Henry Nicol and Paul Meyer

“ A large number of Old French words and meanings, now extinct in the language of Paris, were introduced into English after the Norman Conquest; and though some have perished, many have survived—strife from Old French estrif (Teutonic strīt) ; quaint from cointe (cognitum) ; remember from remembrer (rememorāre) ; chaplet (garland) from chapelet (Modern French “chaplet of beads”) ; appointment (rendezvous) from appointement (now “salary”) . Many also survive in other French dialects. ”

“ A few words have been furnished by Provençal (abeille, cadenas) , and several have been adopted from other dialects into the French of Paris (esquiver Norman or Picard for the Paris-French eschiver) . German has contributed a few (blocus = blochūs; choucroute = sūrkrūt) ; and recently a considerable number have been imported from England (drain, confortable, flirter) . In Old French, new words are freely formed by derivation, and to a less extent by composition; in Modern French, borrowing from Latin or other foreign languages is the more usual course. ”

“ The consequence of those efforts in contrary directions is that French orthography is now quite as traditional and unphonetic as English, and gives an even falser notion than this of the actual state of the language it is supposed to represent. Many of the features of Old French orthography, early and late, are preserved in English orthography; to it we owe the use of c for s (Old English c = k only) , of j (i) for dzh, of v (u) for v (in Old English written f) , and probably of ch for tsh. The English w is purely French, the Old English letter being the runic þ. ”

“ As literature came to be extensively cultivated, traditional as distinct from phonetic spelling began to be influential; and in the 14th century, the close of the Old French period, this influence, though not overpowering, was strong—stronger than in England at that time. ”

“ At the Renaissance they became very abundant, and have continued since, stifling to some extent the developmental power of the language. Imported words, whether Teutonic, classical Latin or other, often receive some modification at their importation, and always take part in all subsequent natural phonetic changes in the language (Early Old French adversarie, Modern French adversaire) . ”

“ The nasalization took place whether the nasal consonant was or was not followed by a vowel, femme (fēminam) , honneur (honōrem) being pronounced with nasal vowels in the first syllable till after the 16th century, as indicated by the doubling of the nasal consonant in the spelling and by the phonetic change (in femme and other words) next to be mentioned. English generally has au (now often reduced to a) for Old French ã—vaunt (vanter, vānitāre) , tawny (tanné (?) Celtic) . ”

“ To these reference should be made for information as to the very numerous articles, treatises and editions by the many and often distinguished scholars who, especially in France and Germany, now prosecute the scientific study of the language. It may be well to mention that, Old French phonology especially being complicated, and as yet incompletely investigated, these publications, the views in which are of various degrees of value, require not mere acquiescent reading, but critical study. The dialects of France in their present state (patois) are now being scientifically investigated. ”

“ If the forms are modernized while the word-order is kept, the Old French l’archevesque ne puet flechir li reis Henris (Latin archiepiscopum nōn potest flectere rex Henricus) assumes a totally different meaning—l’archevêque ne peut fléchir le roi Henri. (2) The replacement of the nominative form of nouns by the accusative is itself a syntactical feature, though treated above under inflection. A more modern instance is exhibited by the personal pronouns, which, when not immediately the subject of a verb, occasionally take even in Old French, and regularly in the 16th century, the accusative form ”

“ English has both forms, sometimes in words originally the same—wage and gage (Modern French gage, Teutonic wadi) ; warden and guardian (gardien, warding) . (3) Latin b after accented a in the imperfect of the first conjugation, which becomes v in Eastern French, in Western French further changes to w, and forms the diphthong ou with the preceding vowel—Norman amowe (amābam) , portout (portābat) ; Burgundian ameve, portevet. -eve is still retained in some places, but generally the imperfect of the first conjugation is assimilated to that of the others—amoit, like avoit (habēbat) . ”

“ Some of the Early Modern etymological spellings were imitated in England; fleam and autour were replaced by phlegm and authour, the latter spelling having corrupted the pronunciation.
(e) Inflections.—In the earliest Old French extant, the influence of analogy, especially in verbal forms, is very marked when these are compared with Latin (thus the present participles of all conjugations take ant, the ending of the first, Latin antem) , and becomes stronger as the language progresses. ”

“ These phenomena occur much earlier in the anglicized French of England—13th century aveynt (Old French aveient) . But the universal loss of final e, which has clipped a syllable from half the French vocabulary, did not take place till the 18th century, after the general loss of final consonants; fort and forte, distinguished at the end of a sentence or line in the 16th century as fòrt and fòrtǝ, remain distinguished, but as fòr and fòrt. The metre of poetry is still constructed on the obsolete pronunciation, which is even revived in singing ”

“ The now extinct use of estre with the participle present for the simple verb is not uncommon in Old French down to the 16th century—sont disanz (sunt dīcentēs) = Modern French ils disent (as English they are saying) . (7) In present Modern French the preterite participle when used with avoir to form verb-tenses is invariable, except when the object precedes (an exception now vanishing in the conversational language) —j’ai écrit les lettres, les lettres que j’ai écrites. ”

