Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Trotter, D. A.

Titel

Overbeck, Anja, Literarische Skripta in Ostfrankreich. Edition und sprachliche Analyse einer französischen Handschrift des Reiseberichts von Marco Polo (Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, Cod. Holm. M 304). (Trierer Historische Forschungen. Band 51.) Trier: Kliomedia, 2003, 539 pp. + 6 illustrations. 3 89890 063 0

Ist Teil von

• Journal of French Language Studies, 2005-11, Vol.15 (3), p.323-324

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• General thresholds for inclusion in the DFB were set at 70 per cent recognition and 40 per cent active usage for each item, but a number of other forms which showed a strong correlation with sub-groups based on age, locality or other parameters were also retained, for example bonbon in the sense of gteau sec, which appears geographically restricted to the area around Lige. Cultural and linguistic contact, on the other hand, and the very homogeneity of the linguistic system, which ensures that similar productive processes (e.g. sufxation, prexation) are available throughout the francophone world, tend to reduce variation between African varieties. While the editor takes pride in the multidisciplinary nature of his research team reected in a collection which ranges from Ancient Greece to the present day via the Middle Ages, taking in France, Belgium, Italy and francophone Africa along the way the volume is possibly casting its net a bit wide and for this reviewer at least the lack of genuine thematic unity is disconcerting. Yet Polo is a text of seminal importance for lots of reasons: cultural and historical, linguistic (irrespective of ones views on its genesis, the linguistic features of the individual witnesses are of considerable interest), sociolinguistic (the roles of French, Italian, Latin and Franco-Italian in northern Italy in the late thirteenth century) and of course lexical (by virtue of its inherently unusual subject-matter).