Brunot, Ferdinand

Brunot, Ferdinand 

Born Nov. 6, 1860, in St. Dié; died Jan. 30, 1938, in Paris. French linguist.

Brunot was the organizer and author of the multivolume History of the French Langauge, which began to appear in 1905 and gradually became a collective work that is still being continued today. The basis of Brunot’s book Thoughtand Language (1922) is the formal analysis of grammar, which is somewhat at variance with his own position as a historian of language who devoted much attention to the relationship between the national literary language and the political, social, and cultural development of the country.

WORKS

Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, [lst-3rd eds.], vols. 1-10, 12-13. Paris, 1917-53.
La pensée et la langue, 3rd ed. Paris, 1953.
Précis de grammaire historique de la langue française, 4th ed. Paris, 1956.