Historical sociolinguists must countervail the ‘bad data’ problem, extracting as much information as possible from historical texts. This volume focuses on variability in spelling and punctuation – both ponctuation noire (conventional punctuation) and ponctuation blanche (spacing, pagination, etc.) – to reveal aspects of orality in historical texts and unearth glimpses of the spoken language of earlier times. Current interest in such an endeavour is high, as evinced by numerous recent special issues, conferences and edited volumes. The editors intend for the seven contributions to provide methods and tools to advance diachronic linguistics and to stimulate further research.
Tobias Scheer and Philippe Ségéral ask whether variation between <r> and <rr> deriving from intervocalic /tr/ or /dr/ – e.g., pier(r)e < petra – was phonetically meaningful. They argue that geminate <rr> followed a short vowel, whereas <r> occurred only after a long vowel. Variation between pierre and piere suggests that Old French concurrently evinced both the syllabification [pjer.re] <pierre>, in which the initial segment of the diphthong has become a glide consonant in the syllable onset, and [pi.e.re] <piere>, in which [ie] subsists as a diphthong.
Elena Llamas-Pombo examines variation in medieval spelling and punctuation, contending that spelling variation in close proximity is stylistic, a means to add variety and emphasis, in keeping with the principe de variation. By turns state-of-the-art and original study, the chapter discusses punctuation (both noire and blanche) with purely visual purposes (i.e., with no apparent phonetic or prosodic value), orthographic variants deployed for versification purposes or emphasis, capitalisation to highlight rhymes, and polysemous punctuation.
Gabriella Parussa tackles spellings involving <u>, <v> and <n> in eleventh to sixteenth-century data. Focusing on spellings that modern editors would consider problematic (e.g., nons for nous; cen que for ce que), in which the <n> is not etymological, Parussa draws on rhythmic data and historical grammars to argue that such variants corresponded to a phonetic reality. Some unexpected nasalised variants subsisted well past Old French, including langouste (< locusta) and jongleur (< joculatore). Parussa argues that <n> could also mark traits other than nasality (e.g., vowel aperture); one hopes that editors respect her appeal to note ‘problematic’ spellings.
Aude Wirth-Jaillard studies the decline of the scripta lorraine in accounting records from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. She finds regional spellings like lai for la only in the earliest data, although the loss of these regional features is not linear. In addition to possessing date and place indications, accounting records sometimes name the scribe, offering a level of sociolinguistic information rarely found for this period. The results reveal evolutions in a regional Romance variety and merit further study.
Maria Colombo Timelli examines the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, demonstrating how the author deployed punctuation, terms of address, verba dicendi, changes of grammatical person, deictics, interjections and other strategies to demarcate represented speech from narrative. Although some form of punctuation was often employed, usage was variable.
Claire Badiou-Monferran investigates ponctuation noire and ponctuation blanche in editions of Perrault's La barbe bleue from 1695 to 1905, offering a diachronic view of editorial practices. She interprets the pagination of the first edition as evidence that the text was originally intended for oral recitation. Similarly, punctuation in early editions reflects prosody rather than syntax. In the case of later editions, however, Badiou-Monferran contends that the text is punctuated and paginated with silent reading in mind, and that punctuation serves to give the impression of orality rather than to guide oral recitation.
Manuel Padilla-Moyano examines how French expressions are spelled by Basque writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with minimal literacy in French. Although somewhat superficial, this is a fascinating study of historical contact between Basque, Occitan, Gascon and southwestern regional French, revealing a range of phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical phenomena (e.g., lack of grammatical gender marking in the imperfectly acquired French of the Basque writers). Further investigation of these tantalising data should yield additional insights about historical language contact and second language acquisition.
This compact volume will interest scholars of French diachrony, especially historical sociolinguistics. The contributors work hard to dispel the notion that variation in spelling and punctuation in historical texts was random. Occasional quibbles aside, the results are compelling and offer rich findings from ‘bad data’. Nevertheless, future research will need to engage with the view, prevalent in diachronic work, that accepts scribal ‘error’ and more meaningfully confront the idée reçue that orthographic variation is largely random and due simply to the lack of a codified norm. Ultimately, a model that accounts for both meaningful and random or inherent variation would be desirable. The volume should succeed in stimulating further research on sometimes overlooked aspects of historical data and is also a convincing mise en garde against over-reliance on modern editions that may whitewash spelling and punctuation vagaries.
