I en ny utgåva av Entre village et tranchées – L’écriture de poilus ordinaires skildrar franska soldater första världskrigets fasor. Brevskrivandet blev en formell livlina hem till vardagen.
Den svenske borgarsonen Eric von Roland skildrar sin bildningsresa i en dagbok på franska. Men mitt i allt det kultiverade språket behöver han ta hjälp av modersmålet.
Alla har behov av att förstärka och överdriva. Romanska språk gör det på ett gemensamt sätt – med en liten jätteändelse.
This article investigates if there is a difference between how the author Michel de Montaigne and the writer Agrippa d’Aubigné use words, mostly connected with emotions, in their argumentation. This quantitative study of the Essais and the Tragiques shows that Montaigne is discussing the government of states and philosophy in society. It also shows that d’Aubigné is far more polemic than Montaigne, using emotion words like death, blood, arms, ennemies etc., which makes this text look like a catalogue of intolerance. Even if the most frequent words are God and heaven, it just means that the fight is holy, made in God’s name.
Eric Roland was born in Stockholm in 1675 and made a so-called Grand Tour in Europe in his youth. This was quite unusual for a person that did not belong to the Swedish aristocracy. He returned to Sweden in 1700, when he started a career as a secretary and a civil servant during the reign of Charles XII. He was ennobled at the end of his career in 1720 and spent the remains of his life at his wife’s manor Tolefors, Östergötland. He died in 1754.
During twenty years, he wrote a diary in French, which contains approximately 220 pages. The diary, which was discovered recently, is kept at the Upsala library Carolina Rediviva in the manuscript X370. It is an interesting witness of a period when French was the most important language in Europe and very important in Sweden due to its close relations to France and French culture.
In this article, two linguistic features in the diary will be examined. Firstly, I examine the borrowings from Swedish and other languages in the text. Even if Eric Roland has a high proficiency in French, he seems to use these words, probably because he does not know their French counterparts. It is interesting to notice that some of the Swedish words coincide with the very first examples in the Swedish dictionary SAOB. Secondly, I examine the use of gender, which varies a lot in the text. This is a particularly salient feature and the question is if modern studies on second language acquisition could explain this use. Or is the variation in gender simply due to the way he learnt French in Upsala?
The synthetic superlative -ÍSSIMUS in Latin survived in Italian, whereas it was borrowed in the Romance languages on the Iberian Peninsula and in French during the Renaissance. This suffix has been very frequent in these languages with the exception of French. In this language it has been accepted merely when used in titles. Condemned by grammarians, the suffix has thus been quite rare in French literature. The present study shows however that in the database Frantext, which comprises mostly literary texts, nearly 1,400 occurrences of words with the suffix -issime are found, rarissime and richissime being the most frequent (apart from titles). But with the emergence of new media, it seems that the suffix has become much more frequent in French. These adjectives are found mainly in areas like politics, sports, travels, adult movies and in comments by web visitors as shown in this study.