Livres, libri, et libros

'Jumping the gun.'  Another English idiom--yet one that at least makes a little sense.  If one jumps the gun, she begins something too soon, before it's appropriate or 'before the gun fires.'  You can't help but wonder if this is an offshoot of the dueling days.  What better way to win a duel than to shoot first?  If the 'second' cries foul, you could always say, 'Oh, dear; my finger twitched.'

Anyway, I suppose I'm jumping the gun by reviewing two books about France and the French before I've finished reading them.  But I've always been the eager beaver (wonder where that one came from?) and prefer to count my chickens before they hatch.  Well, what's wrong with optimism?  I fully expect my hens to produce a healthy brood.

The books are Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barrow's, The Story of French and Alistair Horne's La Belle France: a Short History.  Both books are de rigueur for students of French.  

The Nadeau/Barrow book is over 450 pages and covers the development of what is now known as French from its Latin routes all the way to modernity.  One thing the authors make clear is that French is not a dying language.  They've even discovered a substantial population of Francophones in places as unlikely as Tel Aviv.  It has always fascinated me how the Big Three Latin-based languages came to be so different from each other.  For example, the most common Latin word for 'boat' is navis.  In Spanish it's barco. In Italian barca (odd that in one it's masculine and in the other feminine).  And of course the French is bateau.  So how did this transformation occur?  Well, it takes 450 pages to find out.  Some of it had to do with foreign invaders--especially Scandinavian and Germanic.  And often there were many different types of boats, all with their own word.  Think of English with boat, skiff, sloop, ship, schooner, canoe, etc.  One of those words over time was settled on to mean 'boat' in general.  And of course there's the enormous influence of French on English, what with the Norman Conquest and all.

Both my given name and my surname appear to have French origins.  Here's an entry concerning my middle name, Hugh, from the site 'Behind the Name' www.behindthename.com:

From the Germanic element hug, meaning "heart, mind, spirit". It was common among Frankish and French nobility, being borne by Hugh Capet, a 10th-century king of France who founded the Capetian dynasty. The Normans brought the name to England and it became common there, even more so after the time of the 12th-century bishop Saint Hugh of Lincoln, who was known for his charity. This was also the name of kings of Cyprus and the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. The name is used in Ireland and Scotland as the Anglicized form of Aodh and Ùisdean.

Funny how though the name was popularized by the French, it appears that it was originally German.  I feel much better now that I know my middle name means Heart, Mind and Spirit.  Is that cool, or what?!  And then there's William, Guillaume, in French, also popularized by the Normans, but derived from German.

As for my surname, I was always under the impression that it too has French origins.  But apparently it is Old English/Scottish.  When the Normans conquered GB, they adopted the name, changing it from Stewart to Stuart.  Those Normies were all over the place, weren't they?  So, it would appear that all my names came either directly or indirectly from French.  Merci, mes camarades.

But I regress.  So far  The Story of French is proving to be a good read, though like so many lengthy books, there's really more information in it than interests me.  

The same goes for  La Belle France.   If this is 'a short history' as the subtitle assures me, then I'd hate to see the long one.  It weighs in at close to 500 pages.  I've sampled histories of various countries before, and I must say that if this book is unbiased, it certainly depicts France as having had its share of blood and guts.  There are stories of a woman and her child being sent to a dungeon with no food and being found later dead, with the child's cheeks half eaten.  Drawings and quarterings, decapitations, castrations, and every kind of torture you can imagine--and some beyond imagination.  I will say that the book moves along at a few rapid clip and so far it has maintained my interest--and I haven't even gotten to Napoleon and Louis XIV yet.  

I'm generally not very good at finishing long books, so I'll have to publish another post at a later date to provide more thorough assessments, if I make it through to the end.  At least the word for book in Spanish, French, and Italian did maintain its integrity on the historical journey from the Latin to modern languages.