Huon de Bordeaux: An Examination of Generative Forces in Late Epic Diction

Abstract

In the following pages I shall sketch out what I perceive as an important relationship between what Edward Sapir called "linguistic drift"1 and certain patterns of change in the narrative of Huon de Bordeaux. While I shall speak of only part of this one text, hopefully these remarks will indicate a perspective from which other texts might be examined in future attempts to understand the problematic domain of medieval French literary development. In the possibly extravagant hope that this brief study can make clear such a perspective, which derives largely from Sapir's work, I should like to cite a passage from his chapter on drift:

• Language exists only in so far as it is actually used—spoken and heard, written and read. What significant changes take place in it must exist, to begin with, as individual variations. This is perfectly true, and yet it by no means follows that the general drift of language can be understood from an exhaustive descriptive study of these variations alone. They themselves are random phenomena, like the waves of the sea, moving backward and forward in purposeless flux. The linguistic drift has direction. In other words, only those individual variations embody it or carry it which move in a certain direction, just as only certain wave movements in the bay outline the tide. The drift of a language is constituted by the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction (Sapir, pp. 154-5).