[7]
FOOTNOTES:
[7] See "Liberty."
_FRENCH_
The French language did not begin to have any form until towards the
tenth century; it was born from the ruins of Latin and Celtic, mixed
with a few Germanic words. This language was first of all the _romanum
rusticum_, rustic Roman, and the Germanic language was the court
language up to the time of Charles the Bald; Germanic remained the sole
language of Germany after the great epoch of the partition of 843.
Rustic Roman, the Romance language, prevailed in Western France; the
people of the country of Vaud, of the Valais, of the Engadine valley,
and of a few other cantons, still retain to-day manifest vestiges of
this idiom.
At the end of the tenth century French was formed; people wrote in
French at the beginning of the eleventh; but this French still retained
more of Rustic Roman than the French of to-day. The romance of
Philomena, written in the tenth century in rustic Roman, is not in a
tongue very different from that of the Norman laws. One still remarks
Celtic, Latin and German derivations. The words signifying the parts of
the human body, or things of daily use, and which have nothing in common
with Latin or German, are in old Gaulish or Celtic, such as _tete_,
_jambe_, _sabre_, _pointe_, _aller_, _parler_, _ecouter_, _regarder_,
_aboyer_, _crier_, _coutume_, _ensemble_, and many others of this kind.
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