Ordinary letters, extraordinary findings
17th- and 18th-century French and the MACINTOSH project (Missing hAlf the picture, ClassIcal NoT sO claSsical
FrencH)
This project proposes an innovative approach to the history of French by replacing the ‘tunnel vision’ (
Watts/Trudgill 2002) which characterizes the vast majority of studies of ‘Classical
French’ by a wider approach, based on an extraordinarily valuable source,
i.e. the ‘Prize Papers’. The Prize
Papers are a collection which includes 50,000 undelivered private French letters, confiscated between 1652 and 1815 during the
frequent military conflicts between France and England. The documents are held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom in
London, and are remnants of the privateering era, a longstanding legitimate activity of capturing enemy ships. These countless
captured letters are becoming known to historians, who have recognized them as an invaluable source of information on the period
in question, but have so far attracted little attention from linguists, even those focusing on diachrony. The MACINTOSH project is
the first French initiative to explore this collection, and aims to show how the alternative data provided by these private
documents can broaden the scope and fill the gaps left by traditional historical linguistics. The research focuses on the first
French colonial era, shedding new light on the dynamics and mechanisms that led to the French and Creole varieties existing in
America and the Indian Ocean.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.State of the art
- 3.The Prize Papers
- 4.Selecting the letters for the sample
- 5.Social and geographical background of the writers and their recipients
- 6.The writers’ languages
- 7.Recognizing non-autographed letters
- 8.Initial results
- 8.1Lexical features
- 8.1.1
Grande f. “mother of one’s mother or father, grandmother”
- 8.1.2
Serrer tr. v. “to put in a safe place, to store”
- 8.2Grapho-phonetic characteristics
- 8.2.1Written representations of regional pronunciations
- 8.2.2Notations of /a/ before /r/: ‹er› > ‹ar›
- 8.3Morphological characteristic
- 8.4Syntax characteristics
- 9.Transcribing, editing and annotating the corpus
- 10.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Author queries
-
References
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