Donning my 'haubregon de fer'

Last Saturday I joined 157 other singers ...

<archivists-note nitpicking="Missing apostrophe explained>
(I was the 158th)
</archivists-note>

...to sing Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man. I have sung this piece three times in various formats...

<parenthesis>

• The whole piece, imam and all
• The concert suite – just the choral settings of the traditional movements of the Mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei (more accessible for both singers and audience, but omitting the song L'homme armé, which seems to me to be rather the point)
• Last Saturday's version  (much the most successful). The score for the concert suite asks the pianist to simulate a marching drum by tapping the piano with their bass hand – a feat of leftidigitation; but we had a percussionist with full drum kit. There was also a trumpeter, marked by the composer as 'optional' (though I'd rather have said 'crucial' –  especially her spine-tingling Last Post).

</parenthesis>

...  and every time I sing it I see the note in the score, which says it was commissioned by the Royal Armouries to mark their move. This note invariably triggers a memory of the visit to the Royal Armouries that led to this post back in November 2012.

The 2000 recording of the London Philharmonic with the National Youth Choir of Great Britain pronounces The first L'homme in the opening line...

<parenthesis>
(L'homme, L'homme, l'homme armé)
</parenthesis>

... ['lɔmɛ].

<parenthesis>
(You must excuse my use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Regular readers will know how I feel about 'sounds like' transcriptions. If you want to understand the depths of my loathing, click on IPA in the word cloud on the right. For the purposes of reading on, the funny thing that looks a bit like a reversed 3 represents an open e)
</parenthesis>

... rather than a schwa – as one would expect in modern French.

This sound is historically likely, though not to my liking – and not preferred by Saturday's MD George de Voil. The song L'homme armé was a popular French medieval French song:

L'homme armé
from the
Mellon Chansonnier
(late 15th cent.)

And generally, in Romance languages, (ones derived from Latin) nouns are derived from the accusative (linguists prefer the term 'objective', as in Vulgar Latin a generalized object noun was added to a <verb + preposition> pair,  rather than following a verb with a declined noun (one with case endings: CREDO IN UNUM DEUM rather than CREDO UNO DEO). Romance Philologists (a group of which I was a fully paid-up member 50 years ago, though I'm still an enthusiatic amateur) use the convention CAPITALS+(last-letter-of-accusative) to give Vulgar Latin spellings: for example HOMINE(M) [='man']; giving homme. This early post says more about this convention in some real-world cases..

Over the years, various bits of original words were eroded and/or changed in some way –  depending on the contexts they were used in; and the open e of the original HOMINE(M) evolved into the schwa of the modern French homme. So the e was open in say 100 CE, and it was schwa  by say 1850 CE....

<apologia-pro-indolentia-sua excuse="laziness">
These guesses are completely off the top of my head; during my studies I avoided a paper called The History of  French because there was too much conflicting data to wade through, and a tedious lecturer who had written the one, overlong, set book.
<apologia>

...in medieval France, when the song first appeared, the odds are that it was fairly open.

<objection>
But what about the -MI-? That's why I said 'various bits of original words were eroded and/or changed in some way'. Unstressed syllables are often the frst things to go; DOMINA(M), for example, gave Spanish doña (where the ñ is a sign of the two nasal consonants left after the -MI- disappeared; it went one step further in Portuguese dona).

<meta-objection>
Only one? Spelling is only part of the story. The final a was reduced, becoming schwa.

<autobiographical-note>
In my time as a technical writer I wortked on some software that had the internal  codename de Gama (pronounced with a schwa). I had come to the project too late to correct this to da Gama. See what I have to suffer?
</autobiographical-note>

</meta-objection>

This post says more about this sort of erosion, including a case involving an unstressed -MI- (in an inscription on a ring unearthed [unashed?]  at Pompeii).
</objection>

But what about that haubregon de fer? (This has gone one too long already. The haubregon will have to wait for an update, if I ever get a round tuit. Words for our next concert won't learn themselves.

b