The Guernsey Norman French Translations of Thomas Martin: A Linguistic Study of an Unpublished Archive (Orbis Supplementa)

This major linguistic study of Guernsey Norman French offers an extensive presentation and analysis of one of the most important sources of data available in the dialect, namely Thomas Martin's translations of the Bible and of 100 plays from the work of Shakespeare, Longfellow, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, Molière and Voltaire. The book describes the socio-political development of Guernsey Norman French, its salient features and linguistic context, and presents the translations against the backdrop of late nineteenth-century Guernsey society. The linguistic analysis focuses on Martin's orthographic system, the way in which the translations reflect nineteenth-century Guernsey Norman french and how the corpus can provide new grammatical and lexical information about the dialect. Transcribed extracts from the translations are also included, supplemented by linguistic notes. The book will be of interest to linguists studying dialectology, translation and language contact and change.