Reviews for Liber Donati

The average rating for Liber Donati based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-05 00:00:00 Javier Villalon This is a textbook of Old French that teaches the language across twenty-three lessons which each start with a reading passage, then explain some aspect of inflection or syntax, and finally offer details of historical phonology. The reading selections are drawn from Marie de France, the Life of Saint Thomas Becket, and the tale of Aucassin and Nicolette. These reading selections do not increase in difficulty – they are all about as equally challenging or not – but they do represent different dialects with different orthographies, as Old French was not a monolithic language. The book does not explicitly require a knowledge of modern French. Nevertheless, the reader is clearly expected to already know some French, because it is on the basis of modern French that readers will be able to get the gist of the reading passages before the author has had time to lay out all the grammar involved. What the author does explicitly demand of the reader is a knowledge of Latin. One of the chief concerns of this book is tracing the phonological developments that produced Old French from Vulgar Latin. As many readers of this book may be interested in the Romance languages in general, this is useful context. These details are more than mere historical trivia, for understanding Latin and Old French historical phonology helps one make sense of the wealth of noun paradigms in Old French, by which a noun stem can change considerably from one case to another. This historical knowledge also equips the learner to deal with divergent forms across time and space. Thus, by the last chapters the Phonology section is concerned with how Norman French, Picard, Wallon, etc. show some slightly different outcomes of Vulgar Latin sound changes than the Francien dialect most ancestral to modern France. I found this a fun book to work through. Old French turns out to be a pretty conventional Romance language; I didn’t know before that most of the weird changes (massive loss of final consonants, nearly polysynthetic grammar) that set Modern French apart from Italian or Spanish actually occurred from the 14th century on, and not all the way back in the early medieval period.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-25 00:00:00 Thomas Vigliotti No wonder everyone was illiterate back then. Good intro to the language; I especially liked the original Old French stories, and the sections on phonology and dialect. Seems like a crazy time period.