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Re: isle > ile?

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, January 15, 2001, 10:39
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