Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/666

630 FRANCE [LANGUAGE. a with following i, survives under the form French, which, though purely Teutonic in origin and form, has long been exclusively applied to the Romanic language and inhabi tants of Gaul. The German name f ramose, with its accent on, and o in, the second syllable, comes from franqois, a native French form older than franqais, but later than the Early Old French franceis. The Scandinavian settlers on the north-west coast of France early in the 10th century quickly lost their native speech, which left no trace except in some contributions to the vocabulary of the language they adopted. The main feature since is the growth of the political supremacy of Paris, carrying ..with it that of its dialect; in 1539 Francis I. ordered that all public docu ments should be in French (of Paris), which then became the official language of the whole kingdom, though it is j still foreign to nearly half its population. The conquest of England in 1066 by William, duke of j Normandy, introduced into England, as the language of the rulers and (for a time) most of the writers, the dialects spoken in Normandy. Confined in their native country to definite areas, these dialects, following their speakers, be came mixed in England, so that their forms were used to some extent indifferently ; and the constant communication with Normandy maintained during several reigns introduced also later forms of Continental Norman. As the conquerors learned the language of the conquered, and as the more cultured of the latter learned that of the former, the Nor man of England (including that of the English-speaking Lowlands of Scotland) became anglicized; instead of fol lowing the changes of the Norman of France, it followed those of English. The accession in 1154 of Henry II. of Anjou disturbed the Norman character of Anglo-French, and the loss of Normandy under John in 1204 gave full play to the literary importance of the French of Paris, many of whose forms afterwards penetrated to England. At the same time English, with a large French addition to its vocabulary, was steadily recovering its supremacy, and is officially employed (for the first time since the Conquest) in the Proclamation of Henry III., 1258. The semi-arti ficial result of this mixture of French of different dialects and of different periods, more or less anglicized according to the date or education of the speaker or writer, is gene rally termed "the Anglo-Norman dialect"; very mislead- ingly for a great part of its existence, because while the French of Normandy was not a single dialect, the later French of England came from other French provinces be sides Normandy, and, being to a considerable extent in artificial conditions, was checked in the natural development implied by the term "dialect." The disuse of Anglo- French as a natural language is evidenced by English being substituted for it in legal proceedings in 1362, and in schools in 1387 ; but law reports were written in it up to 1600, and, converted into modern literary French, it re mains in official use for giving the royal assent to bills of parliament. (6) Literary. Doubtless because the popular Latin of northern Gaul changed more rapidly than that of any other part of the empire, French was, of all the Romanic dialects, the first to be recognized as a distinct language, and the first to be used in literature ; and though the oldest speci men now extant is probably not the first, it is consider ably earlier than any existing documents of the allied languages. In 813 the council of Tours ordered certain homilies to be translated into Rustic Roman or into Ger man ; and in 842 Louis the German, Charles the Bald, and their armies confirmed their engagements by taking oaths in both languages at Strasburg. These have been preserved to us by the historian Nithard (who died in 853) ; and though, in consequence of the only existing manuscript (at Rome) being more than a century later than the time of the author, certain alterations have occurred in the text of the French oaths, they present more archaic forms (pro bably of North-Eastern French) than any other document. The next memorials are a short poem, probably North- Eastern, on St Eulalia, preserved in a manuscript of the 10th century at Valenciennes, and some autograph frag ments (also at Valenciennes) of a homily on the prophet Jonah, in mixed Latin and Eastern French, of the same period. To the same century belong a poem on Christ s Passion, apparently in a mixed (not intermediate) language of French and Provenal, and one, probably in South-Eastern French, on St Leger; both are preserved, in different handwritings, in a MS. at Clermont-Ferrand, whose scribes have introduced many Provengal forms. After the middle of the llth century literary remains are comparatively numerous ; the chief early representatives of the main dialects are the following, some of them preserved in several MSS., the earliest of which, however (the only ones here mentioned), are in several cases a generation or two later than the works themselves. In Western French are a verse life of St Alexius (Alexis), probably Norman, in an Anglo-Norman MS. at Hildesheim ; the epic poem of Roland, possibly also Norman, in an A.-N. MS. at Oxford ; a Norman verbal translation of the Psalms, in an A.-N. MS. also at Oxford ; another later one in an A.-N. MS. at Cam bridge ; a Norman translation of the Four Books of Kings, in a native MS. at Paris. The earliest work in the Parisian dialect is probably the Travels of Charlemagne, preserved in a late Anglo-Norman MS. with much-altered forms. In Eastern French, of rather later date, there are translations of the Dialogues of Pope Gregory, in a MS. at Paris, contain ing also fragments of Gregory s Moralities, and (still later) of some Sermons of St Bernard, in a MS. also at Paris. From the end of the 12th century literary and official docu ments, often including local charters, abound in almost every dialect, until the growing influence of Paris caused its language to supersede in writing the other local ones. This influence, occasionally apparent in the 12th century, was overpowering in the 15th, when authors, though often displaying provincialisms, almost all wrote in the dialect of the capital ; the last dialect to lose its literary independence was the North-Eastern, which, being the Romanic language of Flanders, had a political life of its own, and (modified by Parisian) was used in literature after 1400. III. Internal History, So little has .been done until recently, and so much remains to be done, in the scientific investigation of the sounds, inflexions, and syntax of the older stages and dialects of French, that what follows can not claim to be more than a fragmentary sketch, mainly of the dialects that which is now literary modern French, and those which were imported into England by the Nor mansin which English readers will probably take most interest, and especially of the features which explain the forms of English words of French origin. Dates and places are only approximations, and many statements are liable to be modified by further researches ; want of space obliges many exceptions and limitations to the general laws, and many points of hardly inferior importance to those here noticed, to be passed over in silence. The primi tive Latin forms given are often not classical Latin words, but derivatives from these ; and reference is generally made to the Middle English (Chaucerian) pronunciation of English words, not the modern. (a) Vocabulary. The fundamental part of the vocabulary of French is the Latin imported into Gaul, the French words being simply the Latin words themselves, with the natural changes undergone by all living speech, or de rivatives formed at various dates. Comparatively few words were introduced from the Celtic language of the native inhabitants (bee, lieite from the Celtic words given