The Story of French (4 page)

Gallo-Roman went on to have more lasting power than the Roman Empire, which crumbled in the fifth century
CE
. Germanic “barbarians” (a Greek term referring to peoples who don’t speak Greek; any other language sounded like “bar-bar” to them) had already been invading Gaul for a century. Tribes including the Wisigoths, the Franks, the Burgundes and the Vikings all settled in different areas of France, where they inter-married with the inhabitants. Curiously, although the invaders left important traces of their language wherever they settled, they all picked up the local Gallo-Roman dialect. This created a galaxy of different dialects across what would become French territory, all of which shared many words and characteristics. The last barbarian invaders, the Vikings, spoke Norse, and were called Norsemen or Normans. At the beginning of the tenth century they settled around the mouth of the Seine, where they established the powerful Duchy of Normandy. Like other invaders, the Norsemen were soon speaking a Gallo-Roman dialect, and Norse donated only a few sea terms to modern French, including
crabe
(crab),
homard
(lobster) and
vague
(wave). But the Normans would have a profound impact on the future of French, thanks to a Norseman who would conquer England.

Of all the invaders, it was the Franks who had the greatest impact on the evolution of French, at least inside France. This tribe from northern Germany filled the power vacuum left by the crumbling Roman Empire. In 430 the Franks created a federation they called Francia, in today’s Belgium. After the sack of Rome in 476, they moved into the province of Gaul, establishing themselves around Lutetia (now Paris). Under king Clovis I, the Franks seized large sections of southern France and Spain, subdued rival tribes and consolidated their control all over Gaul. Clovis founded a dynasty that lasted three centuries. In French political mythology he is considered the first king of France, and many French kings who followed him used a modern variant of his name—Louis. The political influence of the Franks would rise and fall, but even so it lasted seven centuries.

The Franks, like all the other invaders, quickly picked up Gallo-Roman, although the Frankish kings remained bilingual (in German) until at least the tenth century. Because of their political power they contributed more words to modern French than any of the other Germanic invaders. Roughly ten percent of modern French words come from Frankish, including words describing home life, clothing, war and emotions, such as
fauteuil
(armchair),
gant
(glove),
robe
(dress),
champion, guerre
(war),
muraille
(wall),
falaise
(cliff),
émoi
(emotion),
honte
(shame) and
orgueil
(pride). Although eighty percent of the words in modern French have Latin or Gallo-Roman roots, the Frankish influence explains why French went on to become the most Germanic of Latin-based languages. The Franks also created a strong “brand”—until the tenth century the king in Paris was called King of the Franks. Germans to this day call France
Frankreich
(empire of the Franks). Over the centuries the language of the Franks gradually came to be known as Françoys.

All languages have three parts: phonetics (pronunciation), grammar and a lexicon (vocabulary), and each part changes constantly. The lexicon changes the most quickly because of exposure to other languages and because of erosion (words tend to lose sounds or syllables), while pronunciation and grammar evolve more slowly. Because of their relative stability, grammar and phonetics form the skeleton of a language. It was Frankish influence on the Latin spoken in Gaul that gave it a new grammatical and phonetic skeleton, making it distinct from Latin (Italian, Spanish and Romanian became distinct much later). Linguists have found convincing evidence that, by the eighth century, even the Latin-speaking clergy in France were speaking a new language. In that century (the exact date is unknown), some monks in Picardy produced a small glossary, known to posterity as the
Gloses
of Reichenau, which translated some 1,300 Latin words into the vernacular, which had little to do with Latin. The word for ewe appears as
berbice,
a term much closer to the modern French
brebis
than the classic Latin
ovis.
The liver was called
ficato,
a word closer to the French
foie
that had very little resemblance to the Latin
jecur.
By then nobody said
forum
(market),
arena
(sand),
liberi
(children) or
uvas
(grapes), but
mercatum, sabulo, infantes
and
racemos.

It didn’t take long for a new label to be applied to this proto-French. In 813 the Council of Tours encouraged priests to preach in
rusticam romanam linguam
(the rustic Roman language). It was the first clear indication that people outside of the Church spoke not Latin, but
Roman.
In English this language is often referred to as Romanic and more generally as Romance, derived from
romanz,
as it was spelled in Romance. The term actually applied to all the Latin-based languages being spoken in France at the time. They are also called Gallo-Romance languages to distinguish them from the Romance languages of Spain, Italy and Romania (Basque and Breton do not fall into this category).

The first complete text to appear in French Romance was
Les serments de Strasbourg
(the Oaths of Strasbourg), a treaty struck between two grandsons of the Frankish Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (742–814), Louis the German and Charles the Bald, in 842. One version of the text is in Romance, the other is in a German vernacular called Francique. According to the treaty, Louis took his oath in Romance in front of his brother’s men, who spoke Romance, while Charles made the same pledge to Louis’s men in Francique. However, since the document that survives is a transcription of the original document made a century later, no one knows for sure what the Romance version actually looked like. A later Romance text, the
Cantilène de Sainte-Eulalie
(a twenty-nine-verse lyrical poem about the saint’s martyrdom, dated 880 or 881), is a more reliable example of Romance.

When we compared the two texts, we were struck by the differences between them. The
Serments de Strasbourg
is written in language that is diplomatic and official, and the Latin influence is clear. It takes a specialist to recognize that the sentence “
In o quid il mi altresi frazet
” (“under the condition that he does the same to me”) is not Latin. However, some sentences taken from the
Cantilène
are almost intelligible to modern readers of French:

Buona pulcella fut eulalie.

