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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Guernsey patois, which is Norman-French bar the shouting, was spoken and written until quite recently (even, allegedly, by my great-grandparents). Thar's where to look.
| We have over 200 letters written by him. |
Let's use this as a test-case for our forgery thread. How many of these have a rock solid pedigree?
| he invented lowercase letters, damn it! |
Or the bloke forging his letters was too accustomed to using lower case letters.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Guernsey patois, which is Norman-French bar the shouting, was spoken and written until quite recently (even, allegedly, by my great-grandparents). Thar's where to look. |
Definitely. If you look at this: http://www.lexilogos.com/normand_jersey.htm
Or even this :
http://www.lexilogos.com/normand_langue_dictionnaires.htm
you won't find any word beginning by W.
What I mean is elemenary. To summarize :
1. As several other members of this site, I am intrigued by the correspondence between the letters W and G (and, being French, I consider W as a foreign letter).
2. This correspondence can simply be explained by the ancient sound similarity of the two letters, which, I think, can still be found in Dutch.
3. When dictionaries refer to 'Frankish', we can reasonably link it to the modern Dutch.
4. The English words beginning with W are not derived from Norman French.
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Cheers, interesting websites. I did the Norse acid test - see if there are any words that begin /sk/ (e.g. skipper, skirt) or the th- in "the" (I don't have the d-like symbol to hand) - and they were both ominously absent. The only word that caught my attention was "THIERS : pieu auquel on attache les animaux pour les faire pâturer." which of course looks exactly like the English word apparently borrowed from "Old" Norse but - if my weak French isn't failing me - that is simply coincidental. I was going to say that the /sk/ + "th" words I found could of course be contaminants from English (of a "le weekend" type) but since there weren't any I don't need to. Is everybody else happy with this disappearance of grandad Viking's language? Perhaps I'm just being anal about it. But when you see the tenacity of Norn in Orkney and Shetland it does seem odd.
I'm sorry you think of "w" as foreign; don't know how you survive without the voiced bilabial semi-vowel! The "conventional wisdom" will amuse Mick and others - I quote from James Essinger's Spellbound [Robson Books, 2006] pp.117-18:
"The Romans represented the w-sound by using two of their V letters, or two of their U letters. Later, the Anglo-Saxons preferred to use their runic letter wyn to depict the w-sound. However, the Norman invasion displaced the use of wyn in favour of the use of the Roman "double-u"..."
So, now you know: tape-recordings of Romans and Anglo-Saxons have revealed that it was the French-speaking Normans who brought the "w" to Perfidious Albion. You shouldn't think of the "w" as foreign at all!
Actually, I was taught at school (in days of yore when people still learned Latin) that the Romans pronounced "v" as /w/ - meaning that ol' Caius Julius C. was meant to have said "weni, weedy, weeky" but they couldn't have conquered an empire speaking like that, could they?
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| Is everybody else happy with this disappearance of grandad Viking's language? |
This disappearance has really happened. In 911, the Viking Rollo has legally gained the territory of Normandy. Thirty-two years later, Richard the Fearless became the third duke of Normandy. He wanted that his son learned Danish language "to directly communicate with his lieges and his soldiers" (Granier de Cassagnac). His instructions were: "In the town of Rouen, the Romance tongue is much more used than the Danish one, though in Bayeux the Danish is more often used than the Romance. So I want... (and so on)"
Under William the Bastard, the language spoken by the Norman aristocracy was completely French, and after the conquest the English nobles of his court were compelled to speak French and French language was taught in the English schools.
| Perhaps I'm just being anal about it. But when you see the tenacity of Norn in Orkney and Shetland it does seem odd. |
We may suppose that Danish or Norwegian have been spoken in these islands far before the Normandy has existed (perhaps one or two millenniums).
| I'm sorry you think of "w" as foreign; don't know how you survive without the voiced bilabial semi-vowel! |
W is foreign. In the common dictionary Le Petit Larousse de la langue française, you only find ninety words beginning by W; in Le Petit Robert, only 2 pages to 2131. And these words are English, German, Dutch, Australian, Arab or Asian.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mais oui! Nick is saying that you do have the w sound but you don't use a w.
We had a long correspondence over the other side about Latin pronunciation and it turned out that a great deal of it was fashion-based. Thus, saying "weeny, weedy, weaky" was a signal that you had been to Winchester (or wherever).
Dutch is often implicated in these matters. For instance, when you are dealing with V and W it turns out that the sound is actually an F!
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| "The Romans represented the w-sound by using two of their V letters, or two of their U letters. Later, the Anglo-Saxons preferred to use their runic letter wyn to depict the w-sound. However, the Norman invasion displaced the use of wyn in favour of the use of the Roman "double-u"..." |
In my big Latin-French dictionary, there are only seven words beginning with W. They are all proper names, foreign in their majority, though, very interestingly, you can find Wardo, the French Gardon river (in Southern France), and Wasco for Vasco, Vascon, which has produced Gascon (and Gascoigne in the history of the English football) and Basque. These two graphs (Wardo and Wasco) were used by Gallic authors in the Vth and the VIth Century.
