How French was medieval England?
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
The example that I think most native English speakers learn at some point is the reason for the distinction in food words: we eat pork (porc) and beef (boef) but they are the flesh of the pig/swine (Schwein) or cow (Kuh). This reflects the elite's use of French (thus using French words for food on the table) while the English servants used their Germanic vocabulary for the animals they worked with.
In both French and German the same word is used for the animal in the field and on the plate.
And then there are innumerable hybrids (anglicized french words). With regards to food and husbandry, one my of favorites is "beeves" ("cattle" -- "beefs"): while I have never heard the word spoken aloud I have seen it in novels even as late as the early 60s.
Pig/pork = cochon / porc
cow/beef = vache / boeuf
chicken/chicken = poulet/poulet
fish/fish = poisson/poisson
We'd say "vache" when it comes to milk or the female, but all "vache" are "boeuf".
Boeuf is used when the gender does not mean much (like for meat).
Cochon and porc are both used for the live animal, and both used for the food as well (cochon is a bit less used for food, but still common enough).
Boeuf and vache aren’t really synonymous as another commenter pointed out
Ehh, in German we talk about Rindfleisch, which comes from a Kuh.
The "smashing" together of words is much less interesting to most of us who use languages that does so than it seems to be to others - it does little more than placing the words adjacent to each other does in English, with the exception that it disambiguated.
E.g. "hakke" on it's own is the verb to hack in Norwegian, but as part of a compound it will mean something that has been hacked, or is hacking (e.g. hakkespett = woodpecker - and there's another English compound)
Funnily, Norwegian (and Danish) has imported the French boef - Norwegian as "biff" - while we still use the Germanic ku for cow - but we also "smash" words together, so hakkebiff = hakkebøf (Danish) = boef haché.
But "hakke biff" would imply the act of chopping it. And so we compound to remove the ambiguity.
We also have flesk, from the same origin as fleisch and flesh, but in Norwegian it specifically means pork flesh, so hakkeflesk, while it's not a term I can remember having heard, would be understandable but refer to pork because the meaning of combining the words is fairly generic.
The distinction between "fully merged" compounds, hyphenated ones, and ones with spaces is yet another one of those endlessly annoying quirks of English.
Being cognizant of these really helps develop empathy with ESL learners.
So I would argue that “streetcar stop” still parses as a complete compound noun grammatically. This is just a matter of orthography in my opinion. German may more readily “freeze” compound nouns and put them into writing as a single unit, but both English and German are full of long ad hoc compound nouns.
In German, you would have to create a single word from the start (possibly using a hyphen for disambiguation) and in some cases pluralise individual words so they can be joined together.
But you are right that in both cases the result is just a single noun, which contrasts with agglutinative languages such as Turkish where the entire grammar of a sentence can sometimes be packed into a single, potentially very long, word.
English speakers are often amazed at how we "have words for everything", which makes it seem like it's been some conscious act of establishing a new world on purpose. Of course sometimes that is the case, but that process happens in English too.
But exactly because of what you say, directing that amazement at us just combining words is pretty much the same as if we expressed amazement at how English has sequences of words for everything.
It just looks different to English-speakers for whom the merging of multiple words into a combination they've not seen before is not a frequent occurrence.
Norwegian has "trikk" for tram/streetcar and "stopp" for "stop", and so we have "trikkestopp" for tram stop (but see below). Trikk was a case of "sporvogn" - "track wagon" - being too long.
Meanwhile, while "streetcarstop" is not in use in English "streetcar stop" is some places. E.g.[1].
"Streetcar stopping place" of course would definitely be a step too far in English, but so would it be in e.g. Norwegian that otherwise mostly shares the German approach to combining words (to the point where newspapers regularly have articles about how the language is going to hell because people fail to combine words when they should) but where we'd go "hang on" and omit parts or otherwise rephrase to find a short alternative.
However, we do have "stoppeplass" for "stopping place", though more often used for somewhere to stop a car for a longer period, and "holdeplass" for "holding place" which implies a more temporary stopp, and so we can and sometimes do also use trikkeholdeplass - "tram holding place" [2], but these longer forms tends to gradually be replaced by shorter ones over time, as Norwegian has a tradition for contractions (to the eternal frustration of foreigners learning Norwegian, because spoken Norwegian tends to drop syllables and whole words with wild abandon) and replacing long terms.
[1] https://www.buildkcstreetcar.com/project-news/stages-of-a-st...
[2] We can, and also sometimes do (but a quick search of the Norwegian national library shows it's quite rare, with peaks of tens of uses in print some decades), use "sporvognholdeplass". If you were to say that people would probably wonder what century you are visiting from (even though the full term was no more common before), but it'd be understandable.
In Sweden there was for a few years a webpage dedicated to the fight against incorrectly writing words apart, famously producing red stickers that were then used as hypens where appropriate: http://www.skrivihop.nu/exempel/bilder/fika_sugen.jpg
They got wildly popular but shut down after just three years because they felt they ended up attracting a lot of asshole followers that outright harassed people in their name.
I never understood what they thought was so funny.
Today we’d write it menslol.
The one that grates on me most is “monolingual” (unilingual/multilingual or monoglottal/polyglottal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language
See also: agglutination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination
A portmanteau is different, where parts of several words are blended, rather than retaining the substance of each word in a compound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word
And let's not forget xkcd's coinage of the malamanteau:
Read up on the Holy Roman Empire. Germany, France etc are quite complicated concepts.
Of course, the Franks came from further East and never replaced the populations they invaded, so even there and then both cultures and peoples were always mixed.
> Der Brand (The Fire), by the historian Jörg Friedrich, accuses Winston Churchill of a conscious policy of airborne terrorism against civilians … The word “brand” in English, of course, carries a distinctly different vernacular meaning.
