Dictionnaire raisonné des onomatopées françaises par Charles Nodier (review)

explique aussi la relation à cette époque entre langue et sexe, écrit et oral, raffinement et efficacité. L’impact sur le français et l’anglais de la révolution menant à l’indépendance américaine en 1776, suivie quelques années plus tard par la Révolution française de 1789, est abordé en fin d’ouvrage, ainsi que les nouvelles relations entre l’anglais britannique et l’anglais américain, un débat qui se poursuit, sous d’autres formes, jusqu’à nos jours. Dans les dernières pages de cette excellente étude, l’auteur se garde de faire une conclusion mais propose une coda, qui a l’avantage de laisser le débat totalement ouvert. Cette analyse comparative de l’histoire des différentes idées et théories linguistiques sur le français et l’anglais entre 1648 et 1789 est d’autant plus riche et intéressante qu’elle s’appuie au fil des chapitres sur une grande diversité de documents historiques: des traités de conversation, des relations de missionnaires, mais aussi des discours, des essais philosophiques, des articles encyclopédiques ou des oraisons funèbres, entre autres. De grands penseurs tels que Rivarol, Smellie, Voltaire ou Jefferson sont cités. Un tel ouvrage permet de mieux comprendre les relations parfois paradoxales qu’entretiennent encore aujourd’hui ces deux langues, si différentes et si proches à la fois. University of Massachusetts, Lowell Carole Salmon NODIER, CHARLES. Dictionnaire raisonné des onomatopées françaises. Éd. Jean-François Jeandillou. Genève: Droz, 2008. ISBN 978-2-600-01167-9. Pp. xxxvi + 316. 41,64 a. Republished in its bicentennial year, this newly annotated reedition of Nodier’s Dictionnaire raisonné is actually based on the augmented version of 1828 and includes a 25-page essay by Jeandillou on “Évidence de l’analogie,” the term analogie being used here and in Nodier’s own préface to indicate what is essentially a synesthetic device whereby auditory-based iconicity can be generalized and made to account for apparent phonosemantic regularites that are not auditory based. For example, a series of phonetically similar words imitate quick striking sounds—clappement, claquer, claquette, clinquant, cliquetis, cloche—and by synesthetic analogy, the same representational convention can be linked to the blinking of an eye or a light—clin d’œil, clignoter—even though these phenomena are perceived visually (71–74). Coupling onomatopoeia with synesthetic analogy provides significant explanatory value, contends Nodier, to account for language. This theory is consistent with the mentality of the siècle des Lumières and the impetus to find possible desacralized explanations for natural phenomena. Emerging from the Enlightenment, Nodier (1780–1849) helped shape its immediate aftermath, not only as a founder of Romantic literature, for which he is best known, but also as a naturalist contributing to the emerging evolutionary thinking of his immediate predecessors, such as Rousseau, Leclerc de Buffon, and Lamarck. Rereading Nodier reminds the modern reader that the notions of the essential arbitrariness of language, on the one hand, and the natural evolution of language, on the other, which are both taken as givens by the majority of contemporary linguists , were not, at one time, indelibly linked, as they now appear to be, owing to their simultaneous currency. To the contrary, one might argue that the two notions were initially hostile. For in Nodier’s era, before Saussure’s views on the arbitrariness of language became the new norm (that is, before Hermogenes won the debate in Plato’s Cratylus) and before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) 228 FRENCH REVIEW 85.1 had definitively reoriented assumptions about the mechanisms of evolution in the direction of natural selection from among randomly generated variants, it was possible—indeed, it must have seemed natural—to espouse an evolutionary hypothesis that was based on reasoned assertions about a fundamental role for onomatopoeia in building human language. This position is similar to Lamarck’s approach, reasoning that anatomical evolution must be linked to such things as successive generations of giraffes extending their necks ever further to increase browsing range. Ultimately, of course, less self-apparent but far more powerful explanations would supplant these “reasoned” approaches. Random variation...