The Vowel Phonemes of Meigret

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS Number 3 April, 1953 THE VOWEL PHONEMES OF MEIGRET By GEORGE RAYMOND SHIPMAN THE INSTITUTE OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY THE VOWEL PHONEMES OF MEIGRET BY GEORGE RAYMOND SHIPMAN GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS WASHINGTON, D. C. Copyright 1953 GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS THE INSTITUTE OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY Two Dollars a Copy Press of Ransdell Incorporated Washington 18, D. C. SROM time to time The Institute of Languages and Linguistics, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, publishes monographs intended to contribute to the discipline of linguistics and the teaching of languages. Manu- scripts should be addressed to JOHN DE FRANCIS, Editor Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics 1719 Massachusetts Avenue, N. W. Washington 6, D. C. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL NOTE Editor, Monograph Series IN MEMORIAM HENRI PEYRE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS GEORGE RAYMOND SHIPMAN I. INTRODUCTION 1.1. The Problem of Meigret's Orthography ... 1 1.2. Meigret's Life and Writings 4 1. 3. The Present Position of Research 12 II. STUDY OF THE TEXTS 2. 1. Meigret's Reformed Alphabet 17 2.2. The Vowel Signs and Their Interpretation . 17 2. 3. Phonemic Status of Meigret's Vowels .... 21 III. EXAMINATION OF THE CRITICISMS 3.1. The Role of Vowel-Length 25 3. 2. The Status of Vowel Nasality 28 3. 3. The Nature of Unstressed e 35 3.4. The Front-Rounded Vowels; the Phoneme /0/ . 43 3. 5. The Back-Rounded Vowels 47 3.6. Diphthongs and Triphthongs 60 IV. CONCLUSION : MEIGRET'S VOWEL PHONEMES AND THE VALUE OF HIS TESTIMONY 4. 1. Vowel Phonemes and Their Allophones ... 69 4.2. Non-Linear Phonemes 70 4.3. Semi-Consonant Phonemes 70 TABLES 1. Meigret's Reformed Alphabet 73 2a. Meigret's Apparent Vowel System 74 2b. Peletier's Vowel System 74 2c. Vowel System of Modern Standard French ... 74 3. Table of Meigret's Diphthongs 75 BIBLIOGRAPHY EDITORIAL NOTE The manuscript of this work was submitted to the Monograph Series in December, 1952, and was accepted for publication shortly before the author's sudden death in the following month. Thus the author was unable to give his manuscript a final scrutiny or to see his book through the press. These tasks have been undertaken by others, including Professor Bernard Bloch, who was kind enough to find time in his busy schedule to give the work a rapid check before publication. Thanks are due to Professor Bloch for assisting in the editorial review of the manuscript, and to Professor Henri Peyre for taking on the melancholy task of writing an obituary. The Institute of Languages and Linguistics joins in mourning the passing of a promising scholar. In view of his untimely death, it is all the more fitting that his work, an important effort in the direction of applying the techniques of descripive linguistics to a historical problem, be preserved in print, both as some slight solace for the loss suffered by the family arid friends of the author, and as a permanent contribution to the world of scholarship in which George Raymond Shipman was a worthy member. Editor, Monograph Series Vll IN MEMORIAM BY HENRI PEYRE One of the truly distinguished and promising scholars in the field of Romance Linguistics in America disappeared on January 22, 1953 with the death, in a Washington hospital, of George Raymond Shipman. It is customary to praise the diligence, the penetration, the pro- fessional devotion, and the intellectual integrity of men who elect, out of an affinity akin to love, the career of a teacher and scholar. George Raymond Shipman possessed those virtues. But virtue with him never assumed the stern and sour face of the pedant who wants " cake and ale " no longer to lure his fellow-beings. Raymond, as he was called by his friends, might have had good reason to indict destiny and to nourish a grudge against nature. He was born with the handicap of an abnormally low stature. His height was under five feet. But that never made him embarrassed or self-conscious. He had been endowed with the happiest of dispositions. He " kept smiling " at life. His smile was neither affected nor stereotyped. It was the ironical smile of the man who possessed a vast store of understanding and of forgiveness and who perceived the comic aspect of things. His irony was gently tempered by humor: he knew how to laugh at himself. His courtesy was exquisite. He would have been at home in any eighteenth century aristocratic society. He was a gifted letter writer, and every one of his letters avoided the dryness of factual statement and the ponderousness of so much correspondence which is made up of acrimonious self-pity and of selfish