Professor of linguistics and director of the Pierre Gardette Institute at UCLy, Claudine Fréchet shares her passion for languages with ILCF learners through a unique course: The Adventure of Words. Through etymology, the history of French, and lexical curiosities, she invites her students to discover how words travel, transform, and reveal the cultures they encounter.
French, like all languages, can be compared to a living organism where words appear, live, transform, and create links between each other. Explaining words means explaining their history and the links that unite them.
What is your role at UCLy and how long have you been teaching at the ILCF?
I am a linguist and professor of Language Sciences at UCLy, where I head the Pierre Gardette Institute of Romance Linguistics (IPG) and the Henri de Lubac University Library. My work focuses on the regional languages of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, namely Franco-Provençal and Occitan. I conduct research on editions of modern and ancient texts in regional languages, on place names, and on the variety of French.
What particularly interests me in my research are the bridges that can be built between Romance languages.
I have been teaching at the ILCF for about twenty years.
You are teaching a specific course this semester entitled “The Adventure of Words.” Can you tell us more about the theme of this course?
We work with exercises designed to help students discover new words and authentic documents (songs, film clips) to better understand the history of words and the variety of French accents. The different activities are done either individually, in pairs, or as a class.
French is a living language with centuries of history. Over the years, this language has developed and enriched itself. It has borrowed words but has also invented new ones. To quote Alain Rey, who was the Director of the Grand Robert publishing house for many years: “There is not one French language but many French languages, and each one is as good as the next.”
What is the objective of this course? What do you want students to gain from it?
Through this course, students will be able to acquire vocabulary by linking words together. By linking words together, they will understand why, for example, “horse” ("cheval") is related to “rider” ("chevalier"), “mother” is related to “motherhood,” etc. This makes it easier to associate meaning with a previously unknown word.
Keys to understanding how words are formed will also be provided to enable better access to meaning.
Examples of visuals used during her class that Ms. Fréchet shared with us:
