Résumé

Summary

The French and European Renaissance saw the rise of a genuine method of etymological analysis. The desire to recover the origin of a word was often stilllinked to forms of belief (among those whose conception of language was mystical), to nationalism (among historians of the vernaculars), or to the pleasures of literary word-play ; yet grammatical and lexicological reflection is progressively oriented towards the uncovering of common structures, towards a morphological segmentation which is now supported by an awareness of the existence of « roots ». Traces of antiquity, nostalgically pieced together, give way to families of words organized according to the major principles of linguistic motivation - reason, usage, and the properties of things (i. e. their definition according to the encyclopedia). The etymologists of the end of the century accept not only the existence of borrowings but also the importance of the social and « environmental » factors which give rise to linguistic transformations. Variation is no longer understood as a generalized anomaly, but as a necessary proliferation within which one can now monitor the previously unpredictable variety of the lexicon, while at the same time reconciling it with the predictable normalization of languages by dietionaries and neologism.