Re: Article wierdness

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> Suppose the incipit of a novel is: [...]
Well, narration is not interlocution.  It's a special case: in ordinary
life, people don't just come up to you and start to talk about some
cat and some table without any previous context.

I don't think you can draw general conclusions based on this usage.

> So the choice between "a" or "the", at least in an
> incipit, is something very important; and "the" is
> much more marked, and expressive, that "a", in English
> like in French, I guess.
Indeed, there are places where the definite article most certainly
is contrastive, but there are also many places where it isn't, and is
just a submission to the Modern French rule that (all but a very few)
noun phrases must start with a determiner

> ??? To me, "mange du pain" just expresses a partitive.
>
> If you say "mange du pain" to a child sitting at a
> table, it just means that some bread is supposed to be
> around, and that the child is not supposed to eat the
> whole of it. No need that bread has be mentioned
> before.
True for Modern French, but in Old French things were different (sorry
if it wasn't clear what contrast I was drawing before).  Old French used
"mange pain" for this meaning, and "mange du pain" only when "the bread"
was clearly definite.

> > in particular, masculine nouns take -s in the
> > singular and drop it
> > in the plural.
>
> ??? I suppose it depends of what noun, and probably
> what function inside the sentence (subject, direct or
> indirect object).
Yes.  I omitted to add the qualifier "in the nominative case".

> "Ha ! sire, fait li vallez [singular], por Deu merci,
> mout est ores miauz que ge muire que uns des prisiez
> chevaliers [plural] de vostre ostel"
> (Ah, Seigneur, dit le valet, pour l'amour de Dieu,
> pardonnez-moi. Mieux vaut que je meure plutot que l'un
> des chevaliers honore's de votre hotel).
Note how the Old French version has much more English-like word
order:  "better that I die than one of the precious knights", e.g.
The Modern French translation neatly illustrates a semantically
bleached article:  the speaker does not refer to a *specific* one of
the knights, and indeed the Old French version has no article at all
("uns" here is the number "one", masculine singular).

Sire/seigneur is one of the few survivals of the old two-case system.
For the most part the nominative forms perished, but a few (e.g.
coeur < COR) out-competed the accusative counterparts (cf. It. corde),
or as in this case survived as separate words.  The most striking
such case is Old French om, the nominative of homme, which became
the pronoun on.

> Anyway, I guess that the language was far from
> strictly codified then, and that there were lots of
> concurrent dialects.
It definitely was not strictly codified, and can be best described
as basically Francien (a term not used at the time) with Picard
influences, and occasional leakage from other dialects.  Furthermore
most of the surviving manuscripts were written in England, and so
use Anglo-Norman spelling conventions: these are often rationalized
away by modern editors.

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