Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
Yes, the presenter made this point quite clearly, and how this influenced Norman French pronunciation as apposed to the pronunciation found in isle de France. This in turn made English pronunciation of words of French origin quite different from standard french.
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That has little to do with the Vikings, whose only legacy are a few words of vocabulary, like homard, varech, vague (sea wave), crique, and a few place names, such as Honfleur, La Hague, the forest of Londe near Rouen (same name as Lund in Sweden), etc.
That coastal Norman pronunciation is due to the Joret line, which separates the Romance dialects (north of it) which kept the hard C of Latin, and the Romance dialects (south of it) which transformed the hard C of Latin into a soft Ch.
The Joret line runs right through the middle of Normandy. Coastal Normandy as well as Picardy are north of it, Southern Normandy and the Paris Region are south of it. Hence "cat" in coastal Norman dialects vs "chat" in Parisian French, "castel" in coastal Norman dialects vs "chastel" in Parisian French, later evolving into "châtel" by dropping the s, then "château", with the Medieval -el ending (spelled -le in English) becoming -eau or -au in modern French (for example: seel in Medieval French, from where English seal is coming from, which became sceau in modern French (with an unpronounced "c" added in the spelling to distinguish it from "seau", an homophone meaning a bucket), oisel in Medieval French which became oiseau in modern French, chapel in Medieval French which became chapeau in modern French, etc).
The hard C is also found in Picardy where the Vikings never settled: so for example cape in Picardy vs chape in Parisian French, pic in Picardy vs pioche in Parisian French. In fact Picardy was called Picardy by the Parisians because construction workers came from Picardy and they called their main tool "pic" (which the Parisians called "pioche"), so that odd way of pronouncing it (in the eyes of the Parisians) soon became a nickname for their region of origin.
Some of these Picard words with hard C were later adopted in standard French alongside their Parisian cognates, so both pic and pioche exist in French today, with slightly different meanings, and Picard cape has completely superseded Parisian chape now (a word hardly ever used today in the sense of cape, the clothing item, but still used in other technical terms, like une chape de béton in construction, or une chape de plomb in dictatorship and hopefully not on this forum).
The English language borrowed either from the hard C dialects or from the soft Ch Parisian French at various times. This is why you have both cavalry (from coastal Normandy and Picardy) and chivalry (from Paris) in English, castle and château, cattle and chattel (that word, which was chatel or chetel in Parisian French, underwent a weird transformation under pedantic Latin etymology in the late 18th century, and was respelled "cheptel", to make it look closer to its Latin ancestor "capitalis", and with the development of literacy in the 19th century people started to pronounce again the "p" which had been lost since more than 1000 years ago).
By the way, how do you guys pronounce "cheptel" in Québec? P or no p? That pedantic "p" appeared in France after the British conquest of Canada.
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