Diachrony in Niçois dictionaries: a new approach
Résumé
Niçois is a dialect of Occitan. From Carles (1866) to Escola de Bellanda (2014), most Niçois lexicographers disregard diachronic data. This is not true of two dictionaries (Castellana, 1947 and Giordan, 1963) whose ambitious panchronic stance is damaged by a flawed method : words are randomly picked up from ancient texts, regardless of whether they fit modern usage or not, and are presented unaltered amid the everyday lexicon. As marking proves to be absent or insufficient (does "1397" mean it is the first, or the only, or just one occurrence of a word ?), such significant works end up being pretty much confusing for their users : neither real usage nor old vocabulary is optimally described.
The electronic, corpus-based Variational Dictionary of Niçois (VDN) project adopts a different approach. It is meant to be a synchronic dictionary. Yet "synchrony" does not refer here to a single spot on the axis of time, but to a homogeneous, consistent language state, i.e. to a period. VDN is a dictionary of the current state of Niçois (CUN, for Contemporary Urban Niçois). It considers that CUN took shape at the turn of the 19th Century, when the language of Nice, after going through the prosodic strengthening process (Dalbera, 1988-89), became patently different from other Occitan dialects. However, expanding over two centuries, the data are systematically evaluated from today’s point of view so that the user knows whenever a recorded word, pronunciation or meaning has become old-fashioned, formal, literary, etc.
But VDN also has a broader diachronic perspective. Diatopic variation in the mountainous County of Nice corresponds clearly to different stages of language evolution (Dalbera, 1994). As a diachronic projection, diatopy draws a soft, graduated transition between CUN and old Occitan. VDN is designed to show that diatopic variation. In order to generate maps and lists of variants, VDN will be connected to THESOC (developed in BCL, University of Nice), a database of the 20th Century Occitan oral lexicon. The historical syntheses which are to be found at the end of each entry will make use of and compare old Occitan, diatopic and CUN lexical forms. They will also analyze the structure and evolution of meaning, using the motivational etymology method (Dalbera, 2006) that mostly relies on diatopic diversity. For the first time, Niçois lexicography should thus be endowed with a usage-describing dictionary mindful of diachronic issues.
Bibliography
Carles Pietro, 1866, Piccolo vocabolario Nizzardo-Italiano, Ms.
Castellana Georges, 1947, Dictionnaire français-niçois, Nice: Editions ludographiques françaises.
Dalbera Jean-Philippe, 1988-89, « Phénomènes de contact, conflit de normes et changement linguistique. Le parler nissart urbain », Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Nice, 10-11, 27-51.
Dalbera Jean-Philippe, 1994, Les parlers des Alpes-Maritimes, étude comparative, essai de reconstruction, Londres: AIEO.
Dalbera Jean-Philippe, 2006, Des dialectes au langage, une archéologie du sens, Paris: Champion.
Escola de Bellanda, 2014, Dictionnaire français-niçois, Nice: Serre.
Giordan Joseph, 1963, Lexique complémentaire du parler de la ville de Nice et des pays environnants, Nice: Vincentelli.