lire le livre Les Mots latins pour Mathilde: Petites leçons d'une grande langue

At one time, people thought that the Greek word crocodeilos was derived from krokos (saffran) and deilos (fearful), which made the crocodile an animal who was afraid of saffran. As a result of erroneous knowledge, people were retaining three words instantly and everyone, like young Montaigne, was reading Latin fluently. Today, linguistic sciences have made prodigious strides, but readers of such languages have become very scarce. To fill in the gap between increasingly scholarly specialists and increasingly powerless amateurs, the author chose to be the first to relate in a broad outline the history of linguistics and, in the process, the key stages of this other amazing collective adventure that was the constitution and evolution of an illustrious language of civilisation. First there was the Indo-European legacy, foreseen as early as the 18th century, which discovered Sanskrit and invented a new account of its origins; then came enrichment: work done by the language on itself by prefixation, suffixation and composition; polysemy, which falls under semantics and endows each word with a multiplicity of meanings; and lastly evolution, which led to the Romance languages, and particularly to French, in which Latin is still transparent enough to be read. Thus there are not one, but several, small vocabulary lessons, progressively presented and illustrated by abundant lists that readers can occasionally dip into and learn from, or enjoy – a thousand everyday words so well explained and so evident that recalling them becomes automatic and effortless. Source: ENG