French was the official language of England from 1066 till 1362 | Hacker News Reader

French was the official language of England from 1066 till 1362

frenchleeds.co.uk

43 pointsthunderbong97 comments

I thought this was well known in the Anglosphere.

Anyway, I have heard that this is why the words for cooked version of the meat and the name of the animal is different in English.

For example, cow meat when cooked becomes beef. Sheep meat when cooked becomes mutton.

The Norman French elites referred to the cooked version by its French names but the English servants who dealt with the animals used the English words.

I am not sure that holds because the same split is observed in other languages, too. See el pez vs pescado in Spanish, for example.

Dutch too: koe (the animal) vs rund (the meat)

Not quite the same. Koe/rund (and Kuh/Rind in German) is a lot more like cow/cattle, with rund naming the species and koe a female animal.

Yes, but if you look at the etymology for “sheep” and “mutton”, they literally come from Old English and Old French respectively.

Does the same (different source languages) is true for “el pez” and “pescado”?

Piscis and piscari repectively, both from Latin so no

Maybe there are better examples, but pez and pescado are pretty obviously derived from the same source (pescado literally meaning a thing that is fished [i.e., captured from the sea]).

But the interesting thing is that in French, sheep and mutton are both mouton.

The English peasants raised the sheep, the French masters eat the mouton.

Sure, but in France, the peasants were French.

Right, but that’s a non-sequitur.

"French is an example of a language in which the meat and animal name are the same, at least in the case of the sheep (mouton)".

"The English peasants raised the sheep, the French masters eat the mouton." <-- this is the non sequitur

My comment was about French as such (being spoken in France by French masters and their French peasants).

So then in the case of English, the different meat names came about in a different way, from two languages that separately didn't have two meat names, which is interesting.

Ok I understand your point. I heard this story being told before as “the aristocratic English masters..” (implying they’d rubbed shoulders with the French enough to have adopted their lingo) which I think makes more logical sense to how it wound up being a French word in the English language.

I always heard the same thing, and it always rang true in my head, but of course it probably [needs citation].

The story is a good one, but I'm not sure it adds up.

Most curiously, what is never explained is what the servants actually called the animal. At the time there was no singular term for cattle or sheep in English. Any reference to the individual animals was more specific, e.g. bull, heifer, steer, cow, ewe, ram, etc.

But once you've cut up the animal, that specific differentiation becomes difficult to track. For all intents and purposes the meat is the same. The idea that the servant would say "time to cook the heifer" or "time to cook the steer" seems suspect. In fact, unless the servant in the kitchen was also the butcher, it is highly unlikely they would even know if the meat came from a heifer, a steer, or what have you in order to be able to speak to it as such.

It seems likely even the servants called it "beef" or, at very least, some other equivalent term of the same intent.

Boeuf (Beef), Mouton (Mutton), Porc (Pork). It doesn't work for chicken though.

Kinda does. Poulet (poultry)

This one is a more technical/farming term but yes.

Cow meat is beef before it's cooked too (hence "ground beef").

Yeah, the point at which the terminology changes for me is at the point at which the matter is dissected from the carcass

The French 'gu' (that you hear in 'segue') was pronounced as 'w' in Norman. So 'guerre' phonetically is close to 'guer', 'wer', 'war'. There is a lot of fun words like this.

Also, there is French legalese that went into English, like 'cancellation' that gave 'cancel' in English, and now sound very English for French people.

There are plenty of g/w examples still present wholly within English, too -- guarantee and warranty is the one I usually point to.

Likewise, Guillaume and William are the same name. (And if you're into medieval lit, Gawain and Wawain.)

There are other places you'll see this. For instance, the names of most historical weapons are Germanic, but tactics are French. Tools are generally Germanic, too -- if you want to see a good list of Old English tool names and people names, have a wander through your local hardware store/ironmonger.

> The Norman French elites referred to the cooked version by its French names but the English servants who dealt with the animals used the English words.

This is probably one of the most interesting facts I learned by watching QI. Probably because I'm more than average interested in languages.

