Louis de Courcillon de Dangeau

Louis de Courcillon de Dangeau (born January 1643 in Paris ; † January 4, 1723 ibid), was a French cleric , Romance scholar , grammarian and phonetician .

life and work

The Abbé Dangeau, who was converted to Catholicism as a Huguenot by Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, held the (bought) office at the court of a Lecteur du Roi from 1671 to 1685. In 1682 he was elected to the Académie française . He ran a salon for intellectual conversations.

As a high-ranking grammarian and phonetician, Dangeau had sharpened his ability to analyze the French language (at a young age in military service and later on a diplomatic mission) by dealing with and comparing numerous foreign languages, including Eastern European ones, and was the first to gain a clear understanding of the French nasal vowels .

Louis de Courcillon de Dangeau was the younger brother of Philippe de Courcillon de Dangeau (1638–1720), author of a court diary that inspired Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon .

Works

Phonetics and Grammar

Essais de grammaire contenus en trois lettres d'un académicien à un autre académicien , Paris 1694
- Essais de grammaire, qui contiennent I. un discours sur les voyèles, II. Un discours sur les consones, III. une lêtre sur l'ortografe, IV. supplément à la lêtre sur l'ortografe. Suite des essais de grammaire , Paris 1711; ed. by Bernard Jullien , Paris 1849
- Réflexions sur la grammaire fransoise , Paris 1717
- Idées nouvèles sur diférantes matières de grammaire , Paris 1722
- Opuscules sur la langue française par divers académiciens , Paris 1754, Geneva 1969, Paris 2011
- Opuscules on the grammaire par l'abbé de Dangeau. Réédités d'après les éditions originales avec introduction et commentaire, ed. by Manne Ekman, Uppsala 1927, Paris 2011

Other works

Nouvelle métode de geography historique , Paris 1693
Tableau des provinces de France , Paris 1694
Principes du blason , Paris 1709, 1715, 1973
(with François-Timoléon de Choisy) Quatre dialogues . I. Sur l'immortalité de l'ame. II. Sur l'existence de Dieu. III. Sur la providence. IV. Sur la religion, Paris 1684, 1768; ed. by Richard Parish, Friborg 1981

literature

Hugo Niemer, The orthographic reform attempts of the French phoneticians of the XIX. Century. Part 1 , Greifswald 1882 (pp. 14–16)
Jean Breuillard, Grammaire du russe et grammaire du français au XVIIIe siècle, in: Irina Fougeron, Etudes russes. Mélanges offerts au professeur Louis Allain , Paris 1995, pp. 151–166 (here: 159f.)
Christophe Rey, Une approche historique du concept de "Nasalité" ( http://www.afcp-parole.org/doc/Archives_JEP/2008_XXVIIe_JEP_Avignon/PDF/avignon2008_pdf/JEP/057_jep_1558.pdf )

Web links

Literature by and about Louis de Courcillon de Dangeau in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
http://ctlf.ens-lyon.fr/n_fiche.asp?num=2310 (entry on Dangeau's grammatical work, French)

personal data
SURNAME	Dangeau, Louis de Courcillon de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Dangeau, abbé de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French Romance scholar, grammarian and phonetician
DATE OF BIRTH	January 1643
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris
DATE OF DEATH	January 4, 1723
Place of death	Paris