Almost all of the 92 words that are connected to the fields of politics are French loanwords. Such examples are the words “reign”, “enemies”, “nations”, “defend”, “prince” and the word “politics” itself. Only the word “queen” is a native Anglo-Saxon word. All these “political” French loanwords were borrowed in the 13th and 14th Century, when Norman
French was the administrative language on the British Isles. These words show us that French was the language that was spoken in the field of politics.
One remarkable thing is that the name “Britain” is also a loanword from Old French. It was borrowed in the end of the 13th century, in a time when many French loanwords were adopted. Most of the Old French borrowings entered the English language in the 13th and 14th century, which makes them loanwords from the third Romance period. Only the words “politics” and “assassins” are from the Modern Period, and it is unknown when the word “gracious” was adopted.
These words show us that English borrowed an enormous amount of words from French during this period, and that the words come from all different aspects of society. “Voice”, “tricks” and “pour” are three more examples of words that were borrowed during this period.
English has a large amount of lexica, in comparison to many other languages. This can be explained with the fact that English has borrowed a great deal of words from other languages and simultaneously kept the native vocabulary. This is a major reason why English has so many synonyms that only have small differences in connotation.
Only two words were found that had once been borrowed directly from Norman French or Anglo French; “confound” and “extend”. This was rather surprising, considering the vast amount of borrowings there is in English from this French dialect. One possible explanation for this is the classification system used in etymological works. The Etymology dictionary most likely states that a word is an Old French borrowing when a word is identical in Norman French and Old French. Only when a word is distinctively Norman French does the dictionary label it as such Lockwood [6 P. 79], for example, uses the term Old French when the dialects Norman French and Central French are “not tangibly distinguished”.
Altogether, the French loanwords made up 26.2%, which means that slightly more than one out of four words were of French origin. This is a rather large percentage, in comparison to how many French loanwords were found in Shakespeare’s works. This could be explained with the fact that “God Save the Queen” is a political anthem, and therefore many of the words are in one way or the other connected to politics. As we saw in the theoretical part, politics is one of those fields, in which a great deal of words were borrowed during the third Roman period, so this has probably played a role in the outcome of the analysis.
Five words were found that were borrowed from Old Norse. “Happy”, “them”, “gifts”, “laws” and “their” all have their origin in the North Germanic language. The fact that the pronoun “them” managed to enter the English language shows us the profound influence that Old Norse must have had on English. It is unusual that pronouns and grammatical words are borrowed, and only when the “lending” language community was powerful and there was much contact between the groups could this be possible. The fact that Old Norse and Old English were fairly similar languages is also a reason for the large amount of borrowings from Old Norse [2 P. 18]. The languages, most likely, mixed into each other and this made it easier to borrow loanwords. The five words that were borrowed from Old Norse entered the English language approximately 200 to 400 years after the first Scandinavian settlements in Great Britain in the 10th century. This gives us a picture of how long time it may take before words are adopted from one language to another. Of the five native Old Norse words, two are adjectives, two are nouns and one is a pronoun.
The word “law” also revels to us in what fields the Scandinavians were powerful. In year 878 A.D., the Danish legal system was introduced in the northern parts of the country, and consequently some legal terminology was borrowed [2 P.17]. The word “law” is one example.
The word “gift” which is also an Old Norse borrowing and therefore also of Germanic origin exists beside its synonym “present” in the English vocabulary today. This word, on the other hand, is of Romance origin, and was borrowed from Old French around 1225 A.D. This is one example of two synonyms in English that have both been borrowed, and that do not
have a native equivalent.
Four Latin loanwords were found among the 92 examined words. “Frustrate”, “cause”, “family”, and “latent”. All the Latin words that were found were adopted between the 13th century and the 15th century. These words were borrowed during a period when the English adopted a considerable amount of Latin words. People were reading a lot of literature in Latin, and a reason for this could be that William Caxton had recently brought the book printing to England, which made the books a lot cheaper and more available to more people.
A further reason is that the Renaissance and the interest in classical texts had just begun in Europe.
Conclusion
The results confirm that English is a very open language with regards to its acceptance to adopt foreign words into its vocabulary. There has been little resistance against loanwords in Great Britain in comparison to many other European countries. In Great Britain, purist groups, whose ultimate goal is to make a language free of foreign influences, were never as successful as in Germany for example [19]. As a consequence, the English have borrowed words from all kinds of people that they have come in contact with over the years. The Romance languages have had the longest and deepest impact on the English language and both Latin and French have played a major role in “lending” words to English.
The people that spoke these Romance languages were not only powerful people abroad, but many of them also lived in the British Isles. There was, in other words, direct contact between the English and the people from whom they borrowed lexica, and this direct contact, which was also of long duration, resulted in this vast borrowing. Great Britain’s history is hence a major reason why a large amount of English words are of foreign origin.
The words in “God Save the Queen” proved not to be any different than the words in general in the English vocabulary. Many of them had once been borrowed from other languages, but the majority was native English words. The results coincide with the percentages shown in the theoretical part of the essay. There we could see that linguists come to the conclusion that the majority of words in a dictionary are of foreign origin. When the most commonly used words are analyzed, however, we saw that most of them were native English words. The words in “God Save the Queen” are all fairly common words, and therefore the majority was of Anglo-Saxon origin.
This paper has showed that linguistic borrowing is an old way of acquiring new vocabulary, and not a new phenomenon of our globalized world. People of different cultures have always interacted with each other, and there has always been an exchange of lexica due to this interaction. Loanwords enrich a language, since the vocabulary gets larger and each word therefore acquires a more specific and subtle meaning and this should be kept in mind before one simply criticizes and dismisses borrowings.
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Appendix 1
God Save the Queen
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and Glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!
O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
Oh, save us all!
Thy choicest gifts in store
On her be pleased to pour;
Long may she reign;
May she defend our laws,
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the Queen!
Not in this land alone,
But be God's mercies known,
From shore to shore!
Lord make the nations see,
That men should brothers be,
And form one family,
The wide world over
From every latent foe,
From the assassins blow,
God save the Queen!
O'er her thine arm extend,
For Britain's sake defend,
Our mother, prince, and friend,
God save the Queen!
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