In Norway - there I'm from - we also use "beef" (except it's "biff"), but for the other animals, I don't think we have a differentiation;

* Pig = "svin" (ref. swine)

* Sheep = "sau" (or "får")

* Chicken = "kylling"

So, I think the only word we still use that is differentiated from the animal it comes from, is "biff" for "okse" (oxen), "ku" (cow). Correct me if I'm wrong.

> For example, cow meat when cooked becomes beef.

So too does bull, heifer, and steer meat.

I have heard the same story, but perhaps beef actually came to be used because there was no generally accepted way to refer to the singular of cattle? "Cow meat" would have only referred to meat from cattle kept to produce milk; which also would have been the least likely meat source.

Eventually we got cattle beast as the singular form of cattle, but it appears it emerged in the lexicon after beef was already in use.

It is well known among anyone who paid attention in history classes. It’s also one of the main reasons why English spelling is so irregular. The Norman scribes didn’t respect English and were always using French spellings in writing English.

What years was English the official language of France? (if any)

The French and the English constantly invaded each other, so surely this had to work the other way at some point?

Half[1] of English is French, just like half[2] of Japanese is English/Portuguese. But off the top of my head I can't think of many French words which are derived from English?[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...

[2] Not an accurate statistic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eig...

[3] Well, here's all 12 of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Englis...

Half of English is medieval Latin (French) and half of Japanese is medieval Chinese is a better analogy.

It's true that half of Japanese is English, and half is medieval Chinese. Only the third half is native to Japan.

The Chinese influence works a lot like the Latin influence on English. Japanese is written in Chinese and some extra derivatives (hiragana/katakana are derived from Chinese characters). English is written in Latin characters plus a few extra (j, w, etc). Words you speak to express emotions, words that move you, words that you speak with your children, etc. are mostly native words (English/Japanese) but open a text book or newspaper and you're met with a wall of passionless loan words (Chinese/Latin) tersely describing precise phenomena.

The English is only for very modern stuff. Think computer technology or business buzz words.

I know, I was just trying to crack a joke :) I love that you can walk down a street in Tokyo and read half the signs if you know katakana.

It has worked the other way as well, as you can see in modern France, but mostly through the USA ;)

I believe it’s more like half of the Japanese gairaigo (Chinese excluded) come from English, not half of the entirety of Japanese.

Thanks to the language purity laws and Le Acedemie de Française, English words have been banned in France since ... well ... forever.

It's l'Académie Française, there are no language purity laws, English words are not banned in France, the Académie offers recommendations that the civil service generally follows, and Québec is generally far purer about the French language than France is.

"The Toubon Law (full name: law 94-665 of 4 August 1994 relating to usage of the French language) is a law of the French government mandating the use of the French language in official government publications, in all advertisements, in all workplaces, in commercial contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in all government-financed schools, and some other contexts.[1]"

"...the law mandates the use of the French language in all broadcast audiovisual programs, with exceptions for musical works and "original version" films.[2] Broadcast musical works are subject to quota rules under a related law whereby a minimum percentage of the songs on radio and television must be in the French language.[2]"

"...this [law also] means that computer software developed outside France must have its user interface and instruction manuals translated into French to be legally used by companies in France."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law

That’s not a language purity law, doesn’t ban English loanwords in French, and doesn’t give the Académie Française any legal or political power.

What "use the French language" means is open to interpretation by the civil service, and as GGP said, "the Académie offers recommendations that the civil service generally follows".

Sure, the Académie is influential, but this thread is in reply to a comment that claims that English words are banned in French which is demonstrably not true. French civil servants use English loanwords like week-end including in official publications, for example: https://dares.travail-emploi.gouv.fr/publication/quelle-cont...

Here is what they have to say about the laws that govern them: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/linstitution/statuts-et-re...

From where I stand, I'd call those language purity laws. You can read them for yourself, if you can read French. Otherwise, you may have to make use of a translation service.

I can read French. Which thing on that page specifically are you talking about? It all seems to be laws establishing the Académie, governing how it’s run, etc., but I don’t see anything on there about mandating that anyone speaks French in a particular way according to the Académie’s decisions.

