The Etymology of the Adverbial Suffix in the Parisian French Dialect

An Exploration of the French Morpheme -ment

Abstract

In this paper, I sought to examine the etymological patterns found in regular and irregular adverbs in the Parisian French dialect, with a specific focus on the derivation of the regular adverbial suffix -ment. With French’s Proto-Indo European roots, we would assume that the adverbial suffix -ment would be used similarly in Latin. However, its use differs in the two languages. As there is not extensive scholarly research on the specific questions I aimed to answer, the principal sources I consulted were French etymological dictionaries, as well as various linguistic publications covering related topics. I used Romance languages, Franconian (a dialect of High German spoken in the Lorraine/Moselle region), Latin, and Indo-European as points of comparison with the Parisian French dialect and examined the topic through the lens of Linguistic Anthropology, Comparative Linguistics, Contact Languages, and Morphology. I investigated George William Putnam’s assertion that the French suffix -ment, as used in the Parisian French dialect, is derived from the Latin word for ‘mood’ (1919: 88).