Jean de Joinville and the Old French rhotic consonant
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Peter Chekin [1]
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[1] Paris 12 Val de Marne University
Paris 12 Val de Marne University
París, Francia
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- Localización: Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, ISSN-e 1865-9063, ISSN 0049-8661, Vol. 134, Nº 4, 2018, págs. 985-1007
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Based on textual evidence from Jean de Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis, this article argues that the Old French rhotic consonant /r/ had a dorsal pronunciation for at least some groups of medieval Francophones. This argument counters the prevailing view that medieval French /r/ was uniformly apical, and that the now-standard dorsal pronunciation only emerged in the early modern period. The article then develops the hypothesis that dorsal /r/ came into Old French as a result of Germanic influence, and not as a spontaneous development. For this purpose, it first surveys the current state of the debate about the origins of dorsal /r/ in the Germanic languages and evaluates the merits of its principal arguments in the light of Joinville’s testimony. The article then advances a sociolinguistic argument in favor of the Germanic-origins hypothesis. Using the available evidence for the interactions between Germanic- and Romance-speakers at the dawn of the written French language, it proposes that Carolingian-era nobles who were native speakers of Franconian dialects brought this pronunciation of /r/ into Old French, and that this sound subsequently persisted in some Old French aristocratic speech as part of a prestige accent.
