ABSTRACT
P: Indeed, and who fingers many of his barrels, When he draws the red wine without payment.a 12 CA: Cliquet, in the name of the faith you owe Saint Mark, Shut up, stop going on! CL: Let's rather drink in comfort and peace; We've still got wine in the pot 16 Of our first half measure, And a burning candle.]
This extract, a scene in an inn taken from the first known French miracle play and probably written around 1200 by the jongleur, Jehan Bodel, has been included to try to represent certain more colloquial features of Old French usage; but it equally illustrates the difficulty of such a venture, since we are dealing with a literary artefact which is, moreover, in verse (this section being in octosyllabic rhyming couplets). Note too that the text is based on the sole surviving manuscript (Bibliotheque nationale, fro 25566), which dates from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century and shows a mixture of Francien forms with Picard phonological and morphological traits - note, for example, the reduction of z [ts] > s, reflected consistently in the spellings of the second person plural forms taisies vous, paries (1. 14), the Picard ending -che for present subjunctive forms (tache, 1. 4), and the unstressed possessive forms, sen (1. 10) and no (1. 17). Henry (1981: 33) described the play in the following terms: 'Tout au long de la piece, se cotoient ou se melent Ie sacre et Ie profane, Ie sublime et Ie comique, Ie merveilleux des songes et des interventions divines et Ie realisme de gens preoccupes d'argent, de nourriture, de vin et de jeu'. There are certainly realistic elements in this scene which apparently employs colloquial expressions and argot forms such as santissies, marc, cois (1. 9), geugon, aseme (1. 10), bignon, teme (1. 11), bai, marc (1. 12). The style is animated and lively using exclamations (Be! Dieus!) and comic names for the characters. Yet as regards morphosyntax, for example in the regular adherence to the two-case system (note the regular masculine nominative singular forms Ii ostes 1. 7, Dieus 1. 5 (vs. Dieu, 1. 4) and nominative plural forms (Ii levre, 1. 2», the text appears very conservative and careful. The colloquial flavour might then be considered to be rather superficial in being primarily lexical.
