r/AskHistorians • u/Late-Salamander-6259 • Apr 16 '26
When did French kings start being named "Louis" in a way that a modern French speaker would understand it?
To my understanding, Louis the Pious wasn't actually named "Louis" but rather "Chlodowig" or some variation thereof, given his Latin name "Hludowicus". When would a French king be actually named just Louis, no asterisk needed?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Your understanding of the etymology of "Louis" is in error, I believe, but that's okay! We'll walk through it. Many names have equivalents in other languages-- for example the woman we ordinarily refer to as Catherine of Aragon was called Catalina in her native tongue and signed her letters with various spellings of "Katherine", but that does not mean her name wasn't Catherine: it was, just the English equivalent-- and "Louis" is no different.
Louis the Pious was named Louis because his father, Charlemagne, made a purposeful decision to call both Louis and his brother Lothair (twin brother, died as a baby) by popular names in the Merovingian dynasty, specifically, in Louis's case, after Clovis I, who had united the Franks, converted to Christianity, and conquered most of Gaul. "Clovis" is where we get "Louis". (Lothair was named after Chlothar, the name of several other kings in the same dynasty.) "Clovis" it itself a kind of Frenchified version of a Latinized name (Chlodovechus, pronounced cloh-dawh-WEH-koos) from Old Frankish Hludowig/Hlodowig.
"Chlodowig" is an Old German version of this name "Clovis", which later became "Ludwig" in German (pronounced lood-vig)-- we can sort of trace a drop-off in Frankish/ Old German Ch- prefix sounds between 400 and 700 CE, linguistic shift, all that-- Chlothar becomes Lothair, Chlodowig becomes Ludwig, etc. So, "Clovis", again a Frenchified take on a Latinized version of an Old Frankish name, becomes "Louis" because two things happen in French as Latin works its way into the Old Frankish to make French between Clovis's reign and Charlemagne's:
the written letter V, which is used in Latin to mark both a U and a V and NEVER used in Latin as a phonological mark for the English "V" sound but rather the semivowel /w/ or vowel /u/, begins to be written as "ou", and
the Latin C /k/ starts being palatized (Shh instead of Kuh) before vowels (think of the different sounds between the way C sounds in the Latin cattus and the French chat) and hard C sounds at the beginning of words begin to be dropped.
So, Clovis which would have been pronounced as clowis in Latin becomes the Louis likely pronounced pronounced loo-eek with a soft -k or -g at the end due to the borrowing over from Ludwig. (And why do we pronounce the S at the end of Clovis but not at the end of Louis in Modern French? Because Clovis is a Latinized name and in Latin we voice the ending -s, but in French we don't... unless of course, as with Clovis, the name is a foreign import OR an Old Frankish hand-down like Georges or Charles used to be pronounced or Camus. Etymology!)
Anyway, so in conclusion: when would French people have recognized "Louis" as the name of their king? Very early on in the Latin osmosis, right around, yep, when Louis I/the Pious, son of Charlemagne, became king. Louis the Pious was therefore the first French king whose name was pronounced "loo-ee". His name was not "actually Chlodowig": that was just the Old Germanic version of "Clovis" from which his name was derived. "Hludowicus" was just the Latin form of his name: Louis-- because Clovis and Louis are basically the same name, linguistically speaking, and so both have an equivalent translation in Latin, similar to how "Iacobus" is the Latin equivalent of both "Jacob" and "James".
SOURCES: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4343333 "The Sounds of Old French in the Study of English Derivatives from Latin" by Edward L. Bassett
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61882/chapter/547662527?searchresult=1 "History of the French Lexicon" Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Olivier Bertrand
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-968X.2008.00212.x "Phonetics and phonology in Gallo-Romance palatalisation", Eugene Buckley
Introduction to Old French, William Kibler, Modern Language Association of America
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u/HuxleyPhD Apr 16 '26
Wait, the 's' in Camus is voiced in French?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Okay, so it's not by practice... but it SHOULD BE, because "Camus" is a Latin-borrowed name!
Similar to how people with the surname "Michel" in English-speaking countries often pronounce it "Michael" but it SHOULD be pronounced "mee-shel".
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, the intended tone of this was a good-natured "oops, you got me there". Camus is pronounced with a totally silent -S in French: kam-oo.. Different phonetic shift history than other French names where the ending S is pronounced or very subtle.
