Léon Fleuriot
French linguist and Celtic scholar (1923–1987)
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Léon Fleuriot (5 April 1923 – 15 March 1987) was a French linguist and Celtic scholar. He specialised in the Celtic languages, above all in Old Breton, and in the history of Gallo-Roman and early medieval Brittany.[1]
Léon Fleuriot | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | 5 April 1923 Morlaix, Brittany, France |
| Died | 15 March 1987 (aged 63) Paris, France |
| Citizenship | French |
| Occupation | Linguist |
| Known for | Studies of Old Breton Les origines de la Bretagne |
| Academic background | |
| Education | University of Paris |
| Alma mater | University of Paris |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Centre national de la recherche scientifique University of Rennes 2 École pratique des hautes études |
Life and career
Fleuriot was born at Morlaix in Brittany on 5 April 1923, into a family from the district of Quintin, and learned Breton in his youth.[1] He passed the agrégation in history in 1950 and taught in lycées and collèges in Paris and its suburbs and at the Prytanée National Militaire at La Flèche.[1]
He joined the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in 1958 and took his doctorate at the University of Paris in 1964, with a thesis on the grammar of Old Breton and a complementary thesis on its glosses.[1] In 1966 he was appointed to the chair of Celtic studies at the University of Rennes 2 – Upper Brittany, while also serving as directeur d'études at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.[1]
He died in Paris on 15 March 1987, aged 63.[1] At the time of his death he was president of the editorial board of the journal Études Celtiques.[1]
Work
Fleuriot's early work was devoted to Old Breton. His grammar Le vieux breton: éléments d'une grammaire and his Dictionnaire des gloses en vieux breton, both published in 1964, became standard works of reference, and he returned to the subject in a two-volume A Dictionary of Old Breton, written with Claude Evans.[1]
In Les origines de la Bretagne (1980) Fleuriot argued that Armorica had been settled from Britain in two successive waves.[1] He held that Breton was the language of these British settlers. On this point he differed from François Falc'hun, who regarded Breton as essentially a survival of continental Gaulish overlaid by the speech of the incomers. Fleuriot none the less accepted that Breton had absorbed surviving local Celtic forms.[2]
Fleuriot also worked on the Gaulish language. He was one of the editors of the Larzac lead tablet, a long Gaulish inscription published in 1985.[3]
Selected works
- Le vieux breton: éléments d'une grammaire. Paris: Klincksieck, 1964.
- Dictionnaire des gloses en vieux breton. Paris: Klincksieck, 1964.
- A Dictionary of Old Breton - Dictionnaire du vieux breton: Historical and Comparative, in two parts. 2 vols. Toronto: Prepcorp, 1985. Part A reprints the '64 edn. while part B is a condensed, English-language version with some supplemental material.
- Les origines de la Bretagne: l'émigration. Paris: Payot, 1980.
- Récits et poèmes celtiques: domaine brittonique, VIe–XVe siècles. Paris: Stock, 1981.
- With Michel Lejeune, Pierre-Yves Lambert, Robert Marichal and Alain Vernhet. Le plomb magique du Larzac et les sorcières gauloises. Paris: CNRS, 1985.
- With Claude Evans. A Dictionary of Old Breton / Dictionnaire du vieux breton: Historical and Comparative. 2 vols. Toronto: Prepcorp, 1985.
- L'histoire littéraire et culturelle de la Bretagne. Vol. 1. Paris/Geneva, 1993.
- Notes lexicographiques et philologiques, edited by Gwennolé Le Menn. Saint-Brieuc: Skol, 1997 (posthumous).
Legacy
A memorial volume, Bretagne et pays celtiques: langues, histoire, civilisation. Mélanges offerts à la mémoire de Léon Fleuriot, edited by Gwennolé Le Menn and Jean-Yves Le Moing, appeared at Saint-Brieuc and Rennes in 1992.[4]