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Re: Les Lais by Marie de France DomA Send a noteboard - 22/03/2013 10:47:54 PM

View original postThe verb cheir or cheoir means “to fall”, but as piez li chiet still sounds more like “she shat at his feet” rather than “she fell to his feet”.

Probably even more so to an anglophone. We're used to related modern verbs like choir and chuter, so those more readily come to mind than chier for us.

It's quite true Old French is full of funny sounding things to modern ears though, a great deal because of the different vowels sparking very odd/funny associations to modern words with very different meanings.


El païs ot un damisel
fiz a un cunte, gent e bel.



That one would work in modern French too. though the -te ruins it a bit for us as it makes it sounds more like comte than like con.

Marie de France is especially easy for people from Normandy, Bretagne and for Québécois (read aloud even more. I saw a production of Shakespeare translated to a mix of Middle and Old French many years ago, and most of it was quite intelligible). I was amazed to see it's full of archaic turns and even some words that are still present in regional speech. "Fils à" instead of "Fils de" would be an example of that. Older people might still refer to someone as La Josée à Raymond instead of saying Josée, la fille de Raymond.

Glad to see you enjoyed it. It's really a pity so little is known about her.


there are words that probably have led people to confusion through their continuing use in English, such as veir or voir, which means “true” or “truly”, and is used in the legal expression voir dire (to speak truthfully), but has nothing to do with the modern French voir, “to see”, which was veeir in Old French.

They're easier to tell apart when pronounced. One is more like vèr, the other is more like voué-er, or even voué-ar. You can still hear some of the é sound in some regional pronunciations of voir (the veoir spelling disappeared for good only in the 19th century).

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Les Lais by Marie de France - 22/03/2013 08:37:20 PM 772 Views
Re: Les Lais by Marie de France - 22/03/2013 10:47:54 PM 675 Views
Re: Les Lais by Marie de France - 26/03/2013 02:52:00 PM 618 Views
Hmm... - 26/03/2013 05:13:44 PM 532 Views
Re: Hmm... - 27/03/2013 01:57:21 PM 570 Views
I could add that comte in Old French was li cons - 27/03/2013 02:48:45 AM 592 Views
Re: I could add that comte in Old French was li cons - 27/03/2013 03:33:30 PM 575 Views
It was both, sort of. - 27/03/2013 06:08:00 PM 586 Views
Re: It was both, sort of. - 27/03/2013 11:29:05 PM 513 Views
cas régime - 28/03/2013 12:01:41 AM 583 Views

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