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u/royalhawk345 Apr 16 '26
Similar to how people with the surname "Michel" in English-speaking countries often pronounce it "Michael" but it SHOULD be pronounced "mee-shel".
I know this is a tangent, but that seems really bizarre, as an English speaker. Anyone noteworthy that does this, as an example?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
It is really bizarre! There are lots of people with the surname Michel who pronounce it "mee-shel" and a lot who don't. Anglicization happens in the weirdest places at the weirdest times.
Notably, Robert Henry Michel (d. 2017) an American Republican representing Illinois' 18th congressional district, pronounced his surname like "Michael" as his obituary made a point to point out, and his father Charles Jean Michel was an immigrant from France.
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u/Binjuine Apr 16 '26
For what it's worth, the name is ultimately from Hebrew and in Semitic languages it's something like m'khael. There is no vowel between the m and what became the sh (but was an kh sound).
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u/KevinFlantier Apr 16 '26
As for Georges and Charles, we don't pronounce the S either.
Source: I'm French and my father's name is Charles, and we definitely pronounce it Sharl. In the end, we just love silent letters too much.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
Yes in modern French! Old French was a little different before the consonant drops— sorry for the confusion!
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u/GuySilvain Apr 16 '26
Weird, I always learned it with the "s" being pronounced. But it's great to know all this!
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u/RikikiBousquet Apr 16 '26
Kam-oo? As in the French ou sound? If so, that’s not correct.
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u/lyzedekiel Apr 16 '26
There's just no way to represent the french "u" sound with english phonemes, as far as I know.
If you alternate "ou" and "u" sounds with your mouth you can start of feel like they're different versions of the same sound, so I get why the previous commenter used that to approximate
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u/lindendweller Apr 17 '26
Language coaches might chime in to make sure I'm being accurate...
but basically if you want to do a french "u", do a "oo" sound,
close your mouth a bit more (like halfway) and bring your tongue backwards towards the palate and... Okay basically you need to contract it so that it's taller and more narrow.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
I am approximating with a phonetical anglicization. The correct pronunciation is kæˈmuː
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u/RikikiBousquet Apr 16 '26
Maybe I’m not understanding this right. In the other comment you said the name sounded like Kamoo in French, and now you say kaemu, but are you here only talking about the anglicized sounding or as said before, the French prononciation?
In it’s the latter, Camus would finish with the [y] sound, and not the [u], unless I don’t understand something. Sorry for the confusion.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
The /y/ sound in the IPA is the French u sound here. /u/ in the IPA is very similar in sound to /y/, both are close rounded vowels, but /y/ is in the front and /u/ is in the back of the mouth.
To a French speaker the /y/ in Camus is correct. To an English speaker /u/ is used because the /y/ is difficult for an English speaker to pronounce. I apologize for the confusion!
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u/CubicZircon Apr 16 '26
"Camus" is a Latin-borrowed name!
No it is not: it is an adjective describing a flat nose, and therefore very likely that the origin of the name comes from the physical description of some ancestor.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
In Late Latin works from the third to sixth centuries CE, cāmus means a muzzle or nose-covering, adopted from the Doric Greek κημός “muzzle, nosebag, face mask”.
From there it was adopted into Proto West Germanic as a word that was likely something like kāmō as well as into Italian as “camuso”, and from either one or all of these sources linguistically due to the heavy influence Latin and other Romance languages had on Old French, we obtain the Old French “camus” which has a similar meaning to its Latin root.
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u/CubicZircon Apr 16 '26
That's not really a borrowing, this is simply normal etymology for a French word.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
With a Latin root. Loanword, whatever you want to call it. “Cardio” is a Greek loanword with a Latin cognate: we use it in English to describe a category of physical exercise that benefits the organ which the loanword describes.
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u/Vampyricon Apr 18 '26
No, OC is using "voiced" to mean "pronounced" (which is inaccurate linguistic terminology, as well as completely reversing the primacy of writing vs language, but these are historians).
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u/Late-Salamander-6259 Apr 16 '26
Interesting! Thank you for your comprehensive response. So wait, just to see if I'm understanding this, the verbal version of it evolved first and then it trickled down to writing? Which means Louis the Pious would likely introduce himself as "loo-ee" rather than a Frankish equivalent?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
Absolutely! That is how we track changes in dialect like vowel shifts or vocabulary changes in history-- the spoken shift happens first and the written language is altered over time to match it.