A famous Belgian linguist (Grevisse)has written this:
| The last letter [which has been included in the French alphabet] is w. This letter was used in the Middle Ages in Picardy, Walloon and Lorraine manuscripts as well as in Anglo-Norman manuscripts (written in Great Britain). The first editions of the dictionary of the Académie did not quote any word in w-, though the double v was in use for the proper names, especially Germanic. (...) The Robert dictionary (1964) has been the first to declare that the w was the 23th letter in the French alphabet |
| So, now you know: tape-recordings of Romans and Anglo-Saxons have revealed that it was the French-speaking Normans who brought the "w" to Perfidious Albion. |
Another (summarized) quotation, from http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_%28typographie%29#W
"The w seems to have been invented by English medieval scribes, who had no grapheme to note the /w/ of their language (Old English). (...) In order to compensate this gap, they used a digram uu (or else just u. However, in the VIIIth Century, the letter ƿ (wyn) has become in general use (s'est imposée). In the XIth Century, the Norman scribes have reintroduced the digram uu in a ligatured form. The letter w was born. "
| The Romans pronounced "v" as /w/ |
Yes, they did. But not the French. In fact, the French w- is g- (pronounced guttural).
PS: In fact, the result of my researches is mitigated. I have just seen that Jean Nicot says in his dictionary (1606) at the word Vuayues (the French vague!): "The letter v being pronounced vowel, and not consonant, and is a word peculiar to the Normans." And he writes Vexin (a Norman area) Vvexin.
And Littré quotes: "E si aveir [bestiaux] trespassent per iloc ... ils deivent waiter" Lois de Guillaume, waiter being for gaiter, guetter (see English to wait). But the laws of William the Conqueror have been written in England, of course.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Mais oui! Nick is saying that you do have the w sound but you don't use a w. |
Our posts have crossed, but I was saying that, except for oui, ouest and ouistiti (marmoset in English), there is no w- in French words.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Ah...Vexin. It features very significantly in Anglo-French affairs (see the Holy Blood and The Holy Grail). Alincthun, bet you didn't know that vex means annoy in English.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Our posts have crossed, but I was saying that, except for oui, ouest and ouistiti (marmoset in English), there is no w- in French words. |
Whatever. [This is a joke that even some English-speakers won't get, Gilles.]
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So when I read that D'Artagnan is a hot-blooded Gascon I ought to be 'knowing' that he is in fact a Basque? Jaysus Kerist, all these years I have been thinking of Gascons as just slightly weird Frenchmen.
There was the French tennis player Jean Borotra, who was called by English newspapers 'the Bounding Basque'. Do the French call him the Galloping Gascon?
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | There was the French tennis player Jean Borotra, who was called by English newspapers 'the Bounding Basque'. Do the French call him the Galloping Gascon? |
No, he was le Basque bondissant. The terms are not synonymous.
Granier de Cassagnac, a Gascon himself, says that the Basques, coming from the other side of the Pyrenees, have occupied the whole Aquitaine in the VIIth Century, that they were pushed off by the French king Dagobert then by Pepin and finally settled in the present Pays basque. That theory would surely make many Basques bound (or gallop). At any rate, they gave their name to the Aquitaine (Gascogne).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Gascon/Basque is clearly one of those loose bits of wool which if tugged sufficiently gently but sufficiently determinedly will eventually unravel the whole orthodox garment.
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Just in case you're gearing up on this one, bear in mind that the Spanish version is Pais Vasco, with the key province being Vizcaya, coming out in English as "Basque" and "(bay of) Biscay".
Basque/Vasco is meant to come from the Latin name for the country Vasconia. The ultimate root of the name is meant to be "euskara" or "eskuara" in the Basque language (Euskadi). That's quite a jump that is - "euskara" to "Vasconia" but maybe justified if Vasconia was pronounced "Waskonia"!
My Brewer's Dictionary of Names relates the basic -sk- root to a "sea-dwelling people" (I presume they mean "seafaring" or are they talking about Atlantis!!!). They relate this -sk- to Etruscan/Etruria (which they also say gives us Tuscany/Toscana). The idea being that /sk/ means "water". 'Parently, the "primitive" inhabitants of Europe didn't distinguish between rivers and seas (they're both wet, damn it) since the only "water" in Tuscany are the rivers Arno and Tiber. That's not a criticism of Tuscany, which is one of my fav places.
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Of course, "Waskonia" would make it much easier to arrive at Gasconia...
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But when was the chronicle actually written? Chronicles that give dialogue are about as reliable as Hollywood scripts. They tend to tell the story that the writer's boss wants to hear, i.e. in this case "the Normans quickly became "French" and so it is reasonable for them to rule half of France". Whatever, I suppose being surrounded by French speakers they could change their language pretty rapidly, I concede.
Mick,
I'm interested in the Beowulf's a fake idea. Is this developed somewhere or did you originate the idea? Could you provide me with a source where the argument is laid out or tell me your reasons. I find this one hard to believe simply because of the enormous effort it would have taken to learn the language and then write out poetry to its - let's face it - pretty damn strict rules.
Michael Alexander says that for his translation he spent an average of two hours a line to translate the poem into Modern English. You'd have to have a lot of free time to do it in a language you just learnt with all the grammar right and that. At the same time I fully accept that it's either stupid or suspect that they haven't carbon-dated the damn thing.
Finally, have you analysed Layamon's Brut another of the few "stepping stones" supposedly between "Old" and "Middle" English. One of the books I was reading (N.F. Blake's Hist. of Eng. Lang.) was highlighting the archaicisms in the poem (I'll send you what he says if you're interested). Sorry to be banging on about these obscure works but I think your theory is made or broken by them. And without a serious academic counterattack someone has to play devil's advocate.
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