De La Langue Francoyse Research Articles

Le vocabulaire de l’architecture dans le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762) : après les traces de Nicot

Studies on the lexicographical treatment of technical architectural terms in general language dictionaries are scarce. Our article shows how architectural technical terms were treated by the French Academy in the fourth edition of its dictionary (1762) through the study of a series of specific terms related to architecture and building. Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (1606) is considered to be one of the first dictionaries to have identified a large number of architectural terms. In this work, we trace the presence or absence of these terms in the Dictionary of the French Academy (1762) and study whether they have become part of the common language or whether they continue to be regarded as specialized terms. Les études sur le traitement lexicographique des termes techniques d'architecture dans les dictionnaires de langue générale sont rares. Notre article montre comment les termes techniques concernant l’architecture ont été traités par l'Académie française dans la quatrième édition de son dictionnaire (1762) à travers l'étude d'une série de termes spécifiques liés à l'architecture et au bâtiment. Le Thresor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne de Jean Nicot (1606) est considéré comme l'un des premiers dictionnaires à avoir identifié un grand nombre de termes architecturaux. Dans cet ouvrage, nous retraçons la présence ou l'absence de ces termes dans le Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1762) et étudions s'ils sont devenus partie intégrante de la langue commune ou s'ils continuent à être considérés comme des termes spécialisés.

Reflections of an Italianist

What are studies in this day and age, and where does my own specialization, Renaissance Italian, fit into them? Has Italian ever really fit in that well--particularly given the fact that in large departments, the Italianists are almost always outnumbered by those who teach Spanish and French (if not Portuguese)? And should Italian fit by virtue of its distinctiveness--or by what Paul Ricoeur, in an essay to which I will return, calls its comparabilities? (1) My brief intervention will suggest that one way to think about Romance and the often vexed relationships among them to invoke translation: particularly the history of translation, and particularly history that focuses on the moment when the vernaculars as we now know them finally established their hegemony over Latin in the sixteenth century. (2) I will confine my remarks to thinking about Italian and French, although the work of Paul Julian Smith among others on Spanish vital to filling out picture important for our understanding as to where our increasingly threatened language and literature departments have come from, and where they are heading. For those departments to remain vital, they must explore ways of interconnecting with one another--both to understand what their historical relationships have been and to make the case for their necessity in the future. (3) This why we might consider translation studies as way to rethink relationships among national languages. Translation has usually been peripheral to the university. Translations don't count because they're not reflective of original work, while translation studies bas been perceived, particularly in the United States, as too technical to be scholarly or humanistic field. Many of out best translators have not been affiliated with universities: William Weaver, Electa Arenal, Edith Grossman, and Michael Moore, to name just few. And yet the study of translation's history, its theory as well as its practice, vital to learning about the particularities of language--and to impressing upon students the importance of thinking about the way that works. John Dryden's claim that he never paid so much attention to Latin as to when he was trying to put it into English epitomizes what the process of translation does: it forces one to consider both the specificities of individual languages and the relationships between them--and to clarify the extent to which one can, and cannot, be translated into another. To this extent, translation forms the basis for truly comparative understanding not only of languages, but of literatures. The early modern period witnessed the triumph of the vernacular as literary across eastern as well as western Europe, inclusive of the Romance to which Romanic Review has been dedicated since its inception. The ensuing contest among different vernaculars as to which would take the place vacated by Latin felt in variety of ways throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggle for linguistic primacy. Dryden's sensitivities to Latin may seem to be the reverse of what we find in one of the earliest reflections on translation and its relationship to emergent vernaculars in sixteenth-century Europe: Joachim du Bellay Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse. As Du Bellay's most recent translator, Richard Helgerson, has put it, during the prosperous 1540s, Du Bellay wanted a rebirth of the Roman Empire with France as the new Rome. (4) In this text devoted to exploring the role of the vernacular in newly-constituted Europe, Du Bellay first laments the effects of Babel and claims that it too bad that there isn't just one language: it takes so many years pour apprendre des motz! (349). But he then stumbles onto the key: to translate everything into French, turning it into the vehicle through which one can learn all things. Envisioning return to the day when Latin was the universal language, Du Bellay predicts that King Francois I will be like Augustus and that French will become like Latin--which in any case, Du Bellay observes, is already dead (352). …

Imitation, Language and Nation in Joachim Du Bellay's Deffence

Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549) not only testifies to the poet’s patriotism, but also entails an intricate reflection on language and nation which complicates and raises difficult questions about their relationship. This article demonstrates how Du Bellay conceptualizes language and nation as imaginary entities shifting between culture and nature by creating a deep and broad analogy between the two. The ultimately indeterminate origin of language poses the serious quandary of the nation’s lack of origin and originality. Du Bellay resolves this and other issues in part by deploying the fruit and the graft as tropes of both culture and nature. Through these metaphors he indirectly proposes the literary practice of imitation as a general cultural procedure to transform what is foreign into the national, even though the nature of imitation remains as obscure as the origin of language and nation.

