Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle

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Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle (born June 10, 1802 in Paris ; † February 4, 1883 there ) was a French grammarian, lexicographer and Romance philologist .

life and work

The beginnings

Bescherelle studied law, became archivist in the Archives of the State Council in 1825 and librarian in the Louvre library in 1828. In 1829 under Charles X, he published a grammatical work on the participe passé as well as a critique of the existing grammars. After the revolution of 1830 he became the grammarian and lexicographer of the ambitious patriotic bourgeoisie, which was not sure of its correctness of language and demanded comprehensive normative information.

The grammar

Bescherelle first published a "national" grammar with the following analytical title: Grammaire Nationale ou Grammaire de Voltaire, de Racine, de Bossuet, de Fénelon, de J.-J. Rousseau, de Buffon, de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, de Chateaubriand, de Casimir Delavigne, et de tous les écrivains les plus distingués de la France; Renfermant plus de cent mille examples qui servent à fonder les règles, et formment comme une espèce de panorama où se déroule notre langue, telle que la nation l'a faite, telle que la nation doit la parler. Ouvrage éminemment classique, qui, indépendamment de son but spécial, doit être considéré comme un Cours pratique de littérature française, et une introduction à toutes les branches des connaissances humaines; publié avec le concours de MM. Casimir Delavigne, de Jouy, Villemain, Tissot, Nodier, de Gérando, É. Johanneau, Deshoulières, Lévi, Litais de Gaux […] Et précédée d'un Essai sur la Grammaire en France et de quelques considérations philosophiques et littéraires sur la langue française par M. Philarète Chasles , Paris, Leipzig [published there by Leopold Michelsen] 1834.

He added a volume of exercises and, in 1838, a school grammar and made an attempt at a grammar newspaper under the title "Das grammatical France": La France Grammaticale, Journal des écoles primaires, des collèges, des pensions, des gens du monde et de l'instruction publique en général .

The peculiarity of Bescherelle's national grammar lay in the large number of examples taken from the classics recognized as authorities. Here the insufficiently educated bourgeois entrepreneurship found security against its own linguistic inferiority complexes. The grammar appeared in 15 editions by 1877.

The conjugation book

Even more successful was the conjugation book published together with younger brother Henri-Honoré Bescherelle (1804-1887) in 1842ff with the changing titles Le véritable manuel des conjugaisons ou Les conjugaisons mises à la portée de tout le monde and Le dictionnaire usuel de tous les verbes français tant réguliers qu'irréguliers, entièrement conjugués, contenant, par ordre alphabétique, les 7000 verbes de la langue française avec leur conjugaison complète (3rd edition 1852, 6th edition 1877, 19th edition 1926, 22nd edition 1946). This book merged early on with a competitor, the Dictionnaire synoptique de tous les verbes de la langue française tant réguliers qu'irréguliers, entièrement conjugués by E. Verlac (also 1843), to which Litais de Gaux wrote an extensive theoretical introduction after he, As he explains in the foreword, knowing Verlac's work, he had renounced his own company of this type, which had started in 1840.

The merger resulted in the book type that still exists today, which is published under the generic title “ Bescherelle ” and which has become an institution in France. In essence, he means a verb dictionary and / or a lexicographical verb grammar that is now available not only for French, but also for a number of foreign languages. So has z. B. the Germanist Michel Esterle the knowledge from his Thèse de doctorat about the German verb particles in the Bescherelle allemand. Les verbes or 8000 verbes allemands: formes et emplois (Paris: Hatier, last edition 2008) and presented a remarkable combination of linguistic-scientific and practical-didactic description.

The dictionary

In 1846, Bescherelle published the national dictionary as a lexicographical counterpart to his national grammar: Dictionnaire National ou Dictionnaire Universel de la langue française in 2 volumes. This dictionary, based on a combination of verbosity (130,000 words) and normative correctness, had 18 editions by 1890. The school dictionary derived from this, Dictionnaire classique et élémentaire de la langue française , which appeared in 1844, was published in the version edited by Joseph-Antoine Pons until 1892.

literature

  • Dictionnaire de biography française sv
  • Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand: Bescherelle, Louis-Nicolas, in: Lexicon Grammaticorum , ed. by Harro Stammerjohann, Tübingen 1996, pp. 99-100
  • Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française , Vol. 12, Paris 1968, pp. 490-494

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Acte de décès de Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle sur le site des Archives de Paris 10e, le 4 février 1883, vue 8/31 .
personal data
SURNAME Bescherelle, Louis-Nicolas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French Romance philologist, grammarian and lexicographer
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1802
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 4, 1883
Place of death Paris