Re: Old french Was: cases

En réponse à Florian Rivoal <florian@...>:

> I am french, but not in france. I think the nearest FNAC is probably 10
> 000km away from here :Shanghai.
>
I thought they had FNACs in Eastern countries... And there is also a Printemps
in South Korea, but that may not help you ;))) .

> How much did they "succeded" to freeze the language?
They froze the spelling, and sound changes, although they carried on, became
much slower (it's not for nothing that you can read Descartes in the first
French translation without even realising that the text was written 3 centuries
ago). But really, the most important is the destruction of the French
creativity and the levelling of the language. Compared to many countries,
France is nearly monolithic when it comes to dialectical differences.

 I think (quite
> recently?) the language is having quite many changes. The "passe simple"
> is falling out of use as well as many complicated tenses and
> modes(nowadays, who is really at ease with past subjontives verb forms),
> the "est-ce que" structure is prefered to invertion for asking
> questions, "on" allmost allways replaces "nous", many new words are
> borowed from english, or "street language", or come from slang to become
> usual words.
>
But those are extremely superficial changes. The passé composé replaced the
passé simple, but it didn't change itself of form. "On" replaced "nous", but
verbs are still conjugated the same way as they were three centuries ago.
Really, all those changes are minor drifting of meaning. Sound changes since
the 17th century are not numerous. We have the /wE/ -> /wa/ thing (although the
pronunciation of |oi| as /wa/ already existed in the 17th century, it just
became the most common one), the /A/ disappeared (and then, not in every
dialect) just like the /9~/, the negative |ne| completely disappeared from
speech (but it was already dying in the 17th century) and some spelling
pronunciations appeared, but apart from this pronunciation is nearly identical
as what we have nowadays, except for some changes in tone and the like. Think
of Quebecois French for instance (and I'm not talking about the extreme forms
of Joual): it's extremely near to the French spoken during the French
revolution, more than 2 centuries ago. Grammarians didn't freeze the language,
but they slowed its evolution very much, and grammatically speaking French has
not changed at all in the last three centuries. The only thing that happened is
that forms evolved in meaning, not in construction.

> By the way, has any one ever paid some attention to this "street
> language", i mean, the one from the bad suburbs of paris?
Of course! Parisian French is a French dialect like any other, not
an "incorrect" French.

 I think
> considering it only as incorect french is probably not true on the
> linguistic point of view.
And indee the linguistic point of view is that it's just another variety of
French.

 It has probably its own syntax, slightly
> different from official dialect, in addition to its obviously different
> vocabulary.
>
But the important thing to realise is that French dialect differ only slightly
in syntax from standard French, and that's all due to the grammarians of the
last centuries. Dialects like Normand and Picard nearly disappeared, and left
place to watered down versions with near identical grammar to French, and only
some differences in vocabulary.

> Since the nearest FNAC is not so near, i'd be gratefull.
>
OK, I'll see that later tonight.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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