A Latin Legacy in Louise Labe: Imitation of Tibullus 1.2.89-94

Louise Labe (ca. 1520 to 1566) published her works in Lyon in 1555, only few years after the appearance of Du Bellay's La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549), in which the author strongly urges poets to imitate classical models in order that French literature may become as illustrious as the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome. (1) Du Bellay specifically advocates writing elegies a l'exemple d'un Ovide, d'un Tibule [sic] et d'un Properce (207). (2) Sixteenth-century French poetry written by men provides ample evidence that they did indeed imitate the classics. Du Bellay does not, however, address the dilemma presented to any female poet aspiring to follow his directives. The rhetorical doctrine of imitatio, as Struever points out, produced pronouncements on the relation of the author's 'self' to the continuing stream of past literary expression (145), but how was female writer of erotic poetry to meet the expectation that one imitate Roman poetry if almost all Roman poetry was written by men? (3) Labe faced the challenge of inserting herself into long tradition of male-authored love poetry. Her debt to Italian sources has been well documented, but surprisingly little has been written about her debt to the Roman elegists. (4) There is abundant evidence both that Labe knew Latin (see Appendix 1) and that the text of Tibullus was easily available in Lyon at the time at which she was writing her poetry (see Appendix 2). Labe makes extensive use of the conventions employed by Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, the three foremost Roman elegists. Throughout her poetry and her prose, she engages in contaminatio, what Greene calls the eclectic mingling of heterogeneous allusions, which includes the use of conventional topoi that might or might not have recalled familiar author but that had been reused over and over by many authors (39). She rarely engages in close imitation of particular classical text. A striking example of this phenomenon, however, is to be found near the end of her first elegy. In passage of fourteen lines, she effects an imitation, analyzed here for the first time, of six consecutive lines of Tibullus: At tu, qui laetus rides mala nostra, caueto: Mox tibi non uanus saeuiet ipse Deus. Vidi ego qui iuuenum miseros lusisset amores Post Veneris uinclis subdere colla senem Et sibi blanditias tremula componere uoce Et manibus canas fingere uelle comas. (Tibullus, 1.2.89-94) (5) But you who happily laugh at my (6) troubles, look out: Soon upon you, not ineffectually, the god himself will vent his rage. I have seen one who had made fun of the pitiable love affairs of the young Afterwards place his neck under the chains of Venus when he was old And compose to himself ingratiating little speeches in tremulous voice And be eager to arrange his gray hair with his hands. (7) Donques celui lequel d'amour esprise Pleindre me voit, que point il ne mesprise Mon triste deuil: Amour, peut estre, en brief En son endroit n'aparoitra moins grief. Telle j'ay vu qui avoit en jeunesse Blame Amour: apres en sa vieillesse Bruler d'ardeur, et pleindre tendrement L'apre rigueur de son tardif tourment. Alors de fard et eau continuelle Elle essayoit se faire venir belle, Voulant chasser le ride labourage, Que l'aage avoit grave sur son visage. Sur son chef gris elle avoit empruntee Quelque perruque, et assez mal antee. (Labe, Elegy 1.91-104) (8) Many male writers have used the image of an old woman's faded beauty to exhort female addressee to yield to male speaker's demands before time takes away both youth and beauty. Famous examples of this carpe diem topos (9) include Ronsard's ode Mignonne, allon voir si la rose (5:196-7) and his sonnet Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir la chandelle (17, pt. 2:265-6). In Labe's poem, however, when female speaker uses the image of an old woman attempting to make herself desirable when it is too late, she does so in the context of an appeal to the ladies of Lyon not to criticize her for having loved. …

:John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist: A Pioneer in Vernacular Language Description

The year 1530 saw the publication in London of one of the most remarkable books of the Renaissance: Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse. The author of this vast work of over 1,000 pages was John Palsgrave, graduate of Cambridge, Paris, and Oxford, priest and chaplain to Henry VIII, and tutor to the King's sister. His book is the first dictionary of two neighbouring vernaculars, English and French, and simultaneously the first contrastive grammar of the two languages. It reveals him as a pioneering and exceptional linguist with a sharply observant and analytical mind, who goes far beyond the traditional application of Latin grammar-writing to two living languages. The book is also remarkable for the liveliness with which Palsgrave discusses and illustrates the social aspects of language use, dialectal variation, and the vigour of colloquial idiom. In this uniquely detailed study Stein sets the author and his book in their wider sociohistorical context and discusses Palsgrave's syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses, some of which anticipate the findings of modern linguistics by over 400 years.