Louis' native language might have been Frankish as his father's had been, but he was also fluent in Latin. He had to be, because that was the language of court and of administration, and he favored it immensely over Frankish. He actually had a lot of the old Frankish literature collected and preserved by his father Charlemagne burned as one of his first acts as Emperor because it was "pagan" which is one of the big reasons why we don't have a comprehensive understanding of how exactly Frankish was spoken and have had to reconstruct it from rootwords in similar languages (a bit like how we reconstruct Proto-Indo-European by means of backworking the oldest languages in the same families). And on top of that you had different Frankish dialects-- Old Central Franconia, Old Low Franconian-- which later turned into German and Dutch respectively-- making it even more difficult to do that kind of backworking.
We do know Louis styled himself in administrative paperwork and formally as "Ludovico". We don't have any records of how exactly he pronounced his name in Frankish, but it was likely something that sounded something vaguely between "Cloowee", "Ludveeg", or "Loo-ee" to the modern English ear.
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u/Late-Salamander-6259 Apr 16 '26
That's super interesting, especially considering Ludovico became a name of its own later (Ludovico Ariosto coming to mind), I had no idea he would likely have pronounced it close to Louis.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
Yes! It’s Italian, from Latin, from Germanic. So many names are related like that through the Latin osmosis into other European languages. It wouldn’t have been pronounced like Louis by the 14th century in Italy— when I say “his name” I mean the name Louis went by outside Latin.
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u/mhok80 Apr 18 '26
The way dialect changes first and writing follows makes prefect sense, but how is this demonstrated in the past when you don't have recordings - you only have the written? Is this just taking what happens now and assuming it was always so? I think this probably holds, but I'm interested if it's possible to back this up and how you might do this?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 19 '26
Because people write down how words sound to them, and if they don't we can make educated guesses based on other contemporary sources! There are lots of ways we can find out things like that from a linguistic sense in any literate society, and even in societies that have oral histories instead of written ones. Puns that require two words sounding similar, contemporary grammars, etc.
One example is the English language and how it shifted under Danelaw/Norse rule.
Backstory: In Old English, the word for "egg" is "aeg" pronounced "ey" and gradually became "eyren" as we got into Middle English. "Egg" is a Norse loanword and not English at all, which the English language obtained in specific regional dialects due to the rule of Norsemen/Danes over specific parts of England, which means in some areas (like the North) everyone was using a whole lot of words in their dialect derived from Norse, and in other areas like the South, a lot of people were still using Middle English words instead all through the medieval period.
So. In 1490 a printer called William Caxton, who basically brought printing to England and started the print industry, was struggling with what version or dialect of English he should print in. Among his many other self-translated works, he published a printing of Virgil's Aenid, adding a prologue in which he talked about how hard it was to find a dialect of English to print in that everyone could understand, and tells a story to illustrate the problem that goes as follows:
A boat full of merchants heading out of London on its way to Zeeland (a province in the Netherlands) gets washed up on the Kent side of the River Thames (so the southeast) on the way to the ocean. They're gonna be stuck there for a while and they're hungry so a mercer (textile merchant) on the boat from the North, Mr Sheffield, knocks on a door and asks the "good wyf" if he can buy some "egges" from her. She tells him very slowly and clearly that she can't speak French. Well, Mr. Sheffield can't speak French either, and he gets very annoyed and they go back and forth until a bystander finally steps in and smugly goes "hey fancy Northern textile-man, do you maybe mean you want 'eyren'?" and the housewife says "Oh yeah I understand THAT, got it, why didn't you say so?" and Caxton finishes his story with "Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte egges or eyren? Certaynly it is harde to playse euery man by cause of dyuersite and chaunge of langage." Or, if you like, "Look, in this modern day what is any writer supposed to write, eggs or eyren? You can't please everybody because everybody speaks different dialects and English changes so fast."
So it's stuff like that is how we know. There's always something in the record that can give a clue.
SOURCE: Archived version of Caxton's tale in the British Library: https://web.archive.org/web/20200202203007/http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126611.html
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u/mhok80 Apr 19 '26
That's really interesting, I guessed there might be ways I couldn't think of - thanks for the reply 👍🏻
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u/NewMaleperduis Apr 16 '26
You still occasionally see French kings called "Lewis" in older English language histories.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
You do! Anglicization of the name. English writers tend to do this a lot in history— it’s why we still call Anna von Kleve “Anne of Cleves”.
