Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; Modern French ancien français) was the Gallo-Romance dialect continuum spoken from the 9th century to the 14th century. In the 14th century, these dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl, contrasting with the langue d'oc or Occitan language in the south of France. The mid-14th century is taken as the transitional period to Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance, specifically based on the dialect of the Île-de-France region.
The place and area where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the historical Kingdom of France and its vassals (including parts of the Angevin Empire, which during the 12th century remained under Anglo-Norman rule), and Burgundy, Lorraine and Savoy to the east (corresponding to modern north-central France, Belgian Wallonia, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy), but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England, Sicily and the Crusader states as the language of a feudal elite and of commerce.
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Areal and dialectal divisions
The areal of Old French in contemporary terms corresponded to the northern parts of the Kingdom of France (including Anjou and Normandy, which in the 12th century were ruled by the Plantagenet kings of England), Upper Burgundy and the duchy of Lorraine. The Norman dialect was also spread to England and Ireland, and during the crusades, Old French was also spoken in the Kingdom of Sicily, and in the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Levant.
As part of the emerging Gallo-Romance dialect continuum, the langues d'oïl were contrasted with the langue d'oc (the emerging Occitano-Romance group, at the time also called Provençal, adjacent to the Old French areal in the south-west, and with the Gallo-Italic ("Old Italian") group to the south-east. The Franco-Provençal group developed in Upper Burgundy, sharing features with both French and Provençal; it may have begun to diverge from the langues d'oïl as early as the 9th century, and is attested as distinct variant of French from the 12th century.
Dialects or variants of Old French included:
- the Burgundian of Burgundy, then an independent duchy whose capital was at Dijon;
- the Picard language of Picardy, whose principal cities were Calais and Lille. It was said that the Picard language began at the east door of Notre-Dame de Paris, so far-reaching was its influence;
- Old Norman, spoken in Normandy, whose principal cities were Caen and Rouen. The Norman conquest of England brought many Norman-speaking aristocrats into the British Isles. Most of the older Norman (sometimes called "French") words in the English language reflect the influence of this variety of Oïl language, which became a conduit for the introduction into the Anglo-Norman realm, as did Anglo-Norman control of Anjou and Gascony and other continental possessions. The Anglo-Norman language reflected a shared culture on both sides of the English Channel. Ultimately, this language declined and fell, becoming Law French, a jargon spoken by lawyers, which was used in English law until the reign of Charles II. Norman, however, still survives in Normandy and the Channel Islands as a regional language;
- the Walloon language, centered around Namur in present-day Wallonia;
- the Gallo language of Brittany, the Romance language of the Duchy of Brittany;
- the Lorrain, the Romance language of the Duchy of Lorraine.
Some modern languages are derived from Old French dialects other than the Classical French based on the Île-de-France dialect. They include Angevin, Berrichon, Bourguignon-Morvandiau, Champenois, Franc-Comtois, Gallo, Lorrain, Norman, Picard, Poitevin, Saintongeais, Walloon.
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History
Evolution from Vulgar Latin
Beginning with Plautus's time (254-184 b.c.), Classical Latin's phonological structure changed, eventually yielding Vulgar Latin, the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire. This latter form differed strongly from its classical counterpart in phonology; it was the ancestor of the Romance languages, including Old French.
Non-Latin influences
Gaulish
Some Gaulish words influenced Vulgar Latin and, through this, other Romance languages. For example, classical Latin equus was uniformly replaced in Vulgar Latin by caballus 'nag, work horse', derived from Gaulish caballos (cf. Welsh ceffyl, Breton kefel), giving Modern French cheval, Occitan caval (chaval), Catalan cavall, Spanish caballo, Portuguese cavalo, Italian cavallo, Romanian cal, and, by extension, English cavalry. An estimated 200 words of Gaulish etymology survive in modern French, for example chêne 'oak tree' and charrue 'plough'.
