Les Buzotias d'Jhonzat

Yesterday I went to the theatre.

There are several local pro-am dramatic groups in the area, and during the winter they tour the small towns. Every little town has a building used for social and leisure purposes, and each one boasts a stage with curtains and a lighting rig of sorts. The one in Saint-Dizant-du-Gua is called the Foyer Rural, and its hall is quite a size. With a population of only about one-and-a-half thousand, it seems a big place to fill, but somehow people do turn out from not just the town but the surrounding hamlets.

This performance was not expected to draw much of an audience, but even so they had to go and fetch a few more chairs. And why did the Association Culturelle think it wouldn't be popular? Because it was a revue of sketches, recitations, and songs by Les Buzotias d'Jhonzat, a troupe which performs in the Charentais dialect (known as Saintongeais in other parts of the region). Surprisingly, there were plenty of young people there, which is encouraging for the future of the dialect; the troupe itself has several child actors.

I went along out of linguistic interest and a desire to Support Your Local Culture, hoping not to fall asleep, and was surprised and pleased at how much I followed. Websearches for historical information and linguistic analyses of Charentais haven't turned up much: there are vocabularies, and a few recordings on Youtube, but a dearth of information about how and why. It's interesting to see that Cajun and Quebeçois have roots in Saintongeais, though.

Curious points:

* The 'jh' is an aspirate, which is like a softer version of the Spanish 'j' (jota).
* Where the second sound of a word in Latin was 'l', it has changed to 'i', as it has in Italian (bianc').
* The final syllable which in modern French contains '-ai' or -'oi' has retained the early pronunciation '-ouai'.

I must admit that most of what I understood was helped by the acting. They had some very good bits of business and a few pieces of clever tech.