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Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 6)

Vandalisme (vandalism), anarchisme (anarchism) and terrorisme (terrorism) all took their present meaning in English from French terms coined during the Revolution. Some terms disappeared, at least temporarily. Parlement (parliament) was abolished as a royalist institution in 1790 (it referred to the high tribunal in the ancien regime); after several generations it reappeared in France with the English meaning of the term.

Commoners also influenced the language. In the early days of the Revolution, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Louis XVI’s doctor, actively promoted reform of capital punishment. Read more »

Photo: Curious Expeditions

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 7)

Like the issue of the Belgian accent, that of the Suisse accent is complicated. Many French people swear that there is a typical Swiss accent. In fact, what is assumed to be a typical Swiss accent is actually the accent of a German Swiss speaking French as a second language. As far as the Suisses Romands, they have roughly the same accent that one would hear in France near the Swiss border. They have a reputation for speaking slowly, but the real difference is where they put the emphasis in their words and sentences. Whereas standard French stresses the last syllable of words and sentences, Swiss French stresses the penultimate (second-last) syllable. This produces a musicality that is instantly recognizable, though it is more typically Franco-Provençal than Swiss per se. Like Belgians and Quebeckers, Swiss francophones also pronounce vowels in a way that distinguishes homonyms (Belgians and Quebeckers distinguish vowels sounds too, but different vowels). Words like peau (skin) and pot (pot) sound the same in Paris, but in Switzerland they are differentiated as po and pah. Read more »

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 1)

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

The Gaulish language ended up contributing very little to the vocabulary of modern French. Only about a hundred Gaulish words survived the centuries, mostly rural and agricultural terms such as bouleau (birch), sapin (fir), lotte (monkfish), mouton (sheep), charrue (plow), sillon (furrow), lande (moor) and boue (mud)—that’s eight percent of the total. However, Gaulish is still relatively well-known, partly because it left many place and family names in northern France. For example, the name Paris comes from the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe, and the word bituriges (which meant “kings of the world”) produced the names Bourges and Berry (the difference comes from whether the original name was pronounced with a Latin or a Gaulish accent). Linguists believe that Gaulish also contributed to development of the peculiar sonority of French, and that it was at the root of some important linguistic variations in what would become French. But, contrary to what some people believe, modern French is not Latin pronounced with a Gaulish accent.  Read more »