Despite attempts to explain some phonetic changes being caused by a Gaulish substrate, only one of them is certain, because this fact is clearly attested in the Gaulish-language epigraphy on the pottery found at la Graufesenque (A.D. 1st century). There, the Greek word paropsid-es (written in Latin) appears as paraxsid-i. The consonant clusters /ps/ and /pt/ shifted to /xs/ and /xt/, e.g. Latin capsa > *kaxsa > caisse (? Italian cassa) or capt?vus > *kaxtivus > OF chaitif (mod. chétif; cf. Irish cacht 'servant'; ? Italian cattiv-ità, Portuguese "cativo", Spanish cautivo). This phonetic evolution is parallel to the shift of the Latin cluster /kt/ in Old French (Latin factum > fait, ? Italian fatto, Portuguese feito, Spanish hecho; or lactem* > lait, ? Italian latte, Portuguese leite, Spanish leche).
Frankish
The pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gaul in Late Antiquity was modified by the Old Frankish language, spoken by the Franks who settled in Gaul from the 5th century and conquered the entire Old French-speaking area by the 530s. The name français itself is derived from the name the Franks.
The Old Frankish language had a definitive influence on the birth of Old French, which partly explains why the earliest attested Old French documents are older than the earliest attestations in other Romance languages (e.g. Strasbourg Oaths, Sequence of Saint Eulalia). It is the result of an earlier gap created between Latin and the new language, which severed the intercomprehensibility between the two. The Old Low Franconian influence is also believed to be responsible for the differences between the langue d?oïl and the langue d?oc (Occitan), being that various parts of Northern France remained bilingual between Latin and Germanic for some time, and these areas correspond precisely to where the first documents in Old French were written. This Germanic language shaped the popular Latin spoken here and gave it a very distinctive identity compared to the other future Romance languages. The very first noticeable influence is the substitution of the Latin melodic accent by a Germanic stress and its result was diphthongization, differentiation between long and short vowels, the fall of the unaccentuated syllable and of the final vowels, e.g. Latin decimus, -a 'tenth' > OF disme > F dîme 'tenth' (> E dime; Italian decima, Portuguese décima, Spanish diezmo); VL dignitate > OF deintié (> E dainty. Italian degnità, Romanian demnitate); or VL catena > OF chaeine (> E chain. Occitan, Portuguese cadeia, Spanish cadena, Italian catena). Additionally, two phonemes that had long since died out in Vulgar Latin were reintroduced: [h] and [w] (> OF g(u)-, ONF w- cf. Picard w-), e.g. VL altu > OF halt 'high' (influenced by OLF *h?h ; ? Italian, Portuguese and Spanish alto, Occitan naut) ; L vespa > F guêpe, Picard wèpe, Wallon wèsse, all 'wasp' (influenced by OLF *wapsa ; ? Occitan vèspa, Italian and Portuguese vespa, Spanish avispa) ; L viscus > F gui 'mistletoe' (influenced by OLF *w?hsila 'morello' with analogous fruits, when they are not ripe; ? Occitan vesc, Italian vischio) ; LL vulpiculu 'fox kit' (from L vulpes 'fox') > OF golpilz, Picard woupil 'fox' (influenced by OLF *wulf 'wolf'; ? Occitan volpìlh, Old Italian volpiglio, Spanish vulpeja 'vixen'). On the opposite, the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words of Germanic origin borrowed from French or directly from Germanic retain /gw/ ~ /g/, e.g. It, Sp. guerra 'war'). In these examples, we notice a clear consequence of bilingualism, that sometimes even changed the first syllable of the Latin words. One example of a Latin word influencing an Old Low Franconian loan is framboise 'raspberry', from OF frambeise, from OLF *br?mbesi 'blackberry' (cf. Dutch braambes, braambezie; akin to German Brombeere, English dial. bramberry) blended with LL fraga or OF fraie 'strawberry', which explains the replacement [b] > [f] and in turn the final -se of framboise added to OF fraie to make freise, modern fraise (? Wallon frève, Romanian frag?, Romansh fraja, Italian fragola, fravola 'strawberry').
Pope (1934) estimated that perhaps still 15% of the vocabulary of modern French derives from Germanic sources (while the proportion was larger in Old French, because the French language borrowed heavily from Latin and Italian).
Earliest written Old French
At the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language (either Romance or Germanic), since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin.
The earliest documents said to be written in French - after the Reichenau and Kassel glosses (8th and 9th centuries) - are the Oaths of Strasbourg (treaties and charters into which King Charles the Bald entered in 842):
Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa...
