ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 1584
http://www.s-gabriel.org/1584
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30 Mar 1999
From:  (Josh Mittleman)


Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked whether <Yvon de Marseille> is an appropriate name for a French
woman living between 1100 and 1500.  Here's what we've found.

<Yvon> is a masculine name, a diminutive form of <Yve>.  It occurs in the
13th century in Paris, used by a man from Brittany.  The root name <Yve> or
<Ive> occurs in various parts of northern France -- Picardy, Champagne,
Paris -- but we've never seen it used in medieval southern France.  Our
references include only one feminine form of the name, <Ivonete>, also
recorded in 13th century Paris [1, 2, 3].  The feminine <Ivonne> or
<Yvonne> is a plausible invention, similar in form to several other 13th
and 14th century women's names, but we can't recommend it as good
re-creation without reservation since we haven't found an example in our
sources [4].

In your period, the language spoken in Marseille was Provencal, not French.
The two languages were closely related, but different.  Many names had
forms in both languages, but we have not found any form of <Yve> in
southern France so we do not recommend a form of that name for a Provencal
persona.  If you'd like to consider other women's names that we have found
in the south, you could use any of the following lists:

  Late Period Feminine Names from the South of France
    http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/talan/latefrenchfem/

  Names from Fourteenth Century Foix
    http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/cateline/foix.html

  Names from Thirteenth Century Languedoc
    http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/cateline/languedoc.html

The modern French placename <Marseille> was spelled differently in the
Provencal of your period.  It appears in several troubadour poems as
<Marselha>, <Marcelha>, <Marsella>, and <Marseilla> [5].  The letter
combinations <lh> and <ll> represent a palatalized <l>, which is the sound
of the letters <li> in the word <billion>.  Thus, we believe the name was
pronounced roughly \mar-SAIL-y@\, where \@\ is the schwa sound at the end
of <sofa>.

We hope this letter has been useful.  Please write us again if you have any
questions.  I was assisted in preparing this letter by Talan Gwynek.

For the Academy,


  Arval Benicoeur
  30 Mar 1999


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References

[1] Colm Dubh, "An Index to the Given Names in the 1292 Census of Paris",
Proceedings of the Known World Heraldic Symposium 1996 (SCA: Montgomery,
Alabama; WWW: SCA, Inc., 1997).
http://www.sca.org/heraldry/laurel/names/paris.html

[2] De Joinville, Jean, _Histoire de Saint Louis_, M. Natalis de Wailly,
ed. (Paris, 1874).

[3] Villehardouin, Geoffroy, _La Conque^te de Constantinople_, ed. & trans.
Edmond Faral (Paris: Socie/te/ d'E/dition Les Belles Lettres, 1961).

[4] Morlet, Marie-Therese, _Etude d'anthroponymie picarde, les noms de
personne en Haute Picardie aux XIIIe, XIVe, XVe siecles_ (Amiens, Musee de
Picardie, 1967).

[5] Chambers, Frank M., _Proper Names in the Lyrics of the Troubadours_
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p.180.