Summary: 'Baby diary' on a French King (Louis XIII)

[Patrick Griffiths]

Dear CHILDES
 
Many thanks to the following colleagues who helped me find a 
lost reference that pushes the start of baby diaries back to the 
beginning of the 17th Century (not Tiedemann near the end of 
the 18th century, as I was told when I was an undergraduate):

David Ingram
Marie-Thérèse Le Normand
Joe Stemberger
Eduardo Blasco Ferrer
Péter Bodor
Michèle Guidetti 
Matthew Rispoli
Barbara Zurer Pearson
 
I asked about a long-term diary record kept by the personal physician 
of a king of France, on the king's development. It turns out that the 
king was Louis XIII. The paper I had read but was unable to recollect 
details of is:
 
Ingram, D. & Le Normand, M-T. (1996). A diary study on the acquisition of Middle French: 
A preliminary report of the early language acquisition of Louis XIII. Proceedings of the 
20th annual Boston University conference on language development, 352-63. 
 
Gerhard Ernst, of Regensburg, did earlier work on the diary: 
 
Ernst, G. (1985) Gesprochenes Franzoesisch zu Beginn des 17
Jahrhunderts, Direkte Rede in Jean Héroards "Histoire particulière de Louis
XIII" (1601-1610), Tubingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, X-623pp.

Ernst, G. (1989) le langage du prince. In Foisil (ed), vol 1, 189-214
Foisil Madeleine (ed) 1989. Journal de Jean Héroards. Publication du centre
de recherche sur la civilisation de l'Europe moderne, 2 volumes, Paris,
Fayard (Vol 1, 1601-1608; vol 2, 1609-1628)

Ernst apparently had the data published as a supplement to the German 
journal of Romance philology (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fuer romanische 
Philologie).

Another paper about this diary is: 

Gougenheim, H (1931) L'observation du langage d'un enfant royal au XVIIe
siècle. Revue de philologie française et romane, 43, 1-15.
I was also told about an analysis of the diaries in Philip Aries' studies 
on the history of childhood. 

Here's an abstract of the Ingram and Le Normand article:

Early French was markedly different from Modern French. Among its properties are that it was pro drop, allowed the inversion of verbs and lexical subjects in questions, and had V2 word order. All of these properties have been lost in Modern French. The process of how these changes took place in Middle French have been speculated upon in Clark & Robert (1993), but no language acquisition data have been brought to bear upon them.
The possibility for examining questions such as these ones, as well as others, has arisen with the recent discovery of a diary on the language acquisition of Louis XIII (1601-1643). Louis's physician kept a daily diary on his development from his birth in 1601 until the physician's death in 1628. This paper is a preliminary report on the diary, focussing on the entries for the first four years of Louis'life. The central focus will be descriptive, i.e. presenting information on the general characteristics of the diary data. In addition, some preliminary analyses will be presented on the nature of Louis' language in relation to the properties of French which were under change in Middle French.

With gratitude,

Patrick Griffiths

Beppu University

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