(For the love of God and for the Christian people, and our common salvation, from this day forward, as God will give me the knowledge and the power, I will defend my brother Charles with my help in everything...)
The second-oldest document in Old French is the Eulalia sequence, which is important for linguistic reconstruction of Old French pronunciation due to its consistent spelling.
The royal House of Capet, founded by Hugh Capet in 987, inaugurated the development of northern French culture in and around Île-de-France, which slowly but firmly asserted its ascendency over the more southerly areas of Aquitaine and Tolosa (Toulouse). The Capetians' langue d'oïl, the forerunner of modern standard French, did not begin to become the common speech of all of France, however, until after the French Revolution.
Transition to Middle French
In the Late Middle Ages, the Old French dialects diverged into a number of distinct langues d'oïl, among which Middle French proper was the dialect of the Île-de-France region. During the Early Modern period, French now becomes established as the official language of the Kingdom of France throughout the realm, also including the langue d'oc-speaking territories in the south. It was only in the 17th to 18th centuries - with the development especially of popular literature of the Bibliothèque bleue - that a standardized Classical French spread throughout France alongside the regional dialects.
Literature
The material and cultural conditions in France and associated territories around the year 1100 triggered what Charles Homer Haskins termed the "Renaissance of the 12th century", resulting in a profusion of creative works in a variety of genres. Old French gives way to Middle French in the mid-14th century, paving the way for early French Renaissance literature of the 15th century.
The earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, but very few texts before the 11th century have survived. The first literary works written in Old French were saints' lives. The Canticle of Saint Eulalie, written in the second half of the 9th century, is generally accepted as the first such text.
At the beginning of the 13th century, Jean Bodel, in his Chanson de Saisnes, divided medieval French narrative literature into three subject areas: the Matter of France or Matter of Charlemagne; the Matter of Rome (romances in an ancient setting); and the Matter of Britain (Arthurian romances and Breton lais). The first of these is the subject area of the chansons de geste ("songs of exploits" or "songs of (heroic) deeds"), epic poems typically composed in ten-syllable assonanced (occasionally rhymed) laisses. More than one hundred chansons de geste have survived in around three hundred manuscripts. The oldest and most celebrated of the chansons de geste is The Song of Roland (earliest version composed in the late 11th century).
Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in his Girart de Vienne set out a grouping of the chansons de geste into three cycles: the Geste du roi centering on Charlemagne, the Geste de Garin de Monglane (whose central character was William of Orange), and the Geste de Doon de Mayence or the "rebel vassal cycle", the most famous characters of which were Renaud de Montauban and Girart de Roussillon. A fourth grouping, not listed by Bertrand, is the Crusade cycle, dealing with the First Crusade and its immediate aftermath.
Jean Bodel's other two categories--the "Matter of Rome" and the "Matter of Britain"--concern the French romance or roman. Around a hundred verse romances survive from the period 1150-1220. From around 1200 on, the tendency was increasingly to write the romances in prose (many of the earlier verse romances were adapted into prose versions), although new verse romances continued to be written to the end of the 14th century. The most important romance of the 13th century is the Romance of the Rose which breaks considerably from the conventions of the chivalric adventure story.
Medieval French lyric poetry was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence--including Toulouse, Poitiers, and the Aquitaine region--where langue d'oc was spoken (Occitan language); in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab world. The Occitan or Provençal poets were called troubadours, from the word trobar "to find, to invent". Lyric poets in Old French are called trouvères.
By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic (as well as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name) tendencies are apparent in the Roman de Fauvel in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church, filled with medieval motets, lais, rondeaux and other new secular forms of poetry and music (mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry, who would coin the expression ars nova to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age). The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chansons of the incipient Middle French period was Guillaume de Machaut.
Discussions about the origins of non-religious theater (théâtre profane) - both drama and farce--in the Middle Ages remain controversial, but the idea of a continuous popular tradition stemming from Latin comedy and tragedy to the 9th century seems unlikely. Most historians place the origin of medieval drama in the church's liturgical dialogues and "tropes". Mystery plays were eventually transferred from the monastery church to the chapter house or refectory hall and finally to the open air, and the vernacular was substituted for Latin. In the 12th century one finds the earliest extant passages in French appearing as refrains inserted into liturgical dramas in Latin, such as a Saint Nicholas (patron saint of the student clercs) play and a Saint Stephen play. An early French dramatic play is Le Jeu d'Adam (c. 1150) written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets with Latin stage directions (implying that it was written by Latin-speaking clerics for a lay public).