The thing about French laws is that they are based on a different system than we have here in the US. It's called the "common law" system. That's why a normal, valid, and fully enforceable contract between two multi-million dollar companies in France could be just a page long. Or maybe just a few pages. The 99.9% that is not written down on that paper is assumed to automatically be applied, and therefore doesn't have to be written down.

And the same is true for creating new laws in France. When you create a law that establishes the existence a certain organization, a whole host of other things are effectively built into that, simply by inheritance from the common law system. And common laws don't need to be written down anywhere, because they're common.

You look at what is written, and you see only what is written. I look at what is written, and I understand something of how much doesn't need to be written because it's common law.

At this point you’re just making up nonsense to avoid admitting that you were wrong from the beginning.

There is no such thing as “language purity laws” in France; that’s a complete myth. The Académie Française is a cultural institution with no legal power whatsoever. Some English loanwords in French are “weekend”, “shampooing”, and “chewing-gum”.

> Half[1] of English is French, just like half[2] of Japanese is English/Portuguese.

Setting aside the difficulty of defending these breathtakingly inflated claims, your phrasing indicates the classic fallacy of defining a language just by its vocabulary. That possible were if, this sentence English in sense make would.

The Anglo-Norman state and the Kingdom of France frequently warred, but the period in which the Anglo-Norman state held substantial parts of France was one in which its élites would not have felt the need to impose English instead of French.

I've told folks half joking and half not that if they really want to level up their English, they should learn French. Once you know what to look for, you notice all the English words that came from French. It's something like 30% of our words.

> It's something like 30% of our words.

Not by any metric you'd care about. (And almost certainly not by any metric at all.)

Your comment contains 49 words. 4 come from Norse, 2 come from Latin (without passing through French), and 3 come from French. The remaining 40 come from Old English.

That's the count by token. By lemma, I counted 9 duplicate words, of which two are Norse and 7 are English. That brings French all the way up to 7.5%!

It's true, though, and in fact 30% is a conservative estimate. The percentage of English words that come from French varies from 29% to 45% depending on whether you count derivatives of those words.

A very non-exhaustive overview of this is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...

That was a great link, thank you!

I managed to find this, which is something that interests me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eig...

(Japanese words taken mostly from English)

What overview? That page repeats a bunch of claims on the basis of nothing, with a big banner at the top of the page warning you that none of the content is supported by any evidence.

The only citation on that page is a dead link to a Canadian university's "about our French program" page, which, while it does claim that 45% of all English words "come from French words" (again, on the basis of nothing), nevertheless manages to contradict the Wikipedia page that cites it by estimating the number at 50,000 rather than Wikipedia's reported 80,000.

Knowing French really helps with the higher register of English, as most of the “fancy” words have French roots.

This is a pretty rubbish post. For a start, it doesn’t cite any primary sources or legislation. 1066 was obviously the year of the invasion, but 1362 is principally notable in English linguistic history for the Statute of Pleading. The Statute of Pleading did not deprecate French as an official language. (Indeed, the concept of a sole official language as applied is pretty anachronistic: the administration used, in a somewhat regular pattern, all three of English, French, and Latin; choice of language was more a matter of convention, habit, and fashion than official diktat.) It merely permitted the use of English in one area of government; but English was already used as an administrative language by the Normans as early as at the time of the writing of the Domesday Book. It makes very little sense (see parenthetical) to regard French as ‘the’ official language of England before the Statute; it makes even less sense to regard it as having lost that status, to the extent that such a claim means anything, after the passage of the Statute. The decline of French in English public and administrative life was a rather lengthy process, and French in fact held out longest in the field the Statute regulated, viz., the law; thus we find the famous passage from Sir Edward Coke as late as 1688:

> Richardson Chief Justice de Common Banc al assises de Salisbury in Summer 1631 fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony, que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice, que narrowly mist, et pur ceo immediately fuit indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner et son dexter manus ampute et fix al gibbet, sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court.

