The Story of the French Store

Awnings are everywhere you look here in Aix-en-Provence: small ones extending over apartment windows; medium ones in front of the florists or the boucher's; vast ones extending from bistrots and restaurants that generously provide shade during the afternoon apéro.

The words for "awning" in French are: auvent (n.m.) and store (n.m.). Auvent is at first obvious: "[set up] against the wind". But in fact, windy conditions are precisely when you'd take an awning down. How to explain this word?

And what on earth is the story behind store? It sounds strikingly un-Gallic to my admittedly anglophone ears, which immediately, when they first heard the word, triggered images in my mind of the local Monoprix or Intersport.

My go-to resource for these questions is the website run by the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTS) which is, to use their words, "a collection of online linguistic resources and language processing tools." It has a corpus of oral French which draws on sources from the 1980's and 90's. It has a tool that analyzes inflections. And, importantly for us, it assembles, online, a number of etymological handbooks.

This resource quickly dispatched my doubts on the history of store. It comes from the Italian stora, a kind of reed mat set up to protect against the sun. And that derives from the Latin storea (also pronounced storia), a good Classical Latin word found in Caesar, Livy, and Pliny, which means "a reed or straw mat". Earlier spellings of the French word were stoire and estoire.

What was the Latin storea used for? Julius Caesar, writing in his war diaries, says he used long, thick ones hanging suspended -- awning-like -- from three sides of a tower, "because they (he and his men) had discovered elsewhere that this was the one type of protection that was impervious to being pierced by spears and arrows." (Diary on the Civil Wars, 2.9). This passage, by the way, contains our first appearance of the term in Latin literature. It looks like the storea as awning goes at least all the way back to Julius Caesar.

One more thing. Does this actually have some connection to the English store, which, in French would be magasin? No. This has a different Latin root, instaurare, "to renew, to restore" which led to the old French estorer, "to provide, furnish...", thence we Old English storen and our own store (how does one derive the noun store, however, from the verb storen? That's another blog post).

And what about the origins of auvent? "Obsc." Obscure. Or rather, debated. One explanation which seems more acceptable than the others is to trace it to an ancient Gallic word, *andebanno, with ande an intensive particle, and banno meaning "horn." Apparently in ancient Gaul, the Celts would place horns on the parts of their homes that projected outward to honor of bull-god, the bull being an animal of great spiritual significance in that culture. This seems to me as good a guess as any, and could owe more to a nationalist desire to give this ubiquitous Gallic furnishing ancient roots.