Enregistrer la parole et écrire la langue dans la diachronie du français ed. by Gabriella Parussa, Maria Colombo Timelli et Elena Llamas-Pombo (review)

This volume examines the relationship between written and spoken French from a historical perspective, focusing specifically on sound–spelling correspondences, or the extent to which orthography ('graphie') can be said to indicate pronunciations ('phonie') in the past. Initially framing the written–spoken dichotomy in Saussurean terms, as langue versus parole, the editors state clearly that the volume adopts a novel theoretical approach by employing essentially a variationist sociolinguistic methodology to historical data. The interface between graphie and phonie is therefore analysed within a variationist framework that seeks to ascertain the internal, external, and extralinguistic factors conditioning linguistic variation and change in French over time, examining data from the ninth to the twentieth century. Tobias Sheer and Philippe Ségéral challenge traditional theoretical viewpoints by providing a detailed variationist analysis of singleton 'r' and double 'rr' in Old French, examining the phonetic reality of the orthographic distinction and the language internal constraints on the distribution of [Q] and [r]. Focusing on the transition from Old to Middle French, Elena Llamas-Pombo examines the effect of various extralinguistic factors on variability in orthography and punctuation, interrogating the notion of oralité and noting that oral texts can mean both those that are written to be read aloud and those that are representations of actual speech using (non-standard) orthography. Looking at the same period, Gabriella Parussa examines the difficulties in distinguishing between 'n' and 'u' in written manuscripts as well as the use of both letters to indicate nasality; this contribution provides valuable insights from acoustic phonetics and argues that orthography in this case may be more representative of speech than previously assumed. Providing a regional perspective, and using data from accounts published in the langue d'oïl variety spoken in the Lorraine region between the fourteenth and sixteenth century, Aude Wirth-Jaillard examines the distribution of regional linguistic features and defines a new text type, the sous-scripta, where regional forms are minimized. Manuel PadillaMoyano also examines the existence of regional traits in documents written in French in the Basque country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining linguistic transfer from both Basque and Gascon and outlining a range of phonological correspondences between the three languages that serve as a key reference point for future studies of language contact in the south-west. Maria Colombo Timelli and Claire Badiou-Monferran focus their respective analyses on the orthography conventions used to represent different discourse types: Timelli provides a detailed analysis of reported speech, comparing manuscript and printed versions of Cent nouvelles nouvelles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while Badiou-Monferran examines the use of white space and traditional punctuation marks in various editions of Charles Perrault's La Barbe bleue to indicate different types of discourse. Overall, the volume provides a variety of novel perspectives on the significance of the sound–spelling interface in the study of the historical French phonology; all contributors adopt modern methods, techniques, and theoretical viewpoints to interrogate the validity of a series of traditional binary oppositions: grapheme/phoneme; manuscript/printed text; punctuation/blank space; narration/reported speech; langue/parole.