Charcoal, Ink and Blackberry

Abstract

The aim of this article is to review intensifying comparative collocations in Medieval French, taking as the tertium comparationis the word noir ‘black’ or its variants in phrases such as ‘as black as ink’. In the course of the article, many examples of such comparisons taken from textual databases, secondary sources and primary sources are presented and discussed. The sections are organized according to the second term of the comparison, such as ‘charcoal’, ‘ink’, ‘blackberry’, and so forth. For the first terms of these comparisons, it turns out that only a quite small set of semantic fields can be identified. This article is one of a series of publications that systematically (and following a similar methodology) study comparisons in medieval French focused on color terms.