and demanding requests. He wrote with a subtle and enter- taining elegance, almost flowery at times, which recalled the graceful allusiveness of preciosite. His charm won him many friends. It was not facile or calculated charm. There was courage and stoicism behind it. For his handicap had not made life easy for him, and solitude must often have visited the tenacious scholar that he was. But words of bitterness seldom or never were uttered by his lips. George Raymond Shipman was born in Lamoni, Iowa, on October 9, 1910. He graduated from public high school at Ames, Iowa, where IX X THE VOWEL PHONEMES OF MEIGRET his father, who is now retired, was a pastor of the Methodist church. His college career, at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, was an excellent one both scholastically and in the way of securing recogni- tion. After graduation in 1932 he worked as a newspaper writer and correspondent in his native state. He then enrolled at the State University of Iowa and, after two years of study (1936-38), during which time he majored in French and wrote a dissertation in that language, took an M. A. In 1938 he placed his unusual liguistic equipment at the service of the U. S. Department of Commerce, where he did research on foreign census and on census among foreign language groups for the Census Bureau. In November 1942 he shifted to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. In June 1944 he was sent to London, where he served for a year with the Office of Strategic Services. All the records and testimonials confirm his unusual competence and his efficiency as a government official, serving his country devotedly in critical years when he was not eligible for military duties. Languages had always attracted George Raymond Shipman. He learned them easily and well. He had studied Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Norse. He knew French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian well. He was also a keen analyst of the structure of language and a close student of modern linguistics. When he wished to pursue his studies and acquire the doctorate, he chose Yale Uni- versity as the center of learning in which he could best combine scientific linguistic studies and the esthetic approach to literary works which he would not forsake. He soon became not only a brilliant and mature student but a leader of other young men and women, admired by all for his generous and warm nature, for his role as a lively and wise " animateur," and for the range and precision of his knowledge. His dissertation, which was written during his four-year stay at Southwestern University, Memphis, Tennessee, and which earned him the Ph. Degree from Yale in 1950, was an original one. We know very little on French pronunciation in the past centuries, and not much on the early attempts at systematic presentation of French grammar. Yet, around Baif and Du Bellay, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, a few pioneers had undertaken to study and reform French spelling and to rationalize French grammar. Louis Meigret, on whom little research had yet been attempted, was the most original of those early grammarians. His two volumes, Traite touchant le IN MEMORIAM XI commun usage de l'ecriture franchise (1545) and Traite de la Gram- maire franchise (1550), were to impress the reformers of the Pleiade and many humanists. George Raymond Shipman has gone into the reasons which drove Meigret to conceive and formulate his original views, then into a penetrating study of those views on language in general and on the pronunciation of French. Trained as he was in modern linguistics, he translated Meigret's views into our present-day terminology in matters of phonology and reconstituted Meigret's probable pronunciation, which was that of a ' Lyonnais ' tainted by southern influences and perhaps even by Italian ones. His study of the most accurate observer of French sounds in the sixteenth century is precise, shrewd, and probably definitive, unless our present ideas of phonology undergo drastic change, which seems doubtful. It is a scientific work accomp- lished with method, subtlety, and insight. More could have been expected from George Raymond Shipman, who was marked by his elders as one of the few promising Romance linguists. But in 1951 he had to interrupt his studies and to undergo an operation for a growth on his left arm; the growth was unfor- tunately a cancerous one, and one of the worst forms. It was feared that the disease might not have been entirely eliminated from the system, and that fear was realized. Early in January of 1953 he entered a hospital in Washington, D. C, for what he thought was a check-up, but his illness became rapidly worse and death came on January 22, 1953, at the age of 42.

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