Gabriel Girard

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gabriel Girard (* 1677 in Montferrand, Clermont-Ferrand , † February 4, 1748 in Montferrand) was a French Romance scholar , Slavist, grammarian and lexicologist.

life and work

Girard, known as abbé Girard, was first canon in Montferrand, then chaplain to Marie Louise Élisabeth d'Orléans in Paris , and (as an employee of the Bibliothèque Nationale, under Jean-Paul Bignon ) translator and interpreter for the king from 1725 to 1747 Russian and other Slavic languages, which hardly went beyond the library area.

In 1718 Girard published the first book of a modern language devoted exclusively to the comparison of synonyms (Latin models existed). It was entitled La Justesse de la langue françoise, ou les différentes significations des mots qui passent pour synonymes (263 pages), from 1736 the title Synonymes françois. Leurs différentes significations et le choix qu'il faut en faire (490 pages, 13th edition, 1766; then re-edited by Nicolas Beauzée , 1769, last 1808; re-edited by Maria Gabriella Adamo, Fasano 1999; also Houilles 2007; English: A new guide to eloquence being treatise of the proper distinctions to be observed between words reckoned synonymous; or, their different significations, and the choice which should be made of them, in order to express ourselves justly. The synonymous words classed alphabetically; upon the plan of a French work of the same nature, by the Abbot Girard , London 1762, Farmington Hills 2009; The difference between words esteemed synonymous, London 1766, Menston 1970).

The book turned the synonym separation into a kind of parlor game and drew synonym-separating dictionaries in French as in numerous other languages, the increasing theorization of which (mainly by Johann August Eberhard and Pierre-Benjamin Lafaye ) resulted in modern structural semantics .

Shortly before his death, Girard published a theoretically ambitious grammar that was re-edited by Pierre Swiggers. became: Les Vrais principes de la langue françoise, ou la Parole réduite en méthode (2 vols., Paris 1747, Geneva 1982, 432 + 470 pages).

Girard was accepted into the Académie française in 1744 . Vasily Kirillowitsch Trediakowski can be considered his pupil from 1727.

Other works

  • L'Ortografe française sans équivoques et dans ses principes naturels, ou l'Art d'écrire notre langue selon les loix de la raison et de l'usage , Paris 1716 (267 pages)
  • Lettre d'un abbé à un gentilhomme de province contenant des observations sur le stile et les pensées de la nouvelle tragédie d'Œdipe, et des réflexions sur la dernière lettre de M. de Voltaire , Paris 1719 (23 pages)
  • Nouvelles remarques sur l'Œdipe de M. de Voltaire, et sur ses lettres critiques où l'on justifie Corneille et où l'on fait un parallèle des deux tragédies de ces auteurs , Paris 1719 (119 pages)

literature

  • Dictionnaire de biography française sv
  • André Mazon, L'abbé Gabriel Girard, grammairien et russisant, in: Revue des études slaves 35, 1958, pp. 15–56
  • Hans-Martin Gauger, The beginnings of synonymy. Girard (1718) and Roubaud (1785), Tübingen 1973
  • Franz Josef Hausmann, 102. The Dictionary of Synonyms: Discriminating Synonymy, in: Dictionaries. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. An international handbook on lexicography. Second part of volume , ed. by Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand and Ladislav Zgusta, Berlin. New York 1990, pp. 1067-1075
  • Pierre Swiggers, 17a. History of grammars and linguistic teachings of Romance languages ​​in Romania, in: Lexikon der Romance Linguistik (LRL), ed. by Günter Holtus, Michael Metzeltin and Christian Schmitt, vol. 1.1. History of Romance Studies. Methodology (Das Sprachsystem ), Tübingen 2001, pp. 476–505 (in French)

Web links