I figured it was about time to
publish some of my language observations, so as to keep to the promise in the
title of my blog!
In my French studies in the
classroom, I always learned that in French, only the first word of a title is
capitalized. However, a bit of research has presented conflicting viewpoints on
how titles are capitalized in French. Some say that only proper nouns are
capitalized; some say that proper nouns and their descriptors are capitalized;
the variations continue. In English, typically each word that is not an article
or preposition (of, the, to, etc.) is capitalized. Also, the Oxford Comma
is never used in French. It is used based on writer preference in English. In
the same sentence in L’Encyclopédie
and in the Plan of the French
Encyclopedia, the Oxford Comma is omitted in the French print while it is
included in the English print.
When I first began to read the
Encyclopedia, I had to adjust myself to a couple of things. Other than becoming
accustomed to handling three-hundred-year-old original prints, there were
differences in the language and format, some of which I expected. The most
glaring difference was the way the letter “s” is sometimes printed. Printing presses
of the time often printed the lowercase “s” so it looks more like an “f”. This
occurs when an “s” appears at the beginning or in the middle of the word, but
never at the end of a word. I was baffled; it seemed impossible that “s” used
to be “f” in every old French word. I soon deciphered the problem – Mr. Ring
informed me of the printing difference.
A difference in actual language, however, is that the typical
“ais,” “ait,” “aient” endings used in some verb tenses were instead “ois,”
“oit,” and “oient.” In addition, the first “a” in the word “connaissances” is
an “o” in L’Encyclopédie. A brief
reading of the Wikipedia article “French Verb Morphology” shed light on this situation:
using an “o” where there is now an “a” was simply a part of Old French, “not…abandoned
by the Académie Française until 1835.”
Specifically, this difference appears frequently in verbs conjugated in the imperfect
tense, used to signify actions in the past.