Bel auret corps bellezour anima.

Voldrent la veintre li deo inimi.

Voldrent la faire diaule servir.

Eulalie was a virtuous maiden.

She had a beautiful body and a soul even more beautiful.

God’s enemies wanted to conquer her,

wanted to have her serve the devil.
¹

Despite their differences, both texts show clear signs that Romance had grown a new linguistic skeleton and was no longer Latin. The main change was the erosion of the system of inflection. Inflection involves changing the end of a noun to show its function in the sentence—a feature typical of Latin and Old English that is still used in modern Russian and German.
Rosa
(rose, in Latin) is a subject, but
rosam
is a direct object, and the endings reflect these functions no matter where the words fall in the sentence. In all, Latin nouns have six inflected cases that correspond to the six functions of a word in a sentence (subject, addressee, direct object, possessive, indirect object and adverbial). In ninth-century Romance the inflections were simplified; only two cases survived, one for the subject and the other for the object. The name Romance, for example, was written as
romanz
when it was a subject and
romanans
when it was an object.

This erosion of the inflection system did not end there, and during the ensuing centuries French nouns lost their variety of cases. The position of words in a sentence became the primary way of marking their grammatical functions—the subject usually comes before the verb, and the object after the verb. However, modern French vocabulary has retained some traces of the old case system. For example, the French pronoun
me
was the accusative (object form) of the Latin
ego
(I). Modern English has retained even more features of the old inflection system. The apostrophe
S
—as in “my father’s”—is a hangover from the genitive (possessive) case in Latin. And
who, whom, whose
and
whence
come from cases in Old English or Germanic languages and are still used as such today.
Whom
and
whose
are the accusative and genitive cases of
who
(nominative); and
whence
is the dative of
when
.

By and large, French got rid of most of those complications over the years, although it did develop some of its own. The progressive erosion of the Latin inflection system explains why French articles multiplied at the same time. In Latin the word endings varied not only according to sentence function, but also according to gender and number. When cases disappeared, speakers needed new markers to indicate gender and number, so they created definite articles—
li, lo
and
la—
and indefinite articles—
un, une, uns, unes, des—
features that were totally absent from Latin.

By the tenth century France was a patchwork of duchies, marches, counties and baronies (the estates of different orders of nobles) where a galaxy of vernaculars was spoken that mixed Latin, Frankish and other Germanic languages. By the fourteenth century, Romance dialects belonged to two broad categories. Those in which “yes” was pronounced
oc
—mostly south of the Loire River—were called
langues d’oc
(
oc
languages). Those in which speakers said
oïl
for “yes”—in the north—were called
langues d’oïl,
a term which came to be used interchangeably with Françoys.
Oïl
and
oc
are both derivatives of the Latin
hoc
(this, that), which at the time was used to say yes. In the south they simply chopped off the
h.
In the north, for some reason,
hoc
was reduced to a simple
o,
and qualifiers were added—
o-je, o-nos, o-vos
for “yes for me,” “yes for us” and “yes for you.” This was complicated, so speakers eventually settled for the neutral
o-il—
“yes for that.” The term was used in the dialects of Picardy, Normandy, Champagne and Orléans. Other important
langues d’oïl
were Angevin, Poitevin and Bourguignon, spoken in Anjou, Poitiers and Burgundy, which were considerably farther south of Paris. Scholars debate who created the designations
langues d’oïl
and
langues d’oc.
The poet Dante Alighieri, in his
De vulgari eloquentia
of 1304, was one of the first to introduce the term
langue d’oc,
opposing it to the
langue d’oïl
and the
langue de si
(Romance from Italy). A fifth important
langue d’oïl
was Walloon, the dialect of the future Belgium.

The
langues d’oc
attained their golden age in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when groups of wandering musicians, or troubadours, travelled from city to city spreading a new form of sung poem that extolled the ideal of courtly love, or
fin’amor.
This new poetry was very different from the cruder epic poems of the north, the
chansons de geste,
and it enjoyed great literary prestige that boosted the influence of two southern rulers, the Count of Toulouse and the Duke of Aquitaine. Even many Italian courts adopted the
langue d’oc,
which is also known today as Occitan. Wandering poets of the north, the
trouvères
of Champagne, also borrowed and popularized the song-poems of the south.

The influence of the
langues d’oc
and
d’oïl
produced a situation in which French had started exporting itself even before it had become a fully developed language with a coherent writing system. Between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, Romance impressed itself on Europe as the language of worldly business, helping to relegate Latin to the religious sphere, although the latter did remain a language of science and philosophy for many more centuries. In the Mediterranean region, fishermen, sailors and merchants used a rudimentary version of
langue d’oc
mixed with Italian that people called the
lingua franca
(“Frankish language”), and over time this spoken language soaked up influences from Italian, Spanish and Turkish. (Today a lingua franca is any common language used in economics, diplomacy or science, in a context where it is not a mother tongue.)

The Mediterranean
lingua franca
never evolved into anyone’s mother tongue, which is why there are very few written traces of it. A rare rendition of it appears in a seventeenth-century comedy by the French playwright Molière, who had been a wandering actor before he entered Louis XIV’s Court. In his
Le bourgeois gentilhomme
(
The Would-Be Gentleman
), Molière creates the character of a fake Turk who speaks in
lingua franca
(for obvious comical effect):

Se ti sabir, / Ti respondir;