By this time it would have made sense to regard English as the (de facto) language of state, but law French still lived; even the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730, which mandated the use of English in court proceedings, would not have obviated the habits of those accustomed to law French in the taking of personal notes and so on.

Although this is well known among more educated English speakers, an interesting bit that's not well known is that French as a literary language arose in England. At the time Normans conquered England, Latin was still the literary language in France. It was the French speakers of England who first started producing literature in their vernacular.

I think you are mistaken here. No doubt England produced literature in French, but in France proper the trouvères were active from the late 11th century, writing poetry and plays in Old French, and a cycle of the life of the Saints probably goes back to the 10th century.

Some of the English kings of the period also spent a lot of time in what is France now.

They had large possessions there, from Normandy to Aquitaine and spent time there and on military campaigns.

For instance, Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner...) spent most of his life in Aquitaine and probably spoke Occitan as well as French (but not English...).

I'm reminded of how the repercussions of this 1066 battle at Hastings are with us today in Britain. Gregory Clark in 'The Son also rises' shows by genealogical tracking how, following this successful French invasion, the families that then formed the ruling aristocracy still largely figure in the British ruling and social elite in the 20th century. Clark presents evidence that 'almost all societies have similarly low social mobility rates'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)

Mostly off topic: when did "till" become widely spread as a replacement for "until"?

Only in the last 6 months have I noticed it being used in official communications where I work. It sort of bothers me, but I can't exactly place why, it just looks / feels wrong when it's written.

Slang on letterhead. It's an uncomfortable juxtaposition (for me).

It would appear that "until" is the latecomer, evolving from the word "till". Perhaps the question is really: When did "until" become widely spread as a replacement for "till"?

"till date" is a particular Indian English-ism that picks folks who use it out /instantly/, approximately the inverse of a shibboleth.

I always wonder what other idioms my Indian colleagues aren't using around me because they're so obviously colloquial.

I had a colleague from India who surprised everyone in the room with his casual usage of the word 'prepone'.

As an Indian English-ism it means the opposite of postpone, so it makes fairly obvious sense in that context. But no one else in the room had ever heard the word before, and the way everyones heads turned questioningly towards him as he uttered it, was memorable.

In unison "did you say... prepone?"

He had "preponed" his flight interstate since we'd finished half a day earlier than expected.

I appreciate the algebraic approach to linguistics so demonstrated, wish it were more common.

Tragically, it appears Americans need a bachelor's in English to appreciate a joke that puns on palp.

Even today, English is still not an official de jure language of the United Kingdom, although Welsh is.

How ironic that now English is the global lingua franca.

Funnily enough the medieval “ Lingua Franca” creole language used in the Mediterranean was primarily based on Italian dialects with some Occitan and Catalan mixed in.

I've heard Italian described as "drunk Catalan" and, being a speaker of Catalan and having had some exposure to Italian, I'm not sure I can entirely disagree.

Going the other way, the monarchs of England also claimed the French throne until 1802:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_claims_to_the_French_t...

Until 1558 they did have an exclave inside France on the continent (the city of Calais), so the claim had some remote connection to reality.

Norman French wasn't really French As We Know It, though.

Someone described it as "French as spoken by Danes", which is probably not too far off.

So ... Wooflez Woo, Woof-woof?

By the time the Normans invaded England, they had gone thoroughly native in France and shed their Nordic origins, and as an Old French dialect theirs wasn't particularly unusual. Any textbook of Old French will go over the differences between the Old French of Normandy and that of Paris, and these differences are rather minor.

Indeed; Anglo-Norman French principally diverged after 1066.

It still is in the Jersey (the old one): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Legal_French

Official yes, common perhaps not. I believe this is why meat from a cow served at a table is beef, because it here it was served to French aristocracy, while cow is the common English, the language used by the servants.

What does "offical" mean in this context?

The US does not have an "official" language, but English is the de facto language of government for the national government.

Court language essentially. Something that you spoke when talking to royalty, or nobility. Granted, you could speak in a different language, but it would make things more complicated, since, as today, many people are not multilingual.

Church mostly worked in latin, as elsewhere in Europe. But sermons used whatever language locals understood.