A large body of fables survive in Old French; these include (mostly anonymous) literature dealing with the recurring trickster character of Reynard the Fox. Marie de France was also active in this genre, producing the Ysopet (Little Aesop) series of fables in verse. Related to the fable was the more bawdy fabliau, which covered topics such as cuckolding and corrupt clergy. These fabliaux would be an important source for Chaucer and for the Renaissance short story (conte or nouvelle).
Phonology
Old French was constantly changing and evolving. However, the form in the late 12th century, as attested in a great deal of mostly poetic writings, can be considered standard. The writing system at this time was more phonetic than that used in most subsequent centuries. In particular, all written consonants (including final ones) were pronounced, except for s preceding non-stop consonants and t in et, and final e was pronounced [?]. The phonological system can be summarised as follows:
Consonants
Notes:
- The affricates /ts/, /dz/, /t?/, /d?/ became fricatives ([s], [z], [?], [?]) in Middle French. /ts/ was written as c, ç, -z, as in cent, chançon, priz ("a hundred, song, price"). /dz/ was written as -z-, as in doze "twelve".
- /?/ (l mouillé), as in conseil, travaillier ("advice, to work"), became /j/ in Modern French.
- /?/ appeared not only in the middle of a word, but also at the end, as in poing "hand". At the end of a word, /?/ was later lost, leaving a nasalized vowel.
- /h/ was found only in Germanic loanwords and was later lost (although it is cheshirized as the so-called aspirated h that blocks liaison). In native Latin words, /h/ was lost early on, as in om, uem, from Latin hom?.
- Intervocalic /d/ from both Latin /t/ and /d/ was lenited to [ð] in the early period (cf. contemporary Spanish: amado [a'maðo]). At the end of words it was also devoiced to [?]. In some texts it was sometimes written as dh or th (aiudha, cadhuna, Ludher, vithe). By 1100 it disappeared altogether.
Vowels
In Old French, the nasal vowels were not separate phonemes, but occurred as allophones of the oral vowels before a nasal consonant. This nasal consonant was fully pronounced; thus bon was pronounced [bõn] (Modern French [b??]). Nasal vowels were present even in open syllables before nasals, where Modern French has oral vowels, as in bone [bõn?] (Modern French bonne [b?n]).
Monophthongs
Notes:
- /o/ had formerly existed, but closed to /u/; it would later appear again when /aw/ monophthongized, and also when /?/ closed in certain positions (e.g. when followed by original /s/ or /z/, but not by /ts/, which later became /s/).
- /õ/ may have similarly been closed to /?/ in at least some dialects, given that it was borrowed into Middle English as /u:n/ > modern /a?n/ (Latin comput?re > OF conter > ME counten > ModE count; Latin rotundum > OF ront > ME, ModE round; Latin bonit?tem > OF bonté > ME bountee > ModE bounty). In any case, traces of such a change were erased in later stages of French when the close nasal vowels /? ? *?/ were opened to become /?? oe? ??/.
- /??/ may have existed in the unstressed third person plural verb ending -ent or it may have already passed to /?/; certainly in later French it was pronounced /?/.
Diphthongs and triphthongs
Notes:
- In Early Old French (up to about the mid-12th century), the spelling ?ai? represented a diphthong /aj/, instead of the later monophthong /?/, and ?ei? represented the diphthong /ej/, which merged with /oj/ in Late Old French (except when nasalized).
- In Early Old French the diphthongs described above as "rising" may have been falling diphthongs (/ie?/, /yj/, /ue?/). In earlier works with vowel assonance, the diphthong written ?ie? did not assonate with any pure vowels, suggesting that it cannot have simply been /je/.
- The pronunciation of the vowels written ?ue? and ?eu? is debated. In very early Old French, they represented (and were written as) /uo/, /ou/, and by Middle French, they had both merged as /ø ~ oe/, but it is unclear what the transitional pronunciations were.
- The diphthong ?iu? was rare, and had merged into ?ui? by Middle French (OF tiule > MF tuile 'tile'; OF siure > Late OF suire > MF suivre 'follow').
