Dialogues in French and English
Dialogues in French and English
By William Caxton
27 Nov, 2018
FROM THE INTRODUCTION......The French of the Paris MS. is the Picard dialect of the former half of the fourteenth century. The French of Caxton’s book retains many of the original north-eastern forms, but is to a considerable extent modernized and
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FROM THE INTRODUCTION......The French of the Paris MS. is the Picard dialect of the former half of the fourteenth century. The French of Caxton’s book retains many of the original north-eastern forms, but is to a considerable extent modernized and assimilated to the literary language of a later period. Such ‘etymological’ spellings as recepueur, debuoit, are common in Caxton’s text, but rarely occur in Michelant. The following comparative specimen of the two versions will afford some notion of the orthographical and grammatical differences between them, and also of the degree in which Caxton’s English was influenced by his Flemish original. Less