I recently bought the 25th Anniversary Tour Cast Album of Les Mis. And upon hearing Earl Carpenter’s parts, his recognizable rolled “r” got me thinking. Because just like that it seems a bit strange, but I came to a conclusion that quite satisfy myself and I wanted to share.
What do we know about Javert : he was born inside a jail from a gypsy woman and a dad he never knew since he was convicted to the chain gang for life before he was even born.
What else do we know ? We know Javert is a bohemian. Now I don’t know if Earl read the book or not (for example I read JOJ said he read it twice or something, anyway) but the fact that Javert is a bohemian may have led him to roll his “r”. Let me explain my reasoning behind this.
First off all, I narrowed my options and I don’t know much about bohemians/gypsy people and I mean no harm, if my vision is missing a point and you know it, please do tell, I’ll be happy to learn something more ! Anyway, let’s start :
Bohemian is a vague word, it could refer to different origins/nationalities : spanish (from Andalucia especially), Egyptian or Romanian (at least I narrowed to those three because I’ve already seen those nationalities when people talk about bohemians).
Spanish is a latin language, a rhotic language with a roll on the “r”.
I listened to several romanian videos : you hear the r-s there’s a slight roll as well.
As for the Egyptian Arabic, r-s are quite present as well.
So as regard the three possible languages, you can have an explanation. Now :
Earl speaks Arabic (he spent some of his youth in Middle East) so that could be a possibility.
But the name, Javert. If we assume it’s the name he got from his mother then we can think about this :
Javert is not really a name in French (not at all even). More like a family name and even. it’s pretty unique. I’ve looked a bit through onomastics and what is the nearest from Javert in French is the name Xavier. Remember the Javert being a bohemian part ? Okay so the name Xavier has a close equivalent in Spanish : Javier (pronunced Raviair). Javier / Javert that’s pretty close isn’t it ? Orthographically speaking at least. In phonetics what is closer to Javert is the variant Xaber/Xabier (the x being pronunced ch).
Back to my point : imagine Javert’s mother was a Spanish woman. Imagine her giving birth to her son in prison and naming him Xabier/Xaber. But since she’s in prison the guards don’t pay attention and hear her say Xabier/Xaber (which in phonetics would give something like Cha for the first syllable and for the “b” a sound between b and v and then “air”). It could totally be possible that the guards just wrote down what they heard or something that sounded like it and wrote down Javert the “ch” sound becoming a “j”.
Sooooo now imagine Javert is of Spanish origin (taking into account what we just said about his name and the fact that he’s bohemian). We know his mother did not lived long after he was born but imagine her talking to him in spanish and it just stays in him. He learns to speak and speaks french (which is a rhotic accent as well) but somehow he has this habit of slightly rolling his r-s and that’s something he can’t really shake off.
Then Earl’s rolling r-s make perfect sense :
- French is a rhotic language
- Javert is a bohemian and three possible mothertongues are rhotic (or more or less)
- Javert could be a deformation of Xabier/Xaber, a spanish name and Spanish rolls the r-s
(- And Earl knowing Arabic could be a thing as well you know if he assumes the bohemian part comes from Egypt and that Javert is just a name he was given in prison)
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