Bilingual Dictionaries in an English Renaissance Knowledge Base

The Renaissance Knowledge Base is a computer-searchable kernel library of electronic texts, a text database for literary and historical studies, for the period 1485-1640. It consists of literature by major authors as well as prose 'reference' books including scripture, sermons, chronicles, encyclopedias, legal works and dictionaries. The five principal bilingual dictionaries will be John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530), Sir Thomas Elyot's first Latin-English dictionary (1538), Thomas Thomas' Dictionarium linguae latinae et anglicanae (1587), Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English tongues (1611) and John Florio's Italian-English A worlde of wordes (1611). The tagging system employed derives from the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines of 1990 (ed. Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard), which are based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), an ISO standard. In this paper I describe some differences between COCOA-style encoding and TEI/SGML-style encoding, specifically as these relate to the tagging of Palsgrave's and Cotgrave's texts, and to the kind of text-retrieval inquiries that the tagging system will facilitate.

Les Vers lascifs d'Horace: Arcadelt's Latin Chansons

Research Article| July 01 1996 Les Vers lascifs d'Horace: Arcadelt's Latin Chansons Kate van Orden Kate van Orden Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1996) 14 (3): 338–369. https://doi.org/10.2307/764061 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kate van Orden; Les Vers lascifs d'Horace: Arcadelt's Latin Chansons. Journal of Musicology 1 July 1996; 14 (3): 338–369. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/764061 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Musicology Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1996 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Strategies of Appropriation in Speroni and Du Bellay

T HE CICERONIAN CONTROVERSIES of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a constricting effect on the neoclassical canon, yet paradoxically they opened up the possibility of new canons, as humanistic principles were extended to vernacular writing and canons of works written in the modern languages began to take shape. In Sperone degli Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue (1542), various speakers discuss the relative merits of Greek, Latin, fourteenth-century Tuscan, and contemporary Italian dialects as suitable media for literary composition; all the speakers concede that these represent separate literary systems, between which there is little if any relationship. On the other hand, Joachim Du Bellay in the Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549) sees all literature as a polysystem, and advocates an active relationship between the classical, Italian, and French canons through the appropriation of ancient and foreign works for new compositions in French.

John Palsgrave’s ‘Lesclaircissement De La Langue Francoyse’ (1530)

Summary John Palsgrave, an Englishman, wrote the first detailed grammar of the French language, Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse (1530). This work is remarkable not only for its length but also for its quality. Palsgrave wrote a pedagogical text for his English readers, using a system which leads the learner from the development of passive skills (interpretation, both oral andintellectual, of written texts) to the development of active skills (expressing oneself in the target language). At the same time, he responded to the French Humanist desire to bring the vernacular languages under the control of ‘rules certayne’. In its grammatical method, Lesclaircissement exemplifies a stage in the development of Humanist grammar, as the Renaissance grammarians moved from a method based on forms to a more abstract representation of linguistic facts. As such, Palsgrave’s work stands half-way between the early Renaissance calques upon Donatus and the later excursions into logical grammar. In phonetics, Palsgrave’s attention to detail leads him to a clear recognition of the importance of nasal vowels in French (even if his articulatory description of the nasal vowels leaves something to be desired). In phonology, he aspires to a greater level of abstraction through his attempts to link liaison and elision phenomena to French phonotactics. In morpho-syntax, he uses the notion of perfection in language to provide an underlying structure in which the syntactic and the logical structure are explicit. He then explains how the languages in question ‘circumlocute’ to express the underlying structures. In this way, he prefigures the work of Meigret in French grammar. For all of his accomplishments, however, Palsgrave’s work had little influence on his successors. It had only one printing of 750 copies, and Palsgrave himself restricted the sales. Still, the work deserves our attention because of its wealth of detail and because of the method it uses.

The Theory of English Lexicography, 1530-1791

This book serves as a welcome addition to the better known English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604-1755 , by Starnes a Noyes (new edition published by Benjamins 1991). Whereas Starnes a Noyes describe the history of English lexicography as an evolutionary progress-by-accumulation process, Professor Hayashi focuses on issues of method and theory, starting with John Palsgrave’s Lesclarissement de la langue francoyse (1530), to John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791). This book also includes a detailed discussion of Dr. Johnson’s influential Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

Rebec, Fiddle and Crowd in England

As very few authentic mediaeval instruments remain, our knowledge of them comes mainly from pictures, references in literature and expense accounts, and from surviving folk instruments. The degree of caution required can be assessed by comparing the terminology of mediaeval word-lists. The Latin word ‘fidis’, for example, denotes a harp-string in the Catholicon Anglicum and a fiddler in an anonymous nominale, while ‘fidecen’ [fidicen] is a harper in the former manuscript and a fiddler in the Promptorium Parvulorum. The word ‘viella’, normally taken to mean a fiddle, appears also in the Promptorium as a lute. John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530) adds confusion to the point of ridicule.

Music for Poetry in France (1550–1580)

The year 1549 is a familiar one to all those interested in sixteenth-century French poetry because it marks the date of publication of the Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse which stands as a sort of manifesto of the nascent Pléiade. In this document of Italian inspiration Du Bellay repudiated most of the indigenous poetic forms in favor of the classical ode and eclogue and the Petrarchan sonnet. In the second part of the work he exhorted his young poet thus: ‘Chante moy ces odes incongnues encor’ de la Muse Francoyse, d'un luc, bien accordé au son de la lyre Grecque et Romaine’ (II, iv).