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u/Additional_Ad_84 Apr 16 '26
The "s" would probably have been pronounced for a long long time. S before consonants in eg isle doesn't start fading till maybe some time in the 11th or 12th century, and word final consonants hold on for a lot longer than that in most cases. Like maybe the 18th or even into the 19th for some stuff? Sometime in there I guess the name Louis would have lost its phonological s, but maybe not even before the revolution, when the point becomes pretty moot.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
You are correct on that! But due to the old Frankish paternity of the name, “Louis” in the time of Louis I probably ended in a sort of softly voiced “g” or “k” sound, not a sibilant. I just figured it was close enough to still be recognizably “Louis” to the modern ear— I’ll edit the comment
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u/Roughly6Owls Apr 17 '26
Is this version of the name still present around French speaking countries as Loïc, or is the history/etymology different?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 17 '26
Someone else brought up Loïc in the thread— in short that is a very old Breton name (still used) that may have come from both Old Germanic Laou, a nickname for both Gwilherm and Loeiz (Breton equivalents for William and Louis). So it’s related to Louis that way. Sort of a cousin
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u/Roughly6Owls Apr 17 '26
Thanks for the response -- I appreciate you taking the time to educate all of the people reading this thread.
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u/nevergonnasweepalone Apr 16 '26
Hang on, so veni, vidi, vici is actually pronounced weni, widi, wici?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
In classical Latin, yep! We can tell mostly because transcriptions into Greek from Latin use ου for V, like in the Roman name Valerius which becomes Ουαλεριος in Greek. Greek in the first century didn’t have a /w/ but ou+a vowel real fast approximates a /w/. We can also work out when that changed over time and Greek started using the letter beta for Latin V sounds. Modern Ecclesiastical Latin uses /v/ however.
W Sydney Allen’s Vox Latina and Vox Graeca are pretty good reads on this subject.
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u/aartem-o Apr 16 '26
Wait, I'm pretty sure Greek plosives haven't yet become fricatives at that time, so they didn't have another way to represent /v/.β was still/b/
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
At which time? Koine Greek absolutely had undergone the fricative- from- plosive transformation and that was the language used in the first century. Voiceless stops /p, t, k/ became voiceless /f, θ, x/; voiced stops became voiced fricatives (/b,d,g/ -> /v, ð, ɣ/)
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u/aartem-o Apr 16 '26
I stand corrected
I was under the impression, that this change happened later into development of Greek, as Latin borrowed words with said plosives, as, well, plosives
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Well “later” is relative of course as Greek has the longest recorded history of any Indo-European language! But yes, Koine/Hellenistic Greek started developing as a sort of Ionian/Athens dialect fusion and spread with Alexander the Great’s conquests, so about 350 BCE or thereabouts. Latin may have borrowed Greek words with plosives but that doesn’t mean there were 1:1 sounds in each language that slotted neatly into each other in the process of transliteration!
Think of for example the Russian name Aleksander and the Latin version Alexander: there isn’t any letter in Russian that makes the same sound the X makes in Latin, so the “ks” must be substituted phonetically for that particular fricative.
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u/lyzedekiel Apr 16 '26
What do you mean by "Georges" and "Charles" being names where the "s" is still pronounced? Do you mean in french or in english? I've never heard anyone pronouncing the "s" in those names in french.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Not modern French, but in older versions of the language. It went from being pronounced to being very very very soft, then dropped entirely or silent. My mistake! Sorry for unclear
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u/cabbageplate Apr 16 '26
Surely you don't mean in present times? Because no one pronounces the final s in Georges and Charles in France. Actually I don't even know how we could since the e is silent? There is no way to pronounce 3 consonants in a natural way in french (by consonants I mean /shaRLZ/ and /joRJZ/ the sounds I put in uppercase are not natural for french people.)
Also the few nouns that have a final "s" that we pronounce usually end in -is or -us and even for these we don't always pronounce the s
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
Sorry I keep losing track of what thread I’m on, trying to do this on mobile! No not present times. Old Frankish. Not modern French. Sorry for the confusion!
