transgression,accusation,coroner,plaintiff,defendant,claimant,executor,notary,bail,
process, appeal,decree, divorce,exile,heritage,prison, treason,dungeon,arrest,plead,
jail,punish,banish,realese,etc.
Military terms:(Much of the fighting during this time was done in France. Many now-obsolete words for pieces of armor, etc., were borrowed at this time.) army, navy,peace,enemy, arms,battle,spy,combat,siege,defence,ambush,soldier,guard, mail, buckler, banner, lance, besiege, defend, array, admiral, armour, artillery, war,
Fortress,host,warrior,archer,chief,captain,admiral,conqueror,victor,robber,destroy,
expedition,etc.
Clothing and ornamentation:habit, gown, robe, garment, attire, cape, coat, collar, petticoat, train, lace, embroidery, pleat, buckle, button, tassel, plume, satin, taffeta, fur, sable, blue, brown, vermilion, russet, tawny, jewel, ornament, broach, ivory, turquoise, topaz, garnet, ruby, pearl, diamond ,blouse, chemise, cloak, frock,
veil,cotton,boot,broach,pearl,scissors,brush,mirror,towel,carpet,curtain,couch,lace,
blanket,cushion,table,chair,fashion,emerald,sapphire,crystal,amethyst,luxury,satin,
embroidery,taffeta,etc
Food and cooking:feast,repast,collation, mess, appetite, tart, sole, perch, sturgeon, sardine, venison, beef, veal, mutton, port, bacon, toast, cream, sugar, salad, raisin, jelly, spice, clove, thyme,fry,boil,roast,mince,dine,dinner,supper,appetite,flour,lard
grease,spice,vinegar,victuals,sausage,sauce,gravy,jelly,juice,cabbage,biscuit,fritter,cider,cucumber,onion,olive,lettuce,grape,orange,leman,cherry,peach,pastry,treacle,
tart,spice,clove,thyme,herb.
Social terms:curtain,couch ,lamp, wardrobe ,screen, closet, leisure, quilt,checker,
dance, carod,lute, melody,conversation,rein,stallion,trot,harness,mastiff,pheasant,
terrier,squirrel,etc.
Hunting terms:rein, curry, trot, stable, harness, mastiff,spaniel, stallion, pheasant, quail, heron, joust, tournament, pavilion,etc.
Art,Learning,Medicine:painting,sculpture,music, beauty, color, image, cathedral, palace, mansion, chamber, ceiling, porch, column, poet, prose, romance, paper, pen, volume, chapter, study, logic, geometry, grammar, noun, gender, physician, malady, pain, gout, plague, pulse, remedy, poison,clause,logic,geometry,compile,
copy,gout,etc.
Common expressions:draw near, make believe, hand to hand, by heart, without fail (These are loan-translations).
Geography:country,coast,river,valley.lake,mountain, frontier, border, city,hamlet,
village; estate,etc.
Noble title: emperor; duke; duchess; duchy; prince; count; countess; baron; squire; noble(man/woman); gentle(man/woman); dame; damsel,chevalier,master,dauphin,
marquis,etc.
Terms referring to sections of the community: peasantry; people; subjects; burgesses; nobility; gentry; knighthood; chivalry,etc
Terms for emotional states:ease, disease, joy, delight, felicity, grief, despair, distress,courage,folly,passion,desire,jealousy,ambition,arrogance,despite,disdain,malice,envy,avarice,certainty,doubt, enjoy,despise,furious,etc
Trades and crafts: barber, butcher, carpenter, carrier,draper,forester,fruiterer; grocer; mason; mercer; merchant; spicer; painter; tailor; victualler; apprentice; surgeon; physician; bargain; fair; merchandise; price; money; coin; dozen; double; measure; gallon; bushel; purchase; profit; pay; usury; debt; prosperity; barrel; bottle; basket; vessel,etc.
Terms that expressed fundamental theological or religious concepts : creator,
saviour,trinity,saint,miracle,faith,heresy,reverence,devotion,sacrilege,temptation,redemption,absolution,immorality,salvation,etc.
Pervasive French influence on vocabulary:
by 1300-action, adventure, affection, age, air, bucket, calendar, cheer, city, coast, comfort, cost, country, courage, debt, force, flower, malice, manner,marriage, noise, odor, opinion, order, pair, people, person, poverty, sign,sound, waste,etc
by 1350-able, abundant, active, blank, calm, certain, courageous, poor,faint, easy, eager, firm, foreign, jolly, large, perfect, original, nice, hardy,safe, rude, real, solid, special, sudden, sure, tender, universal, usual, allow,apply, arrange, betray, carry, change, chase,close,complain,consider,continue, count, cry, deceive, declare, defy, defer, desire, destroy, embrace, enjoy, enter, flatter, force, grant, increase, inquire, join, marry, muse, murmur,obey observe, pass, please, prefer prove, receive, refuse, remember, reply, to take leave, to do justice, by heart, in vain, without fail, according to, at large,etc.
