"Languages do not spring up like plants, some weak and sickly, others healthy and robust. All their virtue lies in the will and determination of mortals. To condemn a language as being struck with impotence is to adopt a tone of arrogance and temerity; as certain of our fellow-countrymen do to-day, who, being nothing less than Greeks or Latins, regard with a more than stoical superciliousness everything written in French. If our language is poorer than the Greek or Latin, this is not attributable to our own inability, but to the ignorance of our own predecessors who have bequeathed it to us in so meagre and so bare a form that it stands in need of ornament, and, so to speak, of plumage from other sources."
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Défense et illustration de la langue françoise (1549). Qtd. by Irma Dreyfus, Lectures on French Literature, Tr. James Smith (1896), pp. 96–7
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joachim_du_Bellay
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Joachim du Bellay
(c. 1522 – 1 January 1560) was a French poet, literary critic, and a founder of '. He notably wrote the manifesto of the group: Défense et illustration de la langue française, which aimed at promoting French as an artistic language, equal to Greek and Latin.
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