The French Language In The Seventeenth Century

The sixty French texts edited here are all direct commentaries, by contemporary authors, on the French language in the 17th century. By this time, French had begun to assert its independence; in its written and printed form it was being used for a wide variety of literary, technical and administrative purposes. Its practitioners not only successfully challenged the hitherto dominant position of Latin, but also began, for the first time, to discuss and analyse for its own sake the language which was now their preferred medium for expression -- hence, in the first half of the seventeenth century, a growing number of publications on the nature and characteristics of French. The texts demonstrate the sustained critical preoccupationwith the welfare of the French language in the 17th century, and illustrate the various ways in which the writers of the age contributed to its development as an instrument of literary expression and social intercourse.

This well-established and popular book provides students with all the linguistic background they need for studying any period of French literature. For the second edition the text has been revised and updated throughout, and the two final chapters on contemporary French, and its position as a world language, have been completely rewritten. Starting with a brief description of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Gaul, and the earliest recorded forms of French, Peter Rickard traces the development of the language through the later Middle Ages and Renaissance to show how it became standardized in a near modern form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This new history of the French language allows the reader to see how the language has evolved for themselves. It combines texts and extracts with a readable and detailed commentary allowing the language to be viewed both synchronically and diachronically. Core texts range from the ninth century to the present day highlight central features of the language, whilst a range of shorter texts illustrate particular points. The inclusion of non-literary, as well as literary texts serves to illustrate some of the many varieties of French whether in legal, scientific, epistolatory, administrative or liturgical or in more popular domains, including attempts to represent spoken usage. This is essential reading for the undergraduate student of French.

This book provides a systematic study of sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a range of case studies, Wendy Ayres-Bennett makes available data about linguistic variation in this period, showing the wealth and variety of language usage at a time that is considered to be the most 'standardising' in the history of French. Variation is analysed in terms of the speaker's 'pre-verbal constitution' - such as gender, age and socio-economic status - or by the medium, register or genre used. As well as examining linguistic variation itself, the book also considers the fundamental methodological issues that are central to all socio-historical linguistic accounts and, more importantly, addresses the question of what the appropriate sources are for linguists taking a socio-historical approach. In each chapter, the case studies present a range of phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical issues, which pose different methodological questions for sociolinguists and historical linguists alike.

Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores the function and meaning of airs in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society's cultivation of chaste love, strict gender roles, and restrained discourse.

Excerpt from Old France in the New World: Quebec in the Seventeenth Century Should the above be the fate of my book, it is unkind to bury the names of friends with my own. Yet I cannot refrain from thanking the Abbe Scott, not only for permitting me tocopy maps from his interesting history of the Parish of St. Foy, but even lending me the block of the Portrait of Com mander Sillery Colonel Neilson for supplying more than one of my illustrations-from his valuable collection of Jesuit memorabilia, secured by his great-grandfather when the Jesuit Estates were sold in 1800; Mr. George Iles and Mr. W. D. Le Sueur for reading my proof sheets; and the Burrows Com pany for being willing to strike 03 copies of some of the inter esting illustrations made for their edition of the Jesuit Rela tions. In my book there are doubtless avoidable and unavoid able mistakes, and many of my friends will charge me with errors of judgment and Opinion. I cannot claim to have had access to unpublished documents, but I have tried to derive my facts and my inspirations from original published sources. The history of Canada was, during the period we have te viewed, indissolubly associated with that of Quebec, and it con tinned so to be during the remaining half century of the French Re'gime. Such books as Sir Gilbert Parker's In Old Quebec, and the more critical description of the city, Quebec Under Two Flags, by Messrs. Doughty and Dionne, blend of neces sity the history of the country with that of the old town well into the period when the possession of Canada passed beyond the control of France. These books and others in the English language tell the story concisely and in a small compass, but none of them are written with the grace and literary skill which distinguish the many memoirs and histories written by French and French Canadian writers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.