Re: Old french Was: cases

On Monday 02 December 2002 4:05 pm, you wrote:
> >En r?onse ? Florian Rivoal <florian@...>:
> >> I am french, but i have actualy no idea of what old french is supposed
> >> to be. The oldest form i have been given to read was "garganuta" from
> >> Rablais, and at the time, i was not at all into linguistics, so i didn't
> >> pay any attention to how it worked. Can someone give me some information
> >> about what is different and what is common between modern, middle, and
> >> old french. Sample texts would be welcome too.
> >
> >Go to the nearest FNAC and buy the "Que Sais-Je?" "L'ancien fran?is" and
> > "Le moyen fran?is". They contain everything you need ;))) .
>
> I am french, but not in france. I think the nearest FNAC is probably 10
> 000km away from here :Shanghai.
>
> >But as a quick summary:
> >
> >Old French is basically French between the 11th and the 14th century,
> > while middle French is French between the 14th and the 16th century.
>
> What was before 11th? Is is still considered something like vulgar latin?
> or is it something which is no more latin, but not yet french?
Hmm...Gallo-Romance, AFAIK.  Maybe proto-French.  However, texts before the
11th century are very sporadic, as latin was still the language of writing.
In fact, up to about the 9th century, French was considered merely
'incorrect' latin, IIRC.


> > Those limits are
> >taken because they correspond approximately to big periods where French as
> > a recognisable structure. After the 16th century, we arrive at the period
> > when grammarians arrived and began to talk about a "correct" French, and
> > thus began to try and freeze its evolution and kill its dialects.
>
> How much did they "succeded" to freeze the language? 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.
>
> By the way, has any one ever paid some attention to this "street language",
> i mean, the one from the bad suburbs of paris? I think considering it only
> as incorect french is probably not true on the linguistic point of view. It
> has probably its own syntax, slightly different from official dialect, in
> addition to its obviously different vocabulary.
It has been frozen in writing.  Of course, nothing can freeze change in a
spoken language, save(don't you just love that word?  Much less clumsy than
'apart from') perhaps by speech monitoring, to make sure that you're thinking
'correctly'.

> >Old French, Middle French and Modern French are the three usual steps
> >recognised in the evolution from the Latin language spoken in Gaulle to
> > the French spoken nowadays. If you want examples, I can always send a
> > mail tonight with some things coming from my Que Sais-Je? :)) .
>
> Since the nearest FNAC is not so near, i'd be gratefull.

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