Assorted loanwords: affair; action; air; baggage; beauty; branch; cage; cable; cattle; chance; change; choice; company; consent; coward; couple; cry; cure; damage; danger; delay; demand; departure; difference; difficulty; error; example; exception; excercise; experience; face; fate; favour; fence; fool; force; foreign; fountain; guide; honour; labour; leisure; marriage; piece; pencil; possession; question; language; wages able; ancient; brief; certain; clear; considerable; cruel; different; difficult; easy; familiar; famous; favourable; feeble; faint; fine; general; gentle; glorious; poor; safe; sure achieve; arrive; appear; approve; approach; assemble; assist; attend; advertise; affirm; await; blame; catch; cancel; carry; cease; chase; cry; change; consent; consider; count; cover; demand; deny; depart; deserve; discover; disturb; finish; employ; encourage; enjoy; enter; excuse; escape; increase; examine; force; fail; form; grieve; marry; refuse; perish; suffer; paint; perform; propose; save; touch; travel; tremble,etc.
The conquered island of English was for centures a pale moon,illuminated by the Sun of French civilization,and it must be our task to trace the penetration of that light into English and common consciousness of the English people.
Two French words borrowed before the Conquest are of considerable interest.These are pride,which appears about A.D 1000,and proud which came in about fifty years later.They are both derived from the French prüd (preux) in modern French which descends from the first element in Latin verb prdesse,to be of value. These words ,which in French had the meaning of valiant, brave, gallant,
soon acquired in English sense of arrogant,haughty,overweening.This change of meaning was due,perhaps,to bearing of the proud Normans who came over to England before Conquest in the train of Edward the Confessor,and the aspect in which these haughty nobles and ecclesiastics presented themselves to the Englishmen they scorned.Another word introduced at this time,and no doubt by Edward the Confessor,is chancellor-a word full of old history,which,for all its present dignity,is derived ultimately from cancer,the Latin word for crab.How the cancellarious,a petty officer of the Eastern Empire,stationed at the bars or crab-like lattices(cancelli) of the law courts,rose from an usher to be notary or secretary and come to be infested with judical functions,and to play a more important part in the Western Empire,belongs however,to European,and not to English history; but the word is interest to us as being one of the three or four French terms that found their way into English in Anglo-Saxon times.But the French language has undergone considerable and more recent changes since the date when the Normans brought it into England.Some words that borrowed have become obsolete in their native country,some consonants have been dropped,and the sound of others has been changed,we retain,for instance,the s that the French have lost in many words like beast and feast,which are bête and fête in Modern French.So,too,the sound of ch has become sh in France,but in English words of early borrowings,like chamber,charity,etc.,they keep the old pronunciation.They keep,moreover,in many cases,forms peculiar to the Norman dialect,as caitiff,canker,carrion,etc.,in which c before a did not become ch,as it did in the Parisian dialect,cark and charge are both from the same Latin word carricare,but one is the Norman and the other the Parisian from the word.In many cases the g of Norman French was changed to j in the Central dialects and English word goal has preserved its Norhern spelling, while it is pronounced,and sometimes written,with the j of Parisian French.
As we haven seen,the main additions to the English language,additions so great as to change its character in a fundamental way,were from the French,first of all from the Northern French of the Norman conquerors,and the from the literary and learned speech of Paris.But the French language,as we have seen,is mainly based on Latin-not on the Latin of classical literature,but the popular spoken language,the speech of the soldiers and uneducated people, and the Latin words were so clipped, changed and deformed by them (not,however,capriciously,but in accordance with certain definite laws) that they are often at first unrecognizable.
From early times,however,a large number of latin words were taken into French,and thence into English,from literary Latin;and as they were never used in popular speech,they did not undergo this process of popular transformation.
With importation,therefore,of French vocabulary into English,many of the learned words borrowed first from Late,and then from Classical Latin,were adopted into English.But in England,also,Latin was spoken by clergy and learned men of the country,the Bible and the service-books were in Latin,and historical and devotional books were largely written in it.When these Latin books were translated into English,or when a scholar writing in English wished to use a latin word,he followed the analogy of the Latin words that had already come to English through the French language,and altered them as if they had first been adopted in French.It is often,therefore,difficult to say whether a Latin word has come to English through the French language,or has been taken immediately from the Latin.
