Grammaire de la langue d’oïl ou grammaire des dialectes français aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles suivie d’un glossaire by Georges Frédéric Burguy (review)

Vandamme’s novel effectively weaves the fantastic with the realistic, the tragic with the humorous, to convincingly portray how, in a universe that may have no meaning, man’s will to live emerges from dialogue and interaction. Inventive anecdotes, thought-provoking conversations, wistful songs, and bawdy short stories populate the novel and demonstrate that the written word continues to play an integral part in the affirmation of life, particularly in the contemporary world. The universe will always produce stupidity, failure and insignificance, but it is also full of beauty, love and art, even in Charleroi. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns BURGUY, GEORGES FRÉDÉRIC. Grammaire de la langue d’oïl ou grammaire des dialectes français aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles suivie d’un glossaire. Vol. 1. Munich: Lincom, 2011. ISBN 978-3-8628-8035-5. Pp. xiv + 409. 74,10 a. At a time when young scholars with something to say are finding it increasingly difficult to publish, the German publisher Lincom has chosen to reproduce verbatim, and at a hefty price, the first of three volumes of a work dating to the 1850s—the first edition of Burguy’s long-forgotten grammar of Old French. In its catalogue, Lincom identifies this volume by three key terms: “historical linguistics ,” “language documentation,” and “sociolinguistics.” The third would appear to be wishful thinking; the other two are certainly more accurate. In fact, it is as a source of language documentation that Burguy’s first two volumes are probably most useful today (except for those engaged in the historiography of Romance linguistics), while the third volume has value as a dictionary of Old French. After a thoughtful introduction, this volume presents chapters on derivation (21–44), the article (45–62), the noun (63–99), the adjective (100–07), numbers (108–20), the pronoun (121–97), and the verb (198–409). Burguy’s goal in writing his Grammaire was to provide for the first time an “ouvrage complet, propre à faire connaître les lois qui [...] régissaient [...] les divers langages parlés en France, au nord de la Loire, dans une partie de la Belgique et de la Suisse, depuis le IXe jusqu’au XIVe siècle” (iii). While many nineteenth-century grammars of French (and Occitan too, for that matter) adhere to Latin-based criteria, Burguy takes instead apophony (as applied by Grimm to the Germanic languages) as his key to unraveling the complexities of the Old French verb. The use of “weak” and “strong” and other such anthropomorphic terms attests to the positivist worldview embodied here. For Burguy, a form like the present tense expressing duration would be represented by “une forme longue et forte” (emphasis mine), while tenses expressing something momentary are represented by “une forme simple et courte.” Where the Romance languages show a somewhat altered pattern, Burguy concludes: “le génie des peuples avait changé” (199). On the same page we read that “chaque langue est soumise à la loi de l’unité et de l’équilibre.” A reliance on pre-Neogrammarian “laws” informs the entire approach taken by Burguy. While it may have been considered a standard source in its day, and while he 1216 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 was evidently the first to undertake such a comprehensive view of the dialectes d’oïl, his is a work that has not fared particularly well in the annals of historical Romance linguistics. This is a study written when it was still necessary to refute that French derived from Hebrew. Suffice it to say that, while Diez’s Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen (1836) has endured to this day as a pioneer work in Romance linguistics, Burguy’s œuvre has not. The three editions of his work do testify to some measure of publishing success . In any case, when a need arises to take a look at any part of Burguy’s Grammaire, the curious Internet scholar has other choices, most notably Google books and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On Google, with a bit of careful hunting, all three volumes of the third edition (1882) can be located and read online , or downloaded for free in a...