhere, it has destroyed the national idioms nowhere. People learn French, but do not forget the tongue of their cradle, of their home, of their childhood, of their local country.

What a strange contradiction! Latin, which has not been able to endure in Rome, would have become customary to us? The Roman people has let Latin perish, and the Gauls would have kept it? The Aquitanians, the Auvergnians, the Catalans would have left their languages to learn another one which has been forgotten in the places themselves where it has formed? I don't have the strength to discuss such hypotheses. Common sense should have been enough to overthrow them. I hope that history, led in a better way, will refute them.

One of the funniest problems to study is certainly to know how Latin has disappeared from Rome itself, where its traces are not more noticeable than in Milan, Firenze or Naples. A lot of noble Roman families are native from various Italian regions, but the people itself, in its greatest part, is obviously the direct heir of this proud, scornful and unruly people that Marius and the Gracchi stirred up to revolt against the patricians. Well, however one studies it, one does not find more Latin remains in Ripetta, in the Trastevere or in the Monti than in the middle of the palaces of the Corso or in Piazza Navona.

In my opinion, the only possible way to explain the dying of Latin is that it was a scholarly language, understood by everybody ("entendue": heard or understood), but spoken only by cultured ("lettrés") men and corpses, by the Senate, by the priests, by the magistrates, by the powerful families; and that, when the dispersion of that polite society, started by the translation of the Empire to Constantinopolis, has been completed by the barbarous invasions, in Rome there was only the people left, which have not kept Latin, because they did not speak it.

Admittedly, our administrative system, the establishing of primary schools, the vulgarisation of books and newspapers have made French enter quite ahead among people in the countries and little towns; however, if a social revolution, similar to the one which has brought the Roman Empire down, had happened in France, as a result of European coalitions, who doubts that French should have been quickly erased from the provinces where patois are the mother tongues learnt by everybody without teachers and effortlessly?

Of all the artificial and literary languages that served as an instrument to a civilisation, Latin is, unquestionably, the one which had formed in the most unfavourable conditions. Greek had formed with its national elements; French had formed with the idiom of Ile de France and with the other Celtic idioms of the provinces, i.e. equally with national elements. The historians of the Latin language are unanimous, as we have seen, in noting Latin has completely formed with words borrowed either from Greek or from the idioms formerly established in Italy. So it has taken strange illusions to consider as the spring of most European idioms the language which, on the contrary, very visibly, is just the result of them.

(De toutes les langues artificielles et littéraires qui ont servi d'instrument � une civilisation, le latin est, sans contredit, celle qui s'était constituée dans les conditions les plus défavorables. Le grec s'était formé avec des éléments nationaux ; le fran�ais s'est formé avec les idiomes de l'Ile de France, ainsi qu'avec les autres idiomes celtiques des provinces, c'est-�-dire également avec des éléments nationaux. Les historiens de la langue latine sont unanimes, on a pu le voir, pour constater que le latin s'était enti�rement formé avec des mots empruntés soit au grec, soit aux idiomes établis ant�rieurement en Italie. Il avait donc fallu d'étranges illusions pour considérer comme la source de la plupart des idiomes de l'Europe la langue qui, au contraire, n'en est que tr�s visiblement le résultat.)

[alincthun]

[Mick Harper]

So, this dude got the status of Latin right too (though not, it would seem, Greek). His sense of spluttering incredulity at what everyone else believes is a very familiar emotion.

[alincthun]

Cassagnac has written : " When Cardinal Mezzofanti was still living, I had the honour to submit to him, in Rome, an observation, that everyone can confirm, that Latin has ever at least two words for saying the same thing, and that of these two words, one invariably exists in the French patois. On the subject to know which one of these two languages could have borrowed from the other, this philologist scholar was answering, as me, that it ought to be Latin; for if Gallic had made the borrowing, it should have borrowed both the words, what is not. "

What do you think if I change the word " Latin " into the word " English " ?

I'm not -- on the principle -- opposed to the idea that English could be the mother-tongue of Western European languages, but the reason cannot be that English words are one-third ' Latinate ' and two-thirds ' Germanic '.

Suppose that English has, first, generated French (after being the same language as French), then, later, has generated German (after being the same as German): Since German is so obviously different from French, the ' Latinate ' side of English should have necessarily evolved at this time with the whole to become somewhat Germanized. A language, as you say, evolves chaotically. So it cannot keep one of its parts intact as in the previous time. Now, many Latinate English words have nothing to do with the Germanic languages. On the contrary, many of them seem more Latin than French words themselves. As freshly released from the workshop.

At any rate, don't you think that a great number of both French and English words (and also Spanish, Italian and so on) have been artificially produced (mass-produced) at different times from Latin (for instance, in the IXth Century) by European Ecclesiastics (well, mainly)?

The word eau is French as water is English, but aquatique/aquatic/aquaticus is completely Latin.

It's a French point of view (optically speaking).

[Mick Harper]

It's true one of the problems is that a) English-speakers made a huge amount of technical advances that involved coining new words and b) these same English-speakers were universally trained in Latin (and often Greek) and used these as sources for the coining. It's also a fact (or at any rate a safe guess) that because French, Italian and Latin were held to be "high-culture" languages in England at various times for the whole of 1000 - 2000 AD, lots of these words would have entered English discourse. I just don't know how to cope with this because English dictionaries are so unreliable about etymologies.

But your statement about Latin/English having two words for every meaning is both true and presumptively important. Actually it's usually more than two. They say the Esquimaux have fifty words for snow (because it's so important to them) but English seems to have fifty words for things that only poets need alternates for. But presumably you must have noticed this over and over again as a French translator of English.

On the general question of the relationships between English/ French/ German, I'm afraid I can be of little help. What is in THOBR is about the limits of my mind, and has stubbornly remained so.

[alincthun]

[Hatty]

[Mick Harper]

Who are these "long-term visitors", Hatty? As far as I know, due to its insularity, Britain has far fewer long-term visitors than any other country in Europe. Spain probably has the next fewest due to its being a peninsula. I rather think we had better invent a new law: the fewer long-term visitors a country has, the richer its language.

[alincthun]

[Hatty]

[alincthun]

Alas, it was a false alarm. The postal notification, which I have received this morning, was announcing the delivery of another book (History of the Origins of the French Language, by Granier de Cassagnac), that I had taken out yesterday! The postal services as many other administrative ones are much deteriorating in France. I'm still waiting for several packages which I have ordered two or three months ago (among which three copies of THOBR). You should perhaps alert Icon Books, Mick (in one week, for instance).

PS: The Cassagnac is a big one (550 pages). I'll read it later, but I can already tell you that he studies Les Serments de Strasbourg word by word, and seems to prove that Les Serments have been told in the "vulgar tongue" spoken between the Meuse and the Loire, in the "trouvères' language", "Langue d'Oil"! It would mean that we were wrong, Hatty. (But many distinguished French philologists have made the same mistake as we did. Is it a consolation?)