Bibliographie complète

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that written Latin of the Merovingian period was read and spoken in such a way as to be understood by the illiterate population and among medievalists it is now communis opinio that the documents of 7th and 8th century Gaul, reflect a formal register of the spoken language. This is particularly consequential for the study of vowel apocope and syncope whereby most unstressed vowels in Classical Latin have disappeared in Old French, either described as direct loss of the vowel (V → ∅) or with a prior reduction to schwa (V → ə → ∅). Despite this paradigm shift, as well as renewed introspection by historical linguists, Merovingian Latin is still omitted from most grammars which describe the evolution of the Latin vowel system to that of Old French. This thesis thus seeks to provide the philological evidence and theoretical pieces necessary to emancipate diachronic phonology from the long shadow of dogmatically acquired tradition, thanks in large part to improved editions, access to digitized manuscripts and great leaps in our understanding of the human language faculty which were unavailable to the founders of our discipline. To address these issues, we have selected a corpus of 48 original charters preserved primarily at Saint Denis north of Paris, dating from the 7th to the early 8th century. Adopting a positivistic philological approach to the data, we first describe the distribution of vowels according to a straightforward method of statistically analysing the type and frequency of vowel variation in recurring lexemes according to stressed and unstressed syllables as well as according to position (initial, final, internal, etc.) within the word. The Merovingian data was then analysed within the phonological frameworks of strict CV and element theory, demonstrating among other processes that vowel reduction was an active part of the synchronic phonology. We conclude that vowel loss in Gallo-Romance proceeded first along a path of contrast-neutralising vowel reduction, which then fed total vowel loss in a typologically regular direction of sound change similar to what can be observed in modern Portuguese or lexicalised in Francoprovençal. Significantly, and counter to all previous account of the diachronic loss of vowels in Proto-French, we argue that there is no evidence in favour of a reduction to schwa in the seventh or eight centuries. Instead, we find a three-way contrast between a front vowel, a back vowel, and a central vowel even in the most reduced unsyncopated syllables. Our conclusions have important consequences for the internal and external history of the French language. On the one hand, so long as final case-bearing vowels were distinguished, Gallo-Romance, despite all its idiosyncrasies and innovations remained an active member of the common Romance diasystem; it likewise retained a generally transparent relation with the written code. On the other hand, Gallo-Romance, like other regional Romance languages, simply remained a rustic variety of a single Latin language, with the “transition” from Latin to Old French occurring in the post-Merovingian period. Merovingian Latin presents itself as the key linguistic hinge needed to understand this transition.

Accepted: 2024-01-10T17:11:02Z