Hiatus
In addition to diphthongs, Old French had many instances of hiatus between adjacent vowels, due to loss of an intervening consonant. (Note that manuscripts generally do not distinguish hiatus from true diphthongs, but modern scholarly transcription indicates it with a diaeresis, as in modern French.) Examples:
- Latin aud?re > OF oïr /o'ir/ 'hear'
- Vulgar Latin *vid?tum > OF veü /v?'y/ 'seen'
- Latin r?g?nam > OF reïne /r?'in?/ 'queen'
- Latin p?g?nsem > OF païs /pa'is/ 'country'
- Latin augustum > OF aoust /a'ust/ 'August'
- Latin patellam > OF paele /pa'?l?/ 'pan'
- Late Latin quaternum > OF quaïer /kwa'jer/ 'booklet, quire'
- Late Latin aet?ticum > OF aage, eage /a'ad???/ ~ /?'ad???/ 'age'
Grammar
Nouns
Old French maintained a two-case system, with a nominative case and an oblique case, for longer than did some other Romance languages (e.g. Spanish and Italian). Case distinctions, at least in the masculine gender, were marked on both the definite article and on the noun itself. Thus, the masculine noun li veisins "the neighbour" (Latin vic?nus /w?'ki:n?s/ > Proto-Romance *vecínos /ve't?sinos/ > OF veisins /vej'z?ns/; Modern French le voisin /vwaz??/) was declined as follows:
In later Old French, these distinctions became moribund. As in most other Romance languages, it was the oblique case form that usually survived to become the modern French form: l'enfant "the child" represents the old oblique (Latin accusative ?nf?ntem); the OF nominative was li enfes (Latin ?nf?ns). But in some cases where there were significant differences between nominative and oblique forms (derived from Latin nouns with a stress shift between the nominative and other cases), the nominative form survives, or sometimes both forms survive with different meanings:
- Both OFr li sire, le sieur (Latin seiior, seii?rem) and le seignor (nom. +sendra; Latin senior, seni?rem) survive in the vocabulary of later French (e.g. messire, le sieur, seigneur) as different ways to refer to a feudal lord.
- Modern French soeur "sister" is the nominative form (OF suer < Latin nominative soror); the OF oblique form seror (< Latin accusative sor?rem) no longer survives.
- Modern French prêtre "priest" is the nominative form (OF prestre < presbyter); the OF oblique form prevoire, later provoire (< presbyterem) survives only in the Paris street name Rue des Prouvaires.
- Modern French indefinite pronoun on "one" continues OF nominative hom "man" (< hom?); homme "man" continues the oblique form (OF home < hominem).
In a few cases where the only distinction between forms was the nominative -s ending, the -s was preserved in spelling to distinguish otherwise homonymous words. An example is fils "son" (< Latin nominative f?lius), spelled as such to distinguish it from fil "wire". In this case, a later spelling pronunciation has resulted in the modern pronunciation /fis/ (earlier /fi/).
As in Spanish and Italian, the neuter gender was eliminated, and old neuter nouns became masculine. Some Latin neuter plurals were re-analysed as feminine singulars, though; for example, Latin gaudium was more widely used in the plural form gaudia, which was taken for a singular in Vulgar Latin, and ultimately led to modern French la joie, "joy" (feminine singular).
Nouns were declined in the following declensions:
Class I is derived from the Latin first declension. Class Ia mostly comes from feminine third declension nouns in Latin. Class II is derived from the Latin second declension. Class IIa generally stems from second-declension nouns ending in -er and from third-declension masculine nouns; note that in both cases, the Latin nominative singular did not end in -s, and this is preserved in Old French.
Those classes show various analogical developments, like -es from the accusative instead of -? (-e after a consonant cluster) in Class I nominative plural (Latin -ae), li pere instead of *li peres (Latin illi patres) in Class IIa nominative plural, modelled on Class II, etc.
Class III nouns show a separate form in the nominative singular that does not occur in any of the other forms. IIIa nouns ended in -?tor, -?t?rem in Latin, and preserve the stress shift; IIIb nouns likewise had a stress shift from -? to -?nem. IIIc nouns are an Old French creation and have no clear Latin antecedent. IIId nouns represent various other types of third-declension Latin nouns with stress shift or a change of consonant (soror, sor?rem; ?nf?ns, ?nf?ntem; presbyter, presbyterem; seiior, seii?rem; comes, comitem).
