Sainte Foy Tarentaise : 05 July 2020
When I first came to Sainte Foy (pronounced Sainte-Fwa), I could never understand why the locals gave me a blank stare whenever I said “Arr-p’tazz”. Now I know, and here’s why . . .
I often have difficulty with French surnames and names of towns and villages in France. They are usually one-off words with little or no connection to anything else in the French language. The same could be said for these names in English, but helpfully I have a lifetime’s experience of hearing English names.
Arpettaz, (pictured below), is a small mountain hamlet consisting of only a few buildings at the top of the eponymously named L’Arpettaz chairlift and piste.
The name Arpettaz has a built-in level of trickiness for anyone coming from outside the Savoie region, you don’t pronounce the ‘z’ at the end. In his book ‘Sainte-Foy-Tarentaise’, Jean-Louis Bradel explains to us the history of this phenomenon.
Pre 1860, the Duchy of Savoy covered land in what is now France and Italy. Following the Treaty of Turin, signed on 24 March 1860, Savoy and Nice were annexed to France and a national border was created, as seen on maps today.
There were several towns bearing the same name on either side of the newly formed national border. So to differentiate the French town names from the Italian towns, scribes drawing up the maps added an ‘x’ or ‘az’ to the French town names.
The ‘x’ and the ‘z’ are not pronounced. Chamonix is an example of the ‘x’ not being pronounced. The local village of La Gurraz1 and the hamlet of Arpettaz are two very local examples of the ‘z’ not being pronounced.
Interestingly, you may hear Arpettaz pronounced in two different ways by the locals. Phonetically, the pure French pronunciation is ‘Arr-pet’. The other pronunciation is the old patois version, ‘Arr-pay-tta’. Neither pronounce the ‘z’!
Those of you who have driven to Sainte Foy may well have stopped off at the fabulous Chevallot boulangerie in Séez with its wood-fire oven and delicious ‘abricotines’. We do not pronounce the ‘z’ in Séez either, but this is for a totally different reason.
We need to go back into Roman times for this one. At one stage in history, Séez was six Roman miles from the border of the Roman empire, and the six-mile ‘borne’, milestone, was where Séez is today. Séez is therefore a derivative of the Roman word for six. It is pronounced ‘say’ by the locals.
A Roman mile consisted of a thousand paces as measured by every other step, as in the total distance of the left foot hitting the ground 1,000 times. I like to think of them using a marching centurion to do this!
In modern day French, ‘borne’ is slang for a kilometre, so a journey of 100 kms is ‘cent bornes’, a hundred kilometres.
Read other articles about Sainte Foy on the Time to Ski blog page
1. If you take the itinerary route up to Le Monal, you can see La Gurraz on the opposite side of the valley.
