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From: Fr John L <>
Subject: Re: [Q-R] Bourgeois, etc.
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:02:06 -0500
References: <16106.17691.qm@web83714.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
In-Reply-To: <16106.17691.qm@web83714.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>


Chere cousine Suzanne,

I did, in fact, notice the dates of the citations (1802 for Baudry's
Voyage to Louisiana, and 1916 for Louis Hemon's novel, Maria
Chapdelaine -- which was on our mandatory reading list at Assumption
Prep School in Worcester Mass, back in the 1950s). I chose not to cite
them, ironically perhaps, for the same reason you chose to cite them:
because they make the point that the meaning of words "morphs" (to use
a word in the current vocabulary) over the course of years and even
more of centuries.

My undergraduate thesis, graduating from Assumption College (same
institution, different level) in 1959 was about the difficulty of
translating a word, a phrase, especially an idiom, from one language to
another, even if the translator was, as I am, fluent since childhood in
both languages. The byword on the paper was an Italian expresssion
"Traduttore, traditore", which I rendered in French and in English
interpretation (not really the same as translation) as "Le traducteur
est toujours un traitre", and "The translator is necessarily a
traitor." No word in one language corresponds exactly to any word in
another language; even if the denotation is similar, the connotations
differ. To some degree, none of us is a translator; all of us are
interpreters.


Fr John L


-----Original Message-----
From: Suzanne Sommerville <>
To:
Sent: Sat, 3 Jan
2009 8:05 am
Subject: Re: [Q-R] Bourgeois, etc.




In citing the definition given for habitant, Father, you did not notice
the
dates of the citations:
 
(Canada). Paysan, cultivateur. Les gens de la ville ont toujours
beaucoup plus
de ressources que les habitans pour obtenir du service des nègres
inférieurs
(BAUDRY DES LOZ., Voy. Louisiane, 1802, p. 264). La mère Chapdelaine
secoua le
tête.  Il n'y a pas de plus belle vie que la vie d'un habitant qui a de
la santé
et point de dettes, dit-elle. On est libre (HÉMON, M. Chapdelaine,
1916, p.
170).
 
That's1802 and 1916, and by that time the word had acquired these
denotations
and connotations because of complex social changes.
 
However, if Marcel Trudel can be believed, in New France the word
habitant had a
different meaning.  From one of my articles:
 

In reconstituting the census of 1666, Trudel learned that habitant (one
of the
terms used to classify the status of individuals in the census of 1666)
referred
to a person who was no longer bound by the hiring contract that brought
him or
her to New France, nor was he a soldier still serving his required
years of
enlistment. A habitant was a male person, or, if female, habitante, who
could be
granted land or purchase it, who could engage in trade, including but
not
limited to the fur trade. He or she could also=2
0farm, and many did, or
they could
hire someone else to farm land for him or her, but farmer was not the
exclusive
meaning of the term, as my examination of hundreds of notarial
documents has
verified. (Marcel Trudel, La Population du Canada en 1666, Sillery,
Québec: Les
Éditions du Septentrion, 1995.)
 
Checking the definition of the word habitant in the old French
dictionaries of
the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries,
available
on the Web, further confirms its meaning. See Dictionnaire de
L'Académie
française at >http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/dicos/<;
 
To Clarence Burton’s translators in the nineteenth century, and to
others,
though, a habitant was always a farmer. Recently I’ve been reading the
word
translated as peasant! In reality, a habitant was an inhabitant of New
France
who had chosen to remain and be a free citizen, to pursue whatever
occupation or
trade that became available. Some individuals are even called bourgeois
habitants.
 
I was aware of the shift in meaning of the word habitant long before I
read
Leslie Choquette’s  Frenchmen into Peasants, Modernity and Tradition in
the
Peopling of French Canada, Harvard University Press, 1997. Her study
establishes
without a doubt that cities and towns of  France contributed to the
peopling of
New France far more than French peasantry. John DuLong is right when
he
says the
habitants of New France refused to be called peasants. This is
well-documented.
As Choquette concludes: “French settlements in Québec and the Maritimes
were
more modern than otherwise before 1763 [the beginning of British rule
in Canada
].” And, she continues: “The irony of Frenchmen becoming peasants [by
the
nineteenth century] is thus compounded by yet another irony: the
archaic
traditional society whose epitaph [Francis] Parkman wrote and whose
survival
beyond the grave Ferland and Faillon celebrated was not really archaic
at all,
but a recent historical
development—one that had literally taken place within those historians’
lifetimes.” (Emphasis mine.) My grandfather would have grown up with
the
histories of these writers, as did my father.
 
So, to repeat, words have lives of their own and "modern" definitions
or going
to the root meaning of a word does not always result in accuracy.
 
Suzanne
 
For those of you who had a problem accessing the web site definition of
bourgeois, go to the main page and enter the word anew.
 
 Le Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé
 
at http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm
 

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