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Looking to find the morphology for the words Champleve' and Cloisonne'

Jewelry Discussion
#1

A friend asked in a Facebook post about the morphology of the words Champleve’ and Cloisonné’.
In his search, he found that the term Champleve’ only dates back to approximately 1855-1860 and the term Cloisonné’ dates back to approximately 1860-1865.
He would like to know what these techniques were called before this timeframe. I know that Middle French was spoken roughly from about the 14th to the 17th century. Old French was spoken before that.
I was wondering about this and thought that maybe these are modern French words that evolved from Middle French. Or I could be completely wrong and maybe they are new words that replaced another word?

I can find plenty of documentation on the processes, but am finding it hard to track down the morphology of these words. I was hoping that some native French speakers, or some enameling professionals might point me in the correct direction for documentation.

Thanks in advance for the assistance.

#2

A visit to Wikipedia brings up a lot of information about the differences between each technique. But beyond explaining that “cloisons” is a French word for compartments not much is explained about the etymology of the words. Do you suppose that the difference could be as simple as different ways to get the same basic result?

Don Meixner

#3

What is language morphology?

Morphology relates to the segmenting of words into affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and roots or base words , and the origins of words. … Further, parts of words (affixes) can have separate meanings that can transform or morph word meaning.

Before you go tossing around big words, make sure you know what they mean.
These words are both literally French words adopted into English.

“champ”= field
“levé”= raised
“champlevé”= raised field

“cloisonné”= partitioned

A better question might be, when all of these enameling techniques are thousands of years old, and have been practiced in societies speaking a myriad of languages, including many languages which are long dead, why do English speakers use French words for them? Never mind Middle French or Old French… how about Ancient Egyptian or Ancient Chinese?

#4

I was using the terminology that my friend was using. I am not a language geek so I trusted him to know what he was telling me. Thank you for your correction. That being said, we are still looking for any reference to what these processes were called before the mid 19th century.

I suspect that this will involve a lot more research into very old documents at this point. A rabbit hole type of project that sounds interesting.
[adds note to pile of projects to do this century…]

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#5

The French words for the various email techniques such as champlevé, Deutsch: Grubenschmelz)) cloisonné, (Deutsch: Zellenschmelz) plique a jour, (Deutsch: Fensteremail) émail en ronde bosse, (Deutsch: Körperschmelz) émail en basse taile (Deutsch: Flachschnittemail) and so on have been popular in Europe for centuries Use. The cause lies among other things. in that the strongholds of the medieval enamel, next to Byzantium, were in France, especially in Limoges/F and in the Rhine-Maas-area. Since these French workshops served almost all of Europe in the Middle Ages, these French terms were used in most European languages ​​and have been preserved in professional circles to this day.

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#6

Thank you. That is more information than we had before and it will provide a great jumping off point for more research. =)

#7

Check out this site:

https://www.academia.edu/search?q=enameling&utf8=✓

If the link doesn’t work, do a search for enameling.

#8

A better question might be, when all of these enameling techniques
are thousands of years old, and have been practiced in societies
speaking a myriad of languages, including many languages which are
long dead, why do English speakers use French words for them?

Answer: After 1066, Norman French became the lingua franca (literally) for the upper classes. Only peasants spoke English, which itself evolved from many roots: Saxon, Norse–whoever marched through to conquer the place. That’s why you find many French words in English, which probably annoys the French no end. English spread and mutated as the British expanded their empire over the entire globe, including America, which in turn spammed the planet with its take on the language via the entertainment industry. The current polyglot state of the English language probably annoys the true English speaker no end. And so it goes…

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#9

I don’t have much to add other than a fun explanation as to why English has so many words of different heritages.
“English beats up other languages in dark alleys, then rifles through their pockets for loose grammar and spare vocabulary”

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