L’Étude récréative et sérieuse de Vincent Roudaut, un hérétique du celtisme au XIXe siècle

• Published in: La Bretagne Linguistique Vol. 23; pp. 199 - 228
• Main Author: Malo Morvan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; French
• Published: Université de Bretagne Occidentale – UBO 01-05-2020
• Subjects: Breton (language); historiography; orthography; polemics; sociolinguistics
• ISSN: 1270-2412; 2727-9383
• DOI: 10.4000/lbl.607

This article presents the theses defended in Vincent Roudaut’s work entitled Supplément aux dictionnaires bretons (1872). Unlike his Breton contemporaries, he advanced a history of the language that did not radically differentiate Breton and French. This positioning influenced his orthographic proposals, which increased the proximity between the two languages and highlighted other, particularly morphological, criteria. In his reflections on translation, he opposed a notion that was centred on the word-for-word translation of the lexicon and promoted the exploitation of syntactic resources. This author’s positionings seem in many respects to have anticipated the debates that were to manifest the following century.