Regular feminine forms of masculine nouns are formed by adding an -e to the masculine stem, apart from when the masculine stem already ends in -e. For example, bergier (shepherd) becomes bergiere (Modern French berger and bergère).
Adjectives
Adjectives agree in terms of number, gender and case with the noun they are qualifying. Thus a feminine plural noun in the nominative case requires any qualifying adjectives to be feminine, plural and in the nominative case. For example, in femes riches, riche has to be in the feminine plural form.
Adjectives can be divided into three declensional classes:
- Class I corresponding roughly to Latin 1st- and 2nd-declension adjectives
- Class II corresponding roughly to Latin 3rd-declension adjectives
- Class III containing primarily the descendants of Latin synthetic comparative forms in -ior, -i?rem.
Class I adjectives have a feminine singular form (nominative and oblique) ending in -e. This class can be further subdivided into two subclasses based on the masculine nominative singular form. Class Ia adjectives have a masculine nominative singular ending in -s:
For Class Ib adjectives, the masculine nominative singular ends in -e, like the feminine. This subclass contains descendants of Latin 2nd and 3rd declension adjectives ending in -er in the nominative singular.
For Class II adjectives, the feminine singular is not marked by the ending -e.
An important subgroup of Class II adjectives are the present participial forms in -ant.
Class III adjectives exhibit stem alternation resulting from stress shift in the Latin imparisyllabic declension, and a distinct neuter form:
In later Old French, Classes II and III tended to be moved across to Class I, a change which was complete by Middle French. For this reason Modern French has only a single adjective declension, unlike most other Romance languages which have two or more.
Verbs
Verbs in Old French show the same extreme phonological deformations as other Old French words. Morphologically, however, Old French verbs are extremely conservative, preserving intact most of the Latin alternations and irregularities that had been inherited in Proto-Romance. Old French has much less analogical reformation than in Modern French, and significantly less than the oldest stages of other languages (e.g. Old Spanish), despite the fact that the various phonological developments in Gallo-Romance and Proto-French led to complex alternations in the majority of commonly-used verbs.
For example, the Old French verb laver "to wash" (Latin lav?re) is conjugated je lef, tu leves, il leve in the present indicative and je lef, tu les, il let in the present subjunctive, in both cases regular phonological developments from Latin indicative lav?, lav?s, lavat and subjunctive lavem, lav?s, lavet. This paradigm is typical in showing the phonologically regular but morphologically irregular alternations of most paradigms:
- The alternation je lef ~ tu leves is a regular result of final devoicing, triggered by loss of final /o/ but not /a/.
- The alternation laver ~ tu leves is a regular result of the diphthongization of stressed (but not unstressed) open syllable /a/ into /ae/ > /æ/ > /e/.
- The alternation je lef ~ tu les ~ il let in the subjunctive is a regular result of the simplification of the final clusters /fs/ and /ft/ resulting from loss of /e/ in final syllables.
Modern French, on the other hand, has je lave, tu laves, il lave in both indicative and subjunctive, reflecting significant analogical developments: analogical borrowing of unstressed vowel /a/; analogical -e in the first singular (from verbs like j'entre, where the -e is regular); and wholesale replacement of the subjunctive with forms modeled on -ir/-oir/-re verbs. All of these serve to eliminate the various alternations in the Old French verb paradigm. Even modern "irregular" verbs are not immune from analogy: For example, Old French je vif, tu vis, il vit (vivre "to live") has yielded to modern je vis, tu vis, il vit, eliminating the unpredictable -f in the first-person singular.
The simple past also shows extensive analogical reformation and simplification in Modern French as compared with Old French.
The Latin pluperfect was preserved in very early Old French as a past tense with a value similar to a preterite or imperfect. For example, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia (878 AD) has past-tense forms such as avret (< Latin habuerat), voldret (< Latin voluerat), alternating with past-tense forms from the Latin perfect (continued as the modern "simple past"). Old Occitan also preserved this tense, with a conditional value; Spanish still preserves this tense (the -ra imperfect subjunctive), as does Portuguese (in its original value as a pluperfect indicative).
