elspethdixon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elspethdixon) wrote2014-05-20 02:05 pm
elspethdixon) wrote2014-05-20 02:05 pm
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Dear Musketeers fandom
Technically, d'Artagnan's name starts with a lowercase letter.
There follows a long explanation of why this is so under the cut, but the important thing to take away here is that unless it's at the beginning of a sentence, it supposed to be spelled d'Artagnan, not D'Artagnan.
(I'm sure that if you scoured my old book-based fics, you'd find at least one place where I slipped up and capitalized it, because the first law of pointing out spelling mistakes is that you'll make the same mistake or a similar one yourself while you're in the process of pointing that other person's error out, but trust me on this, the "d" is lowercase)
Let me explain at tl;dr length.
In English, last names, being proper nouns, always begin with a capital letter. In French, it's normally the same, with one notable exception:
The particle. Particles are the "de"s and "du"s that show up in characters' names, as in "de Treville," "d'Artagnan" ("de" always becomes "d' " when it precedes a vowel), "Milady de Winter," "du Vallon," and "the Comte de la Ferre." They are almost never capitalized, unless the name appears at the beginning of a sentence.
Ex:
D'Artagnan was engaged to fight a duel with Athos at noon. Porthos and Aramis were also engaged to duel with d'Artagnan at one o' clock and two o'clock, respectively.*
"D'Artagnan! My sister's honor will not wait a moment longer!" shrieks the foppish local nobleman at the beginning of the Disney 1993 movie.
"Monsieur de Treville awaits Monsieur d'Artagnan," cried a servant, throwing open the door of the cabinet.
Originally/most frequently used to denote nobility (as the judge points out in episode 5, where he's offended by Porthos's adoption of the faux-noble name "du Vallon"), the particle is a preposition that indicates where someone is from. In English, "de" translates to "of" and "du" and "de la" to "of the" (because grammar can be just as arbitrary and weird in French as it can in English, "de le" is always shortened to "du" but "de la" is not shortened to anything), so being known as [title] de/du/de la [place name] indicated that you were the lord of a particular estate. Think of English noblemen like the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Essex.
Often, the de [something] was used in conjunction with a family name, (for another English example, think "George Gordon, Lord Byron," or "Arthur Wellesly, Duke of Wellington" - both of them are known by their titles and referred to as Byron and Wellington as if those were last names, but if you took the titles away, they'd be Mr. Gordon and Mr. Wellesly, just as "George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham" would be Mr. Villiers). Captain de Treville's name is technically an example of this - the real historical captain of the king's musketeers whom Dumas based him on was named Jean-Armand du Peyrer, Comte de Troisville (the fact that this gives him basically the same first name as Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu is yet more proof that people need to write lots of delicious rival-slash/hatesex fic for that pairing).
Just to be confusing, de/du/de la [place name] without the title could also indicate that you were an ordinary person who just happened to be from [place], so having a particle in your name doesn't automatically mean you're an aristocrat. To increase the confusion, some families over time combined the particle and the name it preceded into one word (ex: DuPont) and started capitalizing it after all.
But in the 1630s? It's lowercase all the way unless it's the first word in a sentence.
Charles de Batz-Castlemore d'Artganan
Olivier de la Ferre
Porthos du Vallon
Captain de Treville
(and Renee d'Herblay/Henri d'Aramitz, depending on whether you want to go with Aramis's book!canon name or the real name of the historical musketeer he's extremely loosely based on)
*Checking the timing of the back-to-back duels in my various copies of The Three Musketeers reminded me once again that Porthos & Aramis's introduction is adorable - when d'Artagnan first meets them, they literally are having one of those 'bickering romantic couple in a 40s screwball comedy' fights that end with shouting one anothers' names in exasperation.
There follows a long explanation of why this is so under the cut, but the important thing to take away here is that unless it's at the beginning of a sentence, it supposed to be spelled d'Artagnan, not D'Artagnan.
(I'm sure that if you scoured my old book-based fics, you'd find at least one place where I slipped up and capitalized it, because the first law of pointing out spelling mistakes is that you'll make the same mistake or a similar one yourself while you're in the process of pointing that other person's error out, but trust me on this, the "d" is lowercase)
Let me explain at tl;dr length.
In English, last names, being proper nouns, always begin with a capital letter. In French, it's normally the same, with one notable exception:
The particle. Particles are the "de"s and "du"s that show up in characters' names, as in "de Treville," "d'Artagnan" ("de" always becomes "d' " when it precedes a vowel), "Milady de Winter," "du Vallon," and "the Comte de la Ferre." They are almost never capitalized, unless the name appears at the beginning of a sentence.
Ex:
D'Artagnan was engaged to fight a duel with Athos at noon. Porthos and Aramis were also engaged to duel with d'Artagnan at one o' clock and two o'clock, respectively.*
"D'Artagnan! My sister's honor will not wait a moment longer!" shrieks the foppish local nobleman at the beginning of the Disney 1993 movie.
"Monsieur de Treville awaits Monsieur d'Artagnan," cried a servant, throwing open the door of the cabinet.
Originally/most frequently used to denote nobility (as the judge points out in episode 5, where he's offended by Porthos's adoption of the faux-noble name "du Vallon"), the particle is a preposition that indicates where someone is from. In English, "de" translates to "of" and "du" and "de la" to "of the" (because grammar can be just as arbitrary and weird in French as it can in English, "de le" is always shortened to "du" but "de la" is not shortened to anything), so being known as [title] de/du/de la [place name] indicated that you were the lord of a particular estate. Think of English noblemen like the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Essex.
Often, the de [something] was used in conjunction with a family name, (for another English example, think "George Gordon, Lord Byron," or "Arthur Wellesly, Duke of Wellington" - both of them are known by their titles and referred to as Byron and Wellington as if those were last names, but if you took the titles away, they'd be Mr. Gordon and Mr. Wellesly, just as "George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham" would be Mr. Villiers). Captain de Treville's name is technically an example of this - the real historical captain of the king's musketeers whom Dumas based him on was named Jean-Armand du Peyrer, Comte de Troisville (the fact that this gives him basically the same first name as Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu is yet more proof that people need to write lots of delicious rival-slash/hatesex fic for that pairing).
Just to be confusing, de/du/de la [place name] without the title could also indicate that you were an ordinary person who just happened to be from [place], so having a particle in your name doesn't automatically mean you're an aristocrat. To increase the confusion, some families over time combined the particle and the name it preceded into one word (ex: DuPont) and started capitalizing it after all.
But in the 1630s? It's lowercase all the way unless it's the first word in a sentence.
Charles de Batz-Castlemore d'Artganan
Olivier de la Ferre
Porthos du Vallon
Captain de Treville
(and Renee d'Herblay/Henri d'Aramitz, depending on whether you want to go with Aramis's book!canon name or the real name of the historical musketeer he's extremely loosely based on)
*Checking the timing of the back-to-back duels in my various copies of The Three Musketeers reminded me once again that Porthos & Aramis's introduction is adorable - when d'Artagnan first meets them, they literally are having one of those 'bickering romantic couple in a 40s screwball comedy' fights that end with shouting one anothers' names in exasperation.