Re: isle > ile?

En réponse à Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...>:

> I was looking at a book I had borrowed from my school's library, and in
> it, there is a French map of the Philippines dating from 1682. What
> struck
> me was that instead of ile, they used isle, for island (not odd in and
> of
> itself). It got me to wondering, was the s still pronounced then? If
> not,
> how long did it take for is to stop being pronounced in that word, and
> when did the French decide to write island as ile?
>
Well, postvocalic s disappeared very early in Old French (by the XIIth century
it was only a memory that scholars kept on writing because it was the only mark
of the two-case declension of Old French. They kept on making mistakes though :)
) but was kept in writing (in many words but not all: épée <- Old French espee
<- Latin (ill)a spatha (with wrong cut) is an example) until the XVIIIth century
when the Academy settled for removing this unpronounced s and to mark the
previous vowel with a circumflex accent.

Narbonósc is extremely different from French in that respect: it kept
postvocalic s (only final s was lost), so the use of the circumflex accent is
completely different than in French.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr