Saturday, December 28, the bookstore Des livres et vous will welcome Gaston and Jacqueline Bazégales who will present their work “Discovering the place names of Quercy and the communes of the Lot – Lot toponymy”. The authors point out that place names have a history that toponymy aims to explain. Place names are, they explain, precious linguistic witnesses to the relationships between man and his environment, retracing for example his incessant efforts to develop the land, master nature, and develop local industries.
In this work you will discover the vestiges of certain cultural and religious practices, with the conservation of the memories of a people who occupied a territory, the founder of a city or the owner of an estate. Inscribed in time, the names of towns and villages, regions, mountains and rivers, and even plots of land belong to a given language and geographical space (Gallic, Gallo-Roman, Germanic, French, or regional language) .
They were able to see that Quercy is rich in these place names which are an intimate part of our daily lives. Whatever the location of our habitat (place, commune), our activity and of course our surname, all of this vocabulary which designates them has been built over the succession of peoples and their languages. They constitute our heritage.
The authors Gaston and Jacqueline Bazégales offer a careful analysis of place names, common Lot words and etymology of all the communes of the Lot as well as the new communes created since the 2000s.
Gaston Bazégales, writer, linguist, pedagogue and Occitan teacher, comes from a peasant family from Couzou. He is today professor emeritus at the Paul Valéry University of Montpellier. Very active in the field of Occitanism since the end of the 1960s, he is best known for his manual for learning Occitan Languedoc (1975). With his wife Jacqueline, a post-graduate doctor in Romance studies, he participates in the writing of the Bonneton Encyclopedia, “Le Lot, 100 places for the curious”. In collaboration with the Cercle Occitan de Sète, he participated in the edition of the unpublished grammar of Sète spoken written by Gustave Terond, published in 2002.
The work is prefaced by Jean-Claude Requier, former senator of Lot.