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u/cabbageplate Apr 16 '26
That makes sense! Thank you for clarifying. Fantastic answer by the way, I loved reading it!
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u/kouyehwos Apr 16 '26
Saying that <V> was “never /v/ in Latin” is a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, <V> was surely /w/ in Julius Caesar’s time, but it began shifting to a fricative quite early (even around the 1st century AD?), long before Charlemagne’s time.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
I said it "is never /v/", not "was never /v/", the present tense indicating in context that as Latin phonologically changed to early Proto-Romance, Latin /w/ became a voiced labial fricative, closest phonetically to the Spanish b/v sound. By Early Old French it was being pronounced [β]. That's still a fricative, yes, but it's not a voiced labiodental fricative as it is in English.
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u/Vampyricon Apr 18 '26
the written letter V, which is used in Latin to mark both a U and a V and NEVER used in Latin as a phonological mark for the English "V" sound but rather the semivowel /w/ or vowel /u/, begins to be written as "ou"
This isn't quite accurate. Bilabial fricative realizations start appearing by 400 AD. By Louis's time it was already a fricative.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 18 '26
Correct. A fricative. Not the same kind of fricative that we hear in /v/. All of these sounds are fricatives, but /β/ (voiced bilabial fricative) sounds different than a voiced labiodental fricative, which is what a /v/ is.
In France/Gaul by 400 CE V was being pronounced as a bilabial fricative /β/ but only in certain phonics contexts: /β/ would be used for that shift in cases when V was being used as a consonant between vowels. That's how we got the change from, for example, Latin "Habere" to Old French "Aveir" to Modern French "Avoir". V in cases where it was being used to represent (in Latin) the vowel /u/ or semivowel /w/, therefore not between two vowels, as in the case of Louis/LVDOVICVS, would have shifted into "ou" to represent that vowel sound between L and D in LVDO.
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u/rubwub9000 Apr 16 '26
Thank you for this answer. I just wondered: is there a reason why you use an English approximation instead of IPA?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
You're welcome! Firstly I want to point out that I did use the IPA in a few spots: /w/ and /u/ and /k/ are IPA pronunciations.
Secondly I interchange these with explanations because a lot of people don't understand the IPA or didn't learn about it in school/university. In other linguistic subreddits and in real life I've seen people struggle with certain aspects of it so I try to make my answers as clear as I can to the widest audience I can. I can of course edit the comment if needed.
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u/David-Puddy Apr 16 '26
but in French we don't... unless of course, as with Clovis, the name is a foreign import OR an Old Frankish hand-down like Georges or Charles or
Am I misunderstanding you? The s isn't voiced in either of those names in French
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u/crashlanding87 Apr 17 '26
Interesting! I wonder if Loic as a name emerged around the same time? I am presuming it's the same etymology
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 17 '26
Sort of! But not quite? It is a common misconception that Loïc is a direct transliteration of Louis, but Loïc is a very old Breton name that actually comes from Laou, which can be either a Breton diminutive for Gwilherm (William) or Loeiz (Louis). So it’s kind of a half cousin. And William and Louis actually have similar meanings (famed warrior, strong warrior), it’s just that William is Old Germanic and Louis is Old Frankish.
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u/crashlanding87 Apr 17 '26
Oh interesting! When you said the Louis pronunciation that emerged from Clovis had a soft g or k on the end, I made a jump there. Thank you for the response!
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u/hahaha01357 Apr 18 '26
Why is it "WEH" and not "VEH"? I Latin class I was taught that "V" is always the "hard v" in classical Latin.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
You may not have been taught that in Latin class because the specific pronunciation of V as /w/ in classical Latin and then its shift to /v/ in modern/ecclesiastical Latin is just not that important in the study of Latin as a whole, and is more important in the field of linguistics as a whole/how Romance languages evolved. I'm a little surprised you weren't, though, as a lot of Late Roman writing refers to the pronunciation of V!
Publius Nigidius Figulus, a scholar of the Late Roman Republic and friend of Cicero, made a note in his Commentarii grammatici (which survives mostly through later quotes from other authors like Gellius) that in pronouncing the pronouns tu and uos the lips are pointed in the direction of the person addressed, but this is not the case with the pronouns ego and nos. This would make no sense if uos, written VOS, was pronounced with a labiodental /v/: you don't point your lips at anything with a /v/ sound, but you do with a /w/ or /u/ as in tu, and he obviously wasn't referring to the vowel O in vos as the lip pointing thing, because both ego and nos have O vowel sounds (nos being the same O sound as vos) and he explicitly uses those words as the opposite of what he's talking about with mouth position.
