Cider words in Norman and Breton

The linguistic map of the northern French cider country is more complicated than the regional map. Normandy speaks, or spoke, Norman: an oïl variety with a long written tradition, once the language of an English court, and now surviving best in the Cotentin and in the Channel Islands, where Jèrriais and Guernésiais are its insular forms.

Brittany is divided in two. Lower Brittany, the western half, is the Breton-speaking country; Upper Brittany, the eastern half, speaks Gallo, which is another oïl variety and a relative of Norman rather than of Breton. Cider is made across the whole peninsula, so a single Breton cider tradition covers a Celtic language and a Romance one.

This matters for anyone trying to read cider vocabulary as evidence. A word recorded in Brittany may be Breton, Gallo or French, and the three carry entirely different implications for where the practice came from and when.

Breton aval means apple and avalenn an apple tree, formed with the singulative ending that Breton uses to make one item out of a collective. Both are inherited Brythonic vocabulary: Welsh has afal, Cornish aval, and the Goidelic languages have their own related forms. The apple has been in the language for as long as the language has existed.

The word for the drink did not travel with it. Chistr is a loan from the French cidre, which descends in turn from Latin sicera and ultimately from a Semitic word for strong drink; the Breton form is a stage in that chain, not an independent development. Welsh shows exactly the same pattern: afal is inherited, and seidr is a borrowing.

The inference has to be drawn carefully, because borrowing a word is not the same as borrowing a practice. What the pattern establishes is that the name arrived from outside; whether a fermented apple drink was made before the name arrived is a separate question the vocabulary cannot answer. What it does argue against is any account in which cider is an ancient indigenous Celtic tradition that happened to acquire a French name later.

Norman cider vocabulary was a working vocabulary, used by people who did not write it down and recorded, where it was recorded at all, by dialectologists working after the practice had begun to contract. Standard French supplied the terminology of the commercial trade, and the local words went with the local practice.

The Channel Islands are the exception, and they are the reason anything survives in an accessible form. Jèrriais and Guernésiais have been the subject of sustained lexicographical work, driven by language revival rather than by any interest in cider, and the dictionaries produced record orchard and press-house terms as part of a general vocabulary of island life.

What that material shows is a dense practical vocabulary for the things a press house contains and the operations it performs — the crushing trough, the pomace, the built cheese, the vessels — of the same kind and density as the English one. The two traditions named the same things because they were doing the same work, and the words are cognate where the languages are.

The best-known Breton cider text is a drinking song beginning with an invitation to drink cider, sung to a lively dance tune and now known well beyond Brittany through a long series of arrangements, translations and cover versions. It is regularly introduced as an ancient Breton folk song.

It is not. It was composed in 1929 by two young men in Morbihan, in Lower Brittany, in the course of ordinary farm work, and its authorship and date are documented. It entered the traditional repertoire in the ordinary way — by being good, being sung and being learned by other people — and was taken up by the Breton folk revival from the 1970s, from which it reached an international audience.

The case is worth setting out because it is a clean example of a general problem. A song in a minority language, on a rural subject, with a dance rhythm and no named author in the mouths of the people singing it, will be assumed to be old. Here the composition is documented, so the assumption can be checked and found wrong. For most such songs it cannot be checked at all, which is a reason for caution rather than a licence to assume antiquity.