So in many ways it was somewhat like current US situation. Just with much less effort on accommodating other languages.

It can't simply be "court language". Peter III of Russia could barely speak Russian, but that didn't make German the official language of Russia during his rule. I'm certain if I dug further I could find more such cases.

If the US had a king, and thus a court, would that automatically make English the official language of the US?

No, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages_by_... say Japan has no official language (de facto Japanese) and they do have royalty, so it doesn't appear that simple.

My assumption is that 'official' requires some formal decree, but I saw no mention of that in the article.

The court language of Russia in the 1760s was French.

France was The European Superpower until the aftermath of Napoleon's empire.

And French continued to be the language of diplomats until up to WW1.

Ahh, thank you. But French wasn't the official language of Russia, right?

Concept of official language is a very new thing. At least in it's current form. It's kind of like 'state' it sort of fits on older institutions, but isn't an exact fit.

Yes. That is why I made the top-level comment - I think the author should have highlighted what made it "official" some 1,000 years ago.

I thought sermons were in Latin until well into the 20th century, at least for Catholicism (surely the Protestants broke from it immediately). My aunt was married in a branch of Catholicism that rejected the Second Vatican Council, and I clearly remember the presiding priest chewing us out in Latin

Not necessarily so. It's another custom that Protestants lifted from the Catholic Mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_sermon

https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs...

Rites were in latin yes. But sermons were generally in vernacular. Otherwise there would be little engagement between priest and his parish during the mass. The somewhat, odd, obsession of some Old-Catholic sects with latin is notable but not entirely orthodox.

Some info on the subject: https://going-medieval.com/2020/09/04/on-sermons-and-the-ver...

> I thought sermons were in Latin until well into the 20th century, at least for Catholicism

Sermons/homilies were generally in the vernacular, most of the rest of the Mass was in Latin [0]. But its worth noting that prior to 1962, the homily was an optional part of the Mass (medieval rules had encouraged, but not strictly required, it every few Sundays, it wouldn't be a feature of daily Masses or even every Sunday Mass.)

> My aunt was married in a branch of Catholicism that rejected the Second Vatican Council, and I clearly remember the presiding priest chewing us out in Latin

“Traditionalist” dissenters are often not simply replicating prior practice.

[0] in most places, but Chinese, Old Church Slavonic, and a few other languages in particular places.

Specifically the article says of the noble elite, courts, and government. Not sure why the cutoff date. More modern French was considered the court language of Europe and diplomacy until fairly modern times. I’m pretty sure I could dig up an old US passport with French in it.

The cutoff is the same date that the courts switched to using English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleading_in_English_Act_1362

That answered my question, thanks!

French was "the official language of legal proceedings in England" between 1066 and 1362.

Sure, but what makes it "official" while English is not the official language of the US?

Nothing really except that the courts apparently used it up to the date given per another comment.

Whether the US has an “official” language has been a politically fraught topic at times even though it’s obviously de facto English.

Indeed - there is an interesting question on Stack Exchange about if a law written and passed in Spanish would be valid (https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/80132/if-congress-pa...) - the conclusion (based on my own summation of the discussion) is that it probably would, but it would cause some problems due to a lack of precedent / legal definitions.

There hasn't been a federal law passed in anything other than English, but there have been early state laws (in Louisiana) passed in French (https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/80132/if-congress-pa...)

The question was specifically about the US Congress.

Puerto Rico's legal system primarily works in Spanish, and is the only US jurisdiction which currently does that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Puerto_Rico

> Whether the US has an “official” language has been a politically fraught topic at times even though it’s obviously de facto English.

The US does not have an official language, and attempts to change that have failed multiple times.

This is a simple fact.

Whether the US should have an official language is controversial, though.

> it’s obviously de facto English.

You can't have a de facto official language, de jure is inherent in the “official” of “official language”.

They still have French in them.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/United_S...

For most of this era, I find it helpful to think in terms of the Angevin empire, not England.

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Shame it still isn't, as I wouldn't have had to struggle learning it.

;-)

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