Sixteenth-century views on the spelling and pronunciation of French

Part I of this thesis shows how external nonlinguistic events such as political unification, improved communications, national and linguistic pride, printing, the prescriptions of grammarians; and the conscious choices of a growing class of literate speakers became in the Renaissance important factors influencing both the direction of linguistic change and the rate of that change. Part II presents the debates raging in the 16th century concerning the spelling of French and shows how the inclinations of 16th-century writers and printers were in large part responsible for the spelling system of modern French. Part III brings together representative statements of 16th-century grammarians and phoneticians concerning the pronunciation of French to show that descriptions of speech sounds made before the days of tape recordings can, however, contribute to our ability to reconstruct the phonology of earlier periods. By the 16th century, spelling had become conventional and almost everybody was writing letters for sounds they were not pronouncing. Thus, traditional spellings tell us little about actual pronunciation. At the same time learned influences were beginning to affect more and more speakers creating conflict between the spontaneous evolution of language and the conservative forces which resist change. The resulting diversity noted in the various segments of the population and irregularities in forms interfere with the reliability of classical reconstruction techniques, further increasing the importance of the grammarians' descriptions. It will be seen that in many cases these descriptions constitute our primary source of information as to when and for whom certain changes occurred, while in other instances observations are scarce, unreliable, or clearly in error and we must depend largely on other available evidence, such as rhymes and misspellings.