A curious tendency,due not so much to the Genius of the Language as to the self-conscious action of the learned people,has affected the form of Latin words in English and French,but more drastically,perhaps,on this side of the Channel.From early times a feeling has existed that the popular forms of words were incorrect,and attepts more or less capricious and often wrong,have been made to change back to words to shapes more accordance with their original spelling.Thus,the h was added to words like umble,onour,abit,etc;b was inserted in debt(to show its derivation from the Latin debitum) and l in fault,as proof of its relation to the Latin fallere,and p found its way into receipt as a token of the Latin receptum.These pedantic forms were either borrowed direct into English from the French,or in many old words the change was made by English scholars;and in some words,as for instance debt and fault,their additions have remained in English,while in French the words have reverted to their old spelling.These changes,as in honour,dept,receipt,do not always affect the pronunciation;but in many words, as vault,fault,assault,the letters pedantically inserted have come gradually to be pronounced fault rhymed with thought in the eighteenth century,and only in the nineteenth century has h come to be pronounced in humble and hospital.
Among the various types of changes which took place in the period in which Middle English borrowed from French through direct contact are those which led to a mixing of Germanic and Romance elements.Thus,one has cases of assimilation in which an English word was created on the basis of a similar sounding French word.Here one has an instance of French form complementing the English one.For example,the English verb choose obtained a noun choice on the basis of a borrowing of French choise.
As a generalization one can say that the French loans are to be found on a higher stylistic levels in English.With the later Central French borrowings this is obvious given the sectors of society where the loans occurred.The general split is between colloquial native words and more formal Romance terms and can be seen clearly I word pairs like”forgive and pardon”.Other examples are:
French English
close shut
reply answer
odour smell
annual yearly
demand ask
chamber room
desire wish
power might
ire wrath/anger
commence begin
cordial hearty
felicity happiness
aid help
conceal hide
repast meal
marriage wedding
dress clothe
amity friendship
nourish feed
liberty freedom
grief sorrow
The areas of the English lexicon in which the influence of French was to be felt reflect the spheres of life in which the French predominated in the early Middle English period.
In some cases French words supplanted even the most everyday words of the English vocabulary.Thus,the French word rivière supplanted the native word ēa river,the French word montagne supplanted the native beorʒ mountain,and the French paix the native friþ peace.in some individual cases there could be special conditions favouring the introduction of the foreign word;for example,the OE word ēa river became ē,in ME and was thus phonetically much weaker than the French riviére.Its phonetical weakness might thus promoted its appearance from the language.In other cases other factors may also have been at work.
Sometimes the intruding French word forced its native synonym into a different sphere of meaning.For instance,the OE substantive hærfest,meaning autumn,was superseded by the French word autumn,but survived in the English language with the meaning harvest.The semantic tie between autumn and harvest is of course clear enough.
In some similar way,the OE substantive ʒebed prayer was superseded by French preiere,MnE prayer.However,the native word survived with the meaning beads,which had developed from the original meaning prayer owing to the intermediate meaning rosary;the number of prayers said was counted on the beads or rosary;thus,in certain circumstance,for example,five beads could mean the same as five prayers.
The degree to which French words penetrated into English depended on two factors:on the geographical region and on the social layer addressed by the document.Thus,we can state two principles in this sphere:
(1)the farther North,the fewer French words;
(2)the closer to the lower strata of society,the fewer French words.
A typical example showing the dependence of the French lexical layer on the social position of an author was found by comparing two documents belonging to the same time (early 13th century),but differing as to the social position of their authors.One of them is Ancrene Riwle(Statue for Nuns) adressed by an unknown author to three aristocratic nuns on the rules of monastic life;the other is Ormulum-a poem by a simple monk called Orm,addresed to his brother Walter.While the Ancrene Riwle contains a large number of French words,the Ormulum is almost entirely devoid of them.
The third period of French borrowings is from around 1400 onwords.The borrowings of the two periods tent to be more elegant and sophisticated but yet not too far away from the core and several became quite nativised (dance,April,native,fine,line,punish,finish).These later borrowings were more,distant from the core,with attention being explicitly called to their sophisticated,well-bred,cultivated,even arty’French’texture:notice the spellings and pronunciations of some of these items:ballet,tableau,statuesque,cliché,motif,format
trousseau,lingerie,soufflé,hors d’oeuvre,rouge,etiquette,etc.
By the 16th,especially the 17th century England was establishing itself as a modern nation state,economically viable,self-confident,powerful.No longer needed French words-for special effects.
The words of this period are not from the Norman dialect of French,but from the Central or Parisian dialect.They were borrowed from French as a result of political and cultural relations between the two countries.In the second half of the 17th century France was the greatest power in Europe.The French language became fasionable in England and that caused the appearance of a lot of new French words in the English language.
Such words as fianc,unique,machine,marine,police,etc were borrowed at this period.A lot of the words borrowed by the English at this period are international,e.g .toilet, hotel, illuminated, elegant, extravagant , delicate,
miniature, critique ,symphony ,bourgeois, regime, bomb,etc.