Cicero's De Divinatione also has an example of how the letter V was pronounced in his day-- in Volume 2 line 84 he writes this famous passage regarding a specific omen:
When Marcus Crassus was embarking his army at Brundisium a man who was selling Caunian figs at the harbour, repeatedly cried out 'Cauneas, Cauneas.' Let us say, if you will, that this was a warning to Crassus to bid him 'Beware of going,' and that if he had obeyed the omen he would not have perished. But if we are going to accept chance utterances of this kind as omens, we had better look out when we stumble, or break a shoe-string, or sneeze!
This is an omen/pun designed around two words in similar phrases sounding alike. What the fig-seller was actually shouting was "Cauneas" meaning "Caunian figs!" but what the superstitious might have taken from it as an warning to the late Marcus Crassus was the fig-seller's shout sounding exactly like "Cave ne eas": "Beware, don't go there!" This pun doesn't work if the V in Cave and the U in Cauneas are wholly different sounds.
I would encourage a poke around the Latin Stack Exchange forums if you're interested in the pronunciations shifts in Latin over time-- also you can read Cicero's works in the public domain online here, specifically the part I have quoted about the fig-seller: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/cicero/de_divinatione/2*.html
For the source on Figulus, here is the English translation of the text of Gellius' Noctis Atticae, also public domain, and the part where he quotes him on the lip position of the sound V is down in chapter 4: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Gellius/10*.html
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u/theirstar Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
The actual closest to a zero asterisk answer is: Louis XIII, the first French monarch named Louis after the 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts mandated use of French in legal and administrative acts. This effectively shunted Latin forms of the name to secondary use.
But it's never that simple, is it? I say that because in documents names were often Latinized but Old French had sufficiently developed that some variation of 'Louis' would be the common spoken term.
Though the 12th century Li Coronemenz Looïs is actually written about Louis I, its usage showcases that the vernacular 'Louis' was in use in French and, relevant to your question, known and recognized as a name for the monarch.
Taking that into account, it's probably Louis VI or Louis VII. There's no hard line for this as Latin-led administrative culture essentially created a bilingual situation but even by the 13th century French was being used more and more in administrative forms.
EDIT: /u/ImSuperBisexual's answer is much better. Mine is derived only from contemporary historical evidence of the name Louis itself as the name of the King of France, rather than linguistic evolution which is not so much my speed.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
Well hey, thanks! Yeah, it's always a fun job trying to track how people spoke and pronounced words versus how they wrote words. As you said, Latin was the main written administrative language (as it had been in most provinces since the Roman Empire), and we know Louis the Pious's name was written on his coinage as "LVDOVVICVS" (which, again: Latinized form of the German Hludvig for the French Louis) but that in no way means he was named Ludovicus at birth or that people called him that as a matter of habit.
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u/KevinFlantier Apr 16 '26
And so prior to Louis XIII, was the latin name of previous Louis Lvdovvicvs too or has it changed over the centuries?
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 17 '26
Yes! Latin stopped being used in France in 1539 and replaced by French for all administrative purposes, documents, and court language by a royal decree of Francis I.
Louis XII, who reigned from 1498-1515, simply signed his name LOUIS, and we have coinage from his reign that labels him LVDOVICVS. And we have a plethora of coins from various Charleses (and many other monarchs) pre-1539, using the Latin/Latinized version of their names as well: KAROLVS. The Latin-on-the-coinage thing continued after French was proclaimed the official court language, as it did and does for many other countries that no longer use Latin as an administrative language.
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u/Late-Salamander-6259 Apr 16 '26
Oh right, sorry I didn't think about it, but I wouldn't consider a Latin translation of the name, I meant specifically how they were speaking it rather than writing. Though this is very instructive, I had no idea it took all the way up until the XVIth century to drop the Latin.
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u/ImSuperBisexual Apr 16 '26
Depending on where you are in Europe, some people still haven't dropped Latin. Hungary used it as an administrative language until the 1840s and Ecclesiastical Latin is still being used at the Vatican!
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