Motto word: "honi" (Honi soit qui mal y pense)

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EducatorPermalink Reply by stu harris on April 3, 2011 at 1:44am

It would be honnir, and the modern participle honni. Not something you might hear on every café terrace these days, but it exists.

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Permalink Reply by inbxadh on April 3, 2011 at 4:44am

Your reply is appreciated, especially because I did not find the word listed in the internet dictionary that I consulted.   I did find it after I read your message in my Larousse de Poche.   I guess the internet is not le dernier cri !

Thank you.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on April 4, 2011 at 10:45pm

I don't know that it's necessarily an Internet vs non-Internet thing.  The verb "honnir" is no longer used in contemporary French and any dictionary, Internet or otherwise, has to make some kind of decision as to  reasonable scope of words to include along various dimensions including the time dimension (otherwise, a French dictionary would include all words of Latin and words from various intermediate stages of the language).

 

On the other hand, there are dictionaries, both paper and Internet based, specialising in historic stages of the language.

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Permalink Reply by inbxadh on April 5, 2011 at 7:21am

I don't know how the French academy influences the editing of French dictionaries.   Of course, in English (or I suppose in other languages) there are similar problems of choice.   In English, we have the transitive verb "to shame" (to shame someone into doing something).  We also have the participial form "ashamed" as an adjective (the ashamed victim).   Surely, there are such useful words in French, but they may not be related to honnir  or to honte (nf).   Perhaps, you could elucidate.

Thanks for your comment.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on April 5, 2011 at 12:06pm

The French Academy has no direct influence on any other dictionary except its own (why would it?). Indirectly, it can have a very minor influence if one of its suggestions becomes popular in some way to the point that a dictionary editor decides that that suggestion should be taken into account. This has happened with recent government initiatives to revive the French spealling reform proposals of 1990. As far as I understand, it is now on the French primary school curriculum to teach the "new" spellings, and so this has created a marketing opportunity for dictionary editors to produce new editions with the "new" spellings (even if they are still sidelined at the moment). But it's an indirect influence.

 

I don't quite understand precisely what your second question is, but I'll expand slightly on the situation with "honte"/"honnir". Both of these words have existed in French for as long as French has been "French": both words appear in the "Chanson de Roland" (which dates from the late 11th century and is the oldest surviving text of any significant length that is ostensibly "French"). They also appear several times (the Chanson de Roland is a good ole' typical medieval tale of pride, valor etc and so notions like "shame", "dishonour" are recurrent undertones), suggesting that they're reasonably well established. I'm not sure to what extent we can say that one derives from the other in French, or if they were both coined at more or less the same time (they are apparently derived from Old Frankish words beginning in "haun-"): as I say, by the time the first French text of any length appears, both words appear to be established.

 

In any case, what "honte"/"honnir" illustrate is how a derivative/related word can go out of use while the "base" form survives, or indeed vice versa.

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