Fig. 4—St. Seine l’Abbaye near Dijon lies in the area of langue d’oïl. The fair land of Burgundy, of which the view is typical, has been open to northern invasions on the northwest and the northeast.
Fig. 5—A farmhouse in the Black Forest, a typical habitation in districts in which High German is spoken.
Between the langue d’oc and the langue d’oïl the difference was that of north and south. The southern idioms expressed feeling and harmony, hence they were preferred by poets. The troubadours favored them exclusively during the Middle Ages. The “parlers” of the north, on the other hand, were endowed with the staying qualities of lucidity, order and precision. The beauty of modern French, as well as the attraction it exerts on cultivated minds, is due to its well-balanced blend of northern and southern elements. French of our day is the shrine in which the treasured remains of earlier centuries are still preserved. In it the sunshine of the south pierces with its warm rays the severity of northern earnestness. No other European language can boast of an equally happy composition. In this respect it is a true mirror of the French mind as well as of French nationality.
As spoken at present, French is derived in direct line from a sub-dialect of the Picard patois formerly spoken in Paris and Pontoise and which spread throughout all Ile-de-France. This province may be aptly described as the bottom of the bowl-shaped area of northern France. It owes its geographical distinctiveness to the convergence of a number of important valleys which empty the products of their fertility into the Paris basin lying in its very center. Five of these irregular furrows, the Seine, Loing, Yonne, Marne and Oise, radiate outwardly from the low-lying Paris center. The ebb and flow of national power and language sped its alternate course along their channels until, from being the heart, Paris, always inseparable from its language, became also the head of France.
Fig. 6—Part of France showing the contact between “langue d’oc” and “langue d’oïl” countries. The shaded area represents the “langue d’oïl” or northern language. “Langue d’oc” prevailed in the unruled area. Between these two regions a transitional zone, shown by broken ruling, intervened, in which a mixture of the two languages was spoken.