Du français aux créoles: phonétique, lexicologie et dialectologie antillaises par André Thibault

Abstract

Reviews 205 of faux amis that Maillet explores in his second chapter, the pair library ≠ librairie is instructive. At an earlier stage, the words were nearly synonymous. However, French abandoned the meaning of bibliothèque in the seventeenth century, whereas English retained it, resulting in a disconcerting difference for the learner. As an exemplar of “deceptive” pairs inventoried in his final chapter, Maillet turns to aunt/tante. Both derive from Latin amita, but the French acquired the initial consonant from children’s usage of the possessive (t’ante), whereas the English is a more faithful rendering. Although superficially similar, they may not be considered cognates. Maillet succeeds in sustaining a nuanced analysis of the crosslinguistic components that have determined the modern French lexicon. But he seems unable to expand his prescriptive argumentation beyond the tiresome battle metaphor. His epilogue disappoints by its weakly formulated cohortative: “Sus aux anglicismes! Chassons-les, corrigeons-les” (418). For better or for worse, the dynamic nature of language change can hardly be constrained by such an idealized manifesto. Although not a pedagogical handbook, it has important implications for the classroom. If students encounter an Anglicism in an authentic text, can—or should—they adopt its usage? Which have achieved droit de cité? What pragmatic factors might determine their word choice? Unfortunately, absolute prescriptions ignore these complex considerations. Cabrillo College and Graduate Theological Union (CA) H. Jay Siskin Thibault, André. Du français aux créoles: phonétique, lexicologie et dialectologie antillaises. Paris: Garnier, 2015. ISBN 978-2-8124-3843-1. Pp. 505. 49 a. Following Thibault’s Le français dans les Antilles, this volume shifts focus to the region’s French-based creoles (FBCs). Thirteen scholars are represented across eleven chapters, divided into three areas: Historical Phonetics and Lexicology, Dialectology, and Historical Sociolinguistics, areas that often receive less attention than morphosyntax in creole studies. In the first section, Bollée studies the development of h aspiré in the Caribbean FBCs, showing that this sound, still pronounced in the colonial French that represents the terminus a quo of Caribbean creoles, has rarely remained [h] but more often become [r] or [w]. Chauveau examines words that survived into FBCs variously from lower class European French sociolects, ephemeral or dated vocabularies, or regional dialects to show that the colonial French serving as the starting point for FBCs was not the prestige dialect of the time. Though not a new idea, Chauveau’s demonstration provides fascinating and well-documented examples. Hazaël-Massieux’s and Jansen and Hoffman’s contributions explore figurative language in the development of Creole lexicons. Hazaël-Massieux develops the thesis of the relative invisibility of creole metaphor, both in lexicography and in translation, but argues that FBCs have a rich contemporary metaphorical language awaiting documentation , whereas Jansen and Hoffman empirically challenge the view that creole lexicons abound (etymologically) in so-called pragmatic metonymies. Rézeau examines lexical items in letters written from Guadeloupe in 1843–46 by a visiting Frenchman, whose vocabulary contains forms of interest for the French of the period as well as his native Burgundian dialect and the regional French and creole of Guadeloupe. Finally, Scholz studies lexicons of magic and voodoo, concluding that this specialized vocabulary is not more likely to be of African origin in most FBCs than is the general vocabulary, though the semantic domain of magic deploys French strategies of derivation and composition in interesting ways. In the Dialectology section, Fattier takes on the oldest text in any Atlantic FBC, La passion de notre Seigneur selon saint Jean en langage nègre. Despite its antiquity, the text has only been known to the scholarly community since 1994, and its language is variously seen as a hybrid of different dialects, or as the precursor of a modern FBC. Fattier argues convincingly that it is an early stage of northern Haitian Creole. Le Dû and Brun-Trigaud, authors of a recent linguistic atlas of the Lesser Antilles, report on a linguistic survey of the creoles of Guadeloupe, Dominique, Martinique, and Saint Lucia, with sixty-one color maps showing the dialectal distribution of various phonological forms and lexical items. In the Historical Sociolinguistics section, Ferreira catalogs work done on...