Outline of the history of French 3304-3ZHJ-3C/1

The content of the lessons will be the appearance and development of the French language in the Middle Ages. The following are the most important components:
Winter semester
1) The evolution of spoken Latin, the origins of the Romance languages. The Roman conquests of Gallia, the shaping of the Romance language, the Germanic invasions, Serments de Strasbourg 842 - the oldest testimony of the Romance language in old Galii.
2) The evolution of spoken Latin: the role and placement of stress; phonetic, morphological and lexical alterations.
3) Old French (northern and central France, langue d’oïl) from the ninth century to the mid fourteenth century, the language of southern France (langue d’oc). Varieties of both languages, linguistic geography.
4) Phonetic system of Old French (langue d’oïl): its spontaneous evolution, the context-dependent evolution of consonants, the articulatory changes of vowels.
5) The link between spelling and pronunciation, traces of the old spelling rules in the spelling system of modern French.

Summer semester
6) The grammatical categories of Old French and Modern French, differences and continuity,
7) Nominal parts of speech: noun, adjective, numeral, pronoun, flexive forms and their gradual disappearance, evolution from Latin forms to those of the modern language. Historical grounds of the so-called exceptions in forming gender, number, and grade (for adjectives) in modern French.
8) The verb: historical explanations of modern conjugation patterns (conjugation groups), impersonal forms, personal forms of tenses and modes. Rudimentary uses, differences with regard to the modern language.
9) The system of tenses in Old French and Modern French, continuity and differences.
10) Indeclinable words: adverb, preposition, conjunction, differences between the forms in the old and modern varieties of the language.
11) Syntactic functions of individual grammatical categories within a sentence. Word order, basic forms of parataxis and hypotaxis, differences with regard to modern syntax.
12) In the course of discussing said topics: there will be an analysis of selected excerpts from Old French texts from a phonetic and morpho-syntactic perspective, translation into the modern language and Polish, working with an etymological dictionary and a dictionary of Old French (see bibliography).