John Palsgrave's 'Lesclaircissement De La Langue Francoyse' (1530)

SUMMARYJohn Palsgrave, an Englishman, wrote the first detailed grammar of the French language, Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse (1530). This work is remarkable not only for its length but also for its quality. Palsgrave wrote a pedagogical text for his English readers, using a system which leads the learner from the development of passive skills (interpretation, both oral and intellectual, of written texts) to the development of active skills (expressing oneself in the target language). At the same time, he responded to the French Humanist desire to bring the vernacular languages under the control of 'rules certayne'.In its grammatical method, Lesclaircissement exemplifies a stage in the development of Humanist grammar, as the Renaissance grammarians moved from a method based on forms to a more abstract representation of linguistic facts. As such, Palsgrave's work stands half-way between the early Renaissance calques upon Donatus and the later excursions into logical grammar. In phonetics, Palsgrave's attention to detail leads him to a clear recognition of the importance of nasal vowels in French (even if his articulatory description of the nasal vowels leaves something to be desired). In phonology, he aspires to a greater level of abstraction through his attempts to link liaison and elision phenomena to French phonotactics. In morpho-syntax, he uses the notion of perfection in language to provide an underlying structure in which the syntactic and the logical structure are explicit. He then explains how the languages in question 'circumlocute' to express the underlying structures. In this way, he prefigures the work of Meigret in French grammar. For all of his accomplishments, however, Palsgrave's work had little influence on his successors. It had only one printing of 750 copies, and Palsgrave himself restricted the sales. Still, the work deserves our attention because of its wealth of detail and because of the method it uses.RESUMEL'Anglais John Palsgrave composa la premiere grammaire detaillee de la langue francaise, Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse (1530). C'est une oeuvre remarquable, non seulement par sa taille, mais aussi par la finesse des ses descriptions grammaticales. Palsgrave ecrivit un manuel destine aux anglophones, suivant une methodologie pedagogique qui mene l'etudiant de l'interpretation orale des textes ecrits a l'expression personnelle. En meme temps, il repondit a l'appel des humanistes francais de fixer les regles des langues modernes.Par sa methode grammaticale, Lesclaircissement marque une etape dans le developpement de la grammaire humaniste, une etape ou les grammairiens essaient de decrire les faits linguistiques d'une facon plus abstraite. L'oeuvre de Palsgrave se trouve au mi-point du chemin entre les calques de Donat et les debuts de la grammaire logique. En phonetique, son etude minutieuse le mene a reconnaitre l'importance des voyelles nasales en francais (meme si sa description articulatoire des voyelles nasales laisse a desirer). En phonologie, il cherche un niveau d'abstraction plus eleve, en essayant d'employer les regles phonotactiques pour decrire la liaison et l'elision en francais. En morphosyntaxe, il decrit un niveau logique sous-jacent, en jugeant la 'perfection' des structures linguistiques des deux langues. De cette maniere, son oeuvre prefigure celle de Meigret (1550). Quelque brillant que Leclaircissement fut, il eut peu d'influence. On n'en tira que 750 exemplaires, et Palsgrave lui-meme en garda la plupart. Neanmoins, les details et la methode de cette oeuvre meritent notre attention.