Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 863

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 863

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/863

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked for our opinion of <Jaquilene L'Renard> as an early 16th century French name. We wrote a letter just a few months ago discussing the name <Jaqueline L'Renard>; was that also you? A copy of that letter is attached.

The previous letter covers everything we have to say about your name, with one exception: The spelling <Jaquilene> is very unlikely to have been used in your period. The standard spelling of the name is <Jaqueline> or <Jacqueline>. The two vowels <e> and <i> are pronounced quite differently in French and would not have been swapped.


Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked for our opinion of <Jaqueline L'Renard> as an early 16th century name. Here is what we have found.

Your name is nearly perfect. <Jacqueline> was in use in French from the 13th century onward, and surnames derived from <Renard> were certainly in use in your period [1, 2, 3]. However, the spelling <L'Renard> is not correct. The definite article <le> only contracts to <l'> in French when the following letter is a vowel (or sometimes an 'h'). Therefore, the correct french for "the fox" is <le renard>.

By your period, the French used hereditary surnames, just as we do today. Since surnames were no longer expected to describe the people who used them, two-word names like <le renard> often collapsed to single words like <Lerenard>. We believe that this one-word form was more common in your period than the two-word form, and we recommend that you use it and call yourself <Jaqueline Lerenard>.

For your information: The modern surname <Renard> is much more common than <Lerenard>. The shorter form derives from the medieval given name <Renard> or <Reynart>, originally having been borne by a child of a man named <Renard>. The descriptive form, meaning "the fox", did exist in medieval France -- we have found examples in the 13th and 14th centuries [3] -- but it was not particularly common. If you'd like your name to be more typical of 16th century French usage, you might prefer to call yourself <Jaqueline Renard>.

I hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Blaise de Cormeilles and Talan Gwynek.

For the Academy,

Arval Benicoeur


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).

[2] Dauzat, Albert, _Dictionnaire Etymologique des Noms de Famille et

Prenoms de France_ (Paris: Libraire Larousse, 1987).

[3] Morlet, Marie-Therese, _Dictionnaire E/tymologique des Noms de

Famille_ (Librairie Académique Perrin, 1997)