Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

[cahn]

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

Comments

French pronunciation

[mildred_of_midgard]

(uh, my French pronounciation is worse than my reading comprehension -- do they not rhyme because of the difference between "te" and "tte," and/or is there some slight difference in the vowel? I suck so badly at vowels!)

Short answer: they rhyme today but didn't necessarily rhyme in Voltaire's day.

Long answer...well, bear in mind that I had only one semester on the history of the French language--selenak, my PhD was in historical linguistics--so the following explanation is derived from Wikipedia plus the 15-year-old hazy memory of a non-French speaker. But Wikipedia matches my memories closely enough that I'm just going to go with it.

Originally, back in Cicero's day in Latin, "t" and "tt" would have been pronounced differently, but by about the year 1000 they were pronounced the same in French. So Voltaire would not have heard any difference between the consonants. It's the vowels he would have cared about.

Now, the word "tête" comes from Latin "testa". Some time in the Middle Ages, "s" before a following consonant got turned to "h", pronounced "tehta".

Then the "h" stopped being pronounced, but to make up for the lost consonant, the preceding vowel went from a short vowel to a long vowel. This was represented by putting a circumflex over the vowel. So "tête" had a long vowel, and "trompette" a short vowel, for several hundred years, and the modern spelling difference reflects this historical difference.

Around Voltaire's time, French speakers stopped pronouncing vowel length differences. Like most sound changes, this took multiple generations and caught on gradually. There was a period when some people were pronouncing them the same, and some people were pronouncing them differently.

My guess (this is an educated guess) is that in ordinary, casual speech in France, and in German-speaking regions, the two words rhymed, but someone known for speaking the "best", i.e. conservative, French, like Voltaire, would still observe a difference, especially because they were spelled differently, and because the poets of preceding generations Voltaire and Fritz were emulating were not rhyming them.

Today, they rhyme in most dialects, including in Paris, and I know this not because I can pronounce French vowels*, but because I asked a friend who grew up just outside Paris to confirm Wikipedia.

* I barely even pronounce English vowels: people make fun of what vowels I rhyme and don't rhyme all the time. :P Case in point, I pronounce "sell" and "sail" the same. I have most but not all the mergers on this page. 

Re: French pronunciation

[selenak]

My measly three years of French at school and I are very impressed and salute you. (It was my last foreign language to learn, after Latin and English, and I never was more than rusty in it and have forgotten a lot, not least because unlike my English, I hardly practiced.) Thank you for coming through with the linguistic expertise!

Re: French pronunciation

[mildred_of_midgard]

My pleasure! The nice thing about historical linguistics is that you can know stuff without needing to know the language in question.

Your measly three years of French in a German (I assume) school probably far surpass my measlier two years of French in a not only American, but academically poor even by American standards, high school. That plus my one semester of French historical linguistics in college is about it for me and French.

My German background is even weirder: one semester of proper German in college, one semester on German syntax from a linguistic perspective (so a lot of diagramming sentences and reading up on different theories that account for where verbs go), one semester on reading academic German in grad school, two semesters of Middle High German, and a few semesters of even more remotely removed long dead Germanic languages: Old English, Old Norse/Icelandic, Gothic. ;) All of these give me a slight edge in reading German over an English speaker who had only that one semester of German 101, but leave me with a total German reading proficiency that is actually worse than my two years of high school French. Largely due to English having a far greater overlap in vocabulary with French, notwithstanding that it's a Germanic language.

I will never cease to complain that my graduate program:
- required nominal reading proficiency in French and German,
- failed to provide us with resources to acquire academic reading proficiency without taking years and years of irrelevant "When is the train coming?" undergraduate courses on spoken French/German that no one actually had time for,
- held the bar so low we could pass without actually being able to read French or German, thus giving us no incentive to prioritize reading proficiency over all the other things we were trying to cram into our years there.

And then we'd get random lectures like, "You know, you should also learn to read academic Russian," and we'd blink and stare at our advisors like..."I don't disagree. In principle."

Re: French pronunciation

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm convinced I have the least knowledge of modern French and the most knowledge of older French of the three of us. :D

Re: French pronunciation

[cahn]

Hey, I had three and a half years of French in school! (One year I couldn't fit it in my schedule and it was with a tutor -- the lovely French teacher I'd mentioned before, who had retired at that point -- but because I wasn't taking it for credit we probably got through about half the curriculum.) I'm feeling very learned right now, having had the most French of the three of us! ;) :P

Of course I didn't keep it up, so it's not like I can read any better than either of you at this point :P And my pronunciation was always execrable.

Re: French pronunciation

[cahn]

Oh wow, that's super cool. My French teacher told me about the circumflex but I didn't know about any of the other stuff.

Re: French pronunciation

[mildred_of_midgard]

Historical linguistics is full of neat explanations for things, or at least I think so. When people want to know why such-and-such is, I take delight in being able to explain the history of the word over the last one to two thousand years. (This comes up a lot when I'm doing ESL with a French-speaking friend. He likes to joke that it's good to know there's usually a reason behind the chaos that is the English language, but that it's not scalable to expect all foreigners to get a PhD so the language can make sense to them!)