It occasionally happens that a word newly encountered, which I suppose to be completely defunct and perhaps even a hapax legomenon, is met again soon after somewhere very different. While reading Saint-John Perse’s work Amers, his long poem in honor of the sea, I was not sure of the definition of one of the terms [...]
In the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, David Greer reviews Robin Adamson’s The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis? (Multilingual Matters, 2007). I’ve not read Adamson’s work yet, but I was intrigued by this bit from Greer’s review: Adamson transitions from an historical perspective to the modern situation in Chapter 2 [...]
I am trying to improve my French for a winter trip to francophone Africa. However, being an obsessive historical linguist, I am not content just to brush up on conversation, and so I’ve checked out some books from the library on the whole evolution of the French language. One is Peter Rickard’s A History of [...]