“ In the 17th and 18th centuries close é changed to open è, except when final or before a silent consonant—amer (amārum) now having è, aimer (amāre) retaining é. English shows the Western close é—peer (Modern French pair, Old French per) , chief (chef, caput) ; Middle High German the Eastern ei—lameir (Modern French l’amer, l’aimer, la mer = Latin mare) . (6) Latin accented e not in position, when it came to be followed in Old French by i unites with this to form i in the Western dialects, while the Eastern have the diphthongs ei—Picard, Norman and Parisian pire (pejor) , piz (pectus) ”

“ A still later change is the general loss of the vowel (written e) of unaccented final syllables; this vowel preserved in the 16th century the sound ǝ, which it had in Early Old French. In later Anglo-Norman final ǝ (like every other sound) was treated exactly as the same sound in Middle English; that is, it came to be omitted or retained at pleasure, and in the 15th century disappeared. In Old French the loss of final ǝ is confined to a few words and forms ”

“ The term gallica, at first denoting the native Celtic language of Gaul, is found applied to its supplanter before the end of the 9th century, and survives in the Breton gallek, the regular term for “French.” After the Franks in Gaul had abandoned their native Teutonic language, the term francisca, by which this was denoted, came to be applied to the Romanic one they adopted, and, under the form française, remains its native name to this day ”

“ Sometimes, as in cieux (caelōs) and ciels, the old traditional and the modern analogical forms coexist, with different meanings. (4) The modern loss of final s (except when kept as z before a vowel) has seriously modified the French declension, the singulars fort (fòr) and forte (fòrt) being generally undistinguishable from their plurals forts and fortes. The subsequent loss of ǝ in finals has not affected the relation between sing. and plur. forms; but with the frequent recoining of the plural forms on the singular present Modern French has very often no distinction between sing. ”

“ Of the French words now obsolete some have disappeared because the things they express are obsolete; others have been replaced by words of native formation, and many have been superseded by foreign words generally of literary origin; of those which survive, many have undergone considerable alterations in meaning. ”

“ Summary.—Looking at the internal history of the French language as a whole, there is no such strongly marked division as exists between Old and Middle English, or even between Middle and Modern English. Some of the most important changes are quite modern, and are concealed by the traditional orthography ”

“ It is, indeed, because dialectal differences as they arise do not follow the same boundary lines (much less the political divisions of provinces) , but cross one another to any extent, that to speak of the dialect of a large area as an individual whole, unless that area is cut off by physical or alien linguistic boundaries, creates only confusion. ”

“ A century later, masculines without s in the nom. sing. take this consonant by analogy of the other masculines, giving leres as nom. similar to tors. In Anglo-Norman the accusative forms very early begin to replace the nominative, and soon supersede them, the language following the tendency of contemporaneous English. In continental French the declension-system was preserved much longer, and did not break up till the 14th century, though acc. forms are occasionally substituted for nom. (rarely nom. for acc.) ”

“ These forms of the plural are retained in the 16th century, though often etymologically spelt with the consonant of the singular, as in vifs, pronounced vis; but in Late Modern French many of them disappear, vifs, with f sounded as in the singular, being the plural of vif, bals (formerly baux) that of bal. In many words, as chant (cantūs) and champs (campōs) with silent t and p (Old French chans in both cases) , maux (Old French mals, sing. mal) , yeux (oculōs, Old French œlz, sing. œil) the old change in the stem is kept. ”

“ French and Northern Provençal also agree in changing Latin ū from a labio-guttural to a labio-palatal vowel; the modern sound (German ü) of the accented vowel of French lune, Provençal luna, contrasting with that in Italian and Spanish luna, appears to have existed before the earliest extant documents. The final vowel laws generally apply to the unaccented vowel preceding the accented syllable, if it is preceded by another syllable, and followed by a single consonant—matin (mātūtīnum) , dortoir (dormītōrium) , with vowel dropped ”

“ Modern Guernsey retains ie after ch—ap’rchier (approcher, adpropeāre) . (20) Some of the Modern French changes have found their places under older ones; those remaining to be noticed are so recent that English examples of the older forms are superfluous. In the 16th century the diphthong au changed to ao and then to ó, its present sound, rendering, for instance, maux (Old French mals, malōs) identical with mots (muttōs) . ”

“ The feminine generally takes no e if the masc. has none, and if there is no distinction in Latin—fem. sing. fort (fortem) , grant (grandem) , fem. plur. forz (fortēs) , granz (grandēs) , like the acc. masc. Certain adjectives of this class, and among them all the adjectives formed with the Latin suffix -ensis, take regularly, even in the oldest French, the feminine ending e, in Provençal a (courtois, fem. courtoise; commun, fem. commune) . To these must not be added dous (Mod. Fr. dolz, dous) , fem. douce, which probably comes from a Low Latin dulcius, dulcia. ”

“ French esclandre (scandalum) , Prov. escandol; French olie (dissyllabic, i = y consonant, now huile) , Prov. oli (oleum) ; (3) in changing accented a not in position into ai before nasals and gutturals and not after a palatal, and elsewhere into é (West French) or ei (East French) , which develops an i before it when preceded by a palatal—French main (Latin manum) , Prov. man; aigre (ācrem) , agre; ele (ālam) , East French eile, Prov. ala; meitié (medietātem) , East French moitieit, Prov. meitat; (4) in changing a in unaccented final syllables into the vowel ǝ, intermediate to a and e ”