Verb alternations
In Latin, stress was determined automatically by the number of syllables in a word and the weight (length) of those syllables. This resulted in certain automatic stress shifts between related forms in a paradigm, depending on the nature of the suffixes added. For example, in pens? "I think", the first syllable was stressed, while in pens?mus "we think", the second syllable was stressed. In many Romance languages, vowels diphthongized in stressed syllables under certain circumstances, but not in unstressed syllables, resulting in alternations in verb paradigms: e.g. Spanish pienso "I think" vs. pensamos "we think" (pensar "to think"), or cuento "I tell" vs. contamos "we tell" (contar "to tell").
In the development of French, no fewer than five vowels diphthongized in stressed, open syllables. Combined with other stress-dependent developments, this yielded 15 or so types of alternations in so-called strong verbs in Old French. For example, /a/ diphthongized to /ai/ before nasal stops in stressed, open syllables, but not in unstressed syllables, yielding aim "I love" (Latin am?) but amons "we love" (Latin am?mus).
The different types are as follows:
In Modern French the verbs in the -er class have been systematically leveled. Generally the "weak" (unstressed) form predominates, but there are some exceptions (e.g. modern aimer/nous aimons). The only remaining alternations are in verbs like acheter/j'achète and jeter/je jette, where unstressed /?/ alternates with stressed /?/, and in (largely learned) verbs like adhérer/j'adhère, where unstressed /e/ alternates with stressed /?/. Many of the non-er verbs have become obsolete and many of the remaining verbs have been leveled. A few alternations remain, however, in what are now known as irregular verbs, such as je tiens, nous tenons; je dois, nous devons or je meurs, nous mourons.
Some verbs had a more irregular alternation between different-length stems, with a longer stressed stem alternating with a shorter unstressed stem. This was a regular development stemming from the loss of unstressed intertonic vowels, which remained when stressed:
- j'aiu/aidier "help" < adi?t?, adi?t?re
- j'araison/araisnier "speak to" < adrati?n?, adrati?n?re
- je deraison/deraisnier "argue" < d?rati?n?, d?rati?n?re
- je desjun/disner "dine" < disi?i?n?, disi?i?n?re
- je manju/mangier "eat" < mand?c?, mand?c?re
- je parol/parler "speak" < *paraul?, *paraul?re < parabol?, parabol?re
The alternation of je desjun, disner is particularly complicated; it appears that disi?i?n?re > Western Romance /desjeju'nare > /desjej'nare/ (preliminary intertonic loss) > /desi'nare/ (triphthong reduction) > /disi'nare/ (metaphony) > /dis'ner/ (further intertonic loss and other proto-French developments). Note that both of the stems have become full verbs in modern French, déjeuner "to have lunch" and dîner "to dine". Furthermore, déjeuner does not derive directly from je desjun (< *disi(?i)?n? with total loss of unstressed -?i-). Instead, it comes from Old French desjeüner, based on the alternative form je desjeün (< *disi?(i)?n? with loss only of -i-, likely influenced by jeûner "to fast" < Old French jeüner < je jeün /d??e.'yn/ "I fast" < i?(i)?n?, where i?- is an initial rather than intertonic syllable and hence the vowel -?- cannot disappear).
Example of a regular -er verb: durer (to last)
Non-finite forms:
- Infinitive: durer
- Present participle: durant
- Past Participle: duré
Auxiliary verb: avoir
Example of a regular -ir verb: fenir (to end)
Non-finite forms:
- Infinitive: fenir
- Present participle: fenissant
- Past participle: feni(t)
Auxiliary verb: avoir
Example of a regular -re verb: corre (to run)
Non-finite forms:
- Infinitive: corre
- Present participle: corant
- Past participle: coru(t)
Auxiliary verb: estre
Examples of the auxiliary verbs
avoir (to have)
Non-finite forms:
- Infinitive: avoir (earlier aveir)
- Present participle: aiant
- Past participle: eü(t)
Auxiliary verb: avoir
estre (to be)
Non-finite forms:
- Infinitive: estre
- Present participle: estant
- Past participle: esté(t)
Auxiliary verb: avoir
Other parts of speech
Adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections are generally invariable. One notable exception being the adverb tot (same as modern French tout; all, every).
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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