ИСТИНА

Chaucer’s Boece has attracted the attention of scholars less frequently than his original works. In the early XX c. it was established that Li Livres de Confort was undoubtedly one of the sources for Boece. However, a comprehensive study of the influence of the French translation on Chaucer’s text still remained to be done. In the present paper I will sum up the results of comparative analysis of “Li Livres de Confort” and “Boece”. From the linguistic point of view the influence of the French translation on “Boece” can be observed at all levels: phonetics/orthography (the way the words of French and Latin origin are represented in the two texts), morphology and syntax (the use of certain prepositions, word-order etc.), lexis (choice of words, the proportion between Romance and Germanic words in different parts of “Boece”). All these features characterizing the two translations become especially meaningful if regarded within a more general picture of the development of English prose in the post-Conquest times under a considerable influence of French, the studies of which are usually limited to making an inventory of lexical and syntactic borrowings. It seems necessary to proceed to the study of functioning of these elements within Middle English texts like “Boece”, in order to uncover the mechanisms of French influence on the development of the English language.