From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 18:50:02 EST
Doug Ewell writes:
> <jcowan at reutershealth dot com> wrote:
> > Also, you have to allow for changes in the source: when the name
> > "Leghorn" was coined, Livorno was still called Ligorno.
> >> ("Pair-iss" is a bit over the top; English speakers are
> >> certainly capable of saying "par-ee.")
> >
> > Again, when that name was borrowed, the French were still pronouncing
> > the final -s and had not yet adopted their phrase-final stress rule.
>
> Thanks for those two pearls. I had not heard them before.
Neither did I. I suppose you're talking about an old time where even the Old
French language was not born (and there were many regional dialects of
Celtic or Nordic languages mixed with Latin, before the Nordic dialect
spoken in the North-East became a dominant langue d'oïl, adopted by the
kings of the small Kingdom of France, and normalized very later as the
"langue françoise" by the Académie Française of Richelieu, which fixed the
rules for its post-medieval orthography.
French became the only official language in France only after the
Revolution, but has been spoken by a majority of French people only during
the 19th century after mandatory and free sholarship was adopted by Jules
Ferry... Before that, almost all cities in France had multiple names: one in
the official "langue française", the other using the regional language, with
its own orthograph or pronunciation.
Paris has always been the capital of the French Kingdom as soon as it was
born, and it already used the old Nordic-Latin dialect. The Roman Empire was
dead since long, and the "Lutecia" Latin name was dead with it in favor of
the Nordic name, which may just have happened to be pronounced differently
by other regional dialects based on Celtic+Latin...
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