The upper classes were French after 1066 (Harold had definitively repelled the Danes for the last time just three weeks before Hastings).
If you examine the richest landed gentry in England today a very sizeable number still bare the family names of those that fought for William at the Battle of Hastings.
The French used to routinely boil their beef but during a lengthy Parisian siege, the locals noticed that the peoples that they came to call "les rosbifs", roasted their beef (phnaaar!) We were chucking steaks on the barbies long before Australia was even thought of ... or something jingoistic 8)
These essays are a bit of fun, as you say. History and life and language are rather more messy than many would like. At one point the article witters on about France and Wessex. Both terms were valid "back then" and are still valid now but they are sodding complicated ideas and neither mean the same now as they used to.
Even the notion of English (and French - obviously) is pretty tricky. Nowadays, in the UK alone we have a largely homogenised language, with some localisations ... on the surface. For example: jitty - allyway, bairn - child, skritch - cry. Then we have the collisions between the Brythonic languages (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cumbric, Cornish and the rest) and English. So a Devonshire bird like my mum spoke what sounded like complete twaddle to a modern (!) lad like myself, when she was a child.
You (@gumby) might know the difference between twaddle and twiddle but I am sure I've lost a few readers right there.
My point is that language, nationality and the like are rather more fluid than people generally think.
Was hal!
Seen that word, with that spelling, IIRC, in Iranian restaurant menus in India.
Right, even for X = pork. But lately, it's fading in favour of "filete" (slice) of X, at least in Spain.
Heavy, heavy pronunciation going on to near comical effect.
Oops, too many spy novels plus a bad sense of humour ... ;)
It generally signalled the end of a night when you headed there.
I guess there’s probably been a few places called bifteki around the uk and other countries then.
Also, see the Czech, Macedonian, and other entries under the Descendants section at your own link above. Many of them spell it the way I did.
Small correction: neither Irish nor the two languages people might refer to as Scottish are Brythonic languages.
Drinkhail! ;-)
And was wondering if there might be an easy way to build a a tech geneology/etemology tree.
Their origin, I mean. I can google, but it's more fun to hear what others have to say. And argue, and put them down and up - or try to :)
Attitude frowned on by HN, I know, only they don't (seem to) know they are doing it themselves, via the voting mechanism, i.e. upvotes and downvotes.
Also, it's interesting that there are so many words for horses in English and Western (cowboy slang, I just made up the word :)
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon.
- from Ivanhoe by Sir Walter ScottThere's no finer student of the subject than him and I appreciate that he starts every video with "I am not [a] formally qualified linguist," yet he has a deeper understanding than most.
Some of my favorite videos:
- Celtic Influence on English [0]
- Progressing Some Words from Proto-Germanic to English [1]
- A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries [2]
- A Northern US Accent from the 18th to the 21st Centuries [3]
- Old English and Middle English; why are they so different? [4]
---
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcCx43I2Vio
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F72jkM9An5Y
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lXv3Tt4x20
He has been taking an historical journey through the development of English from proto-Indo-European and is currently up to the Elizabethan period and 172 episodes so far. There are also lots of side trips to specific topics to mix things up. Very enjoyable listen.
Just to put things in perspective, Franks were a Germanic people and were much more culturally affine to the Anglo-Saxons.
Charlemagne didn't speak "French" so it's no surprise Louis IV didn't either.
The Latin substrate in the territory of modern France was so strong that it gradually took over the Germanic ruling class over centuries. Old French evolved during this time before the norman conquest.
It very much depends on what you mean by Franks. As with everything in History, terms themselves have a history that must be understood. Clovis-era Franks were a Germanic people. Later in the Merovingian era not so clearly, as Germanity wasn't a defining characteristic of the Franks as a people and Germanic origins were seemingly forgotten. The push East under the later Merovingians and early Carolingians likely produced more Germanic-speaking Franks than there were before.
As for Charlemagne, while he couldn't indeed speak a language that didn't exist yet (French), considering the area his family was based around as well as his constraints and style of government, it would be surprising if he wasn't bilingual in Gallo-Romance and High German. Bilingualism is heavily implied throughout the Carolingian era in a lot of the written source, and explicit by the end.
At that time all the West Germanic dialects would have been closer to what we call "Low" Germanic now; Dutch, Low Saxon, Frisian, etc. Harder consonants where German now has softer ones.
And I imagine it was probably easier for them to muddle through mutually understanding each other back then.
But yes, in addition to Gallo-Romance, he probably spoke something similar to Old Low Franconian, which eventually became Dutch.
Good place to point out that those Germanic speakers had a major impact on French, and to this day it is by far the most heavily influenced by Germanic, of all the languages descended from Latin.
For example: attaquer (attack). craquer (crack), affreux (fright), hautesse (height), saisir (seize), taper (tap), trier (tear). (I've given English cognates in parentheses, not translations -- "taper" means more like "to slap".)
In fact, Germanic borrowings are around 10 - 20% of French vocabulary.
Some words in English have actually cycled between the Germanic and Romance branches multiple times because of this. For example, Old French had a verb, something like "warder". Probably borrowed from Frankish. English borrowed "warden" from Norman French. Later, sound change in French shifted /w/ to a /gw/ sound, so warder -> guarder. English borrowed the word again, giving us "guardian". In this particular case, English also kept the original fully Germanic form - "warder" (noun).
Happened with the Goths in Spain as well.
It's interesting to compare to Anglo-Saxon England where this did not happen and the native Brittonic speech as well as late Romano-British Latin was wiped out.
Besides, it’s cute when they try, but it’s not like most English people can pronounce French, either.
Almost any. In Spain:
za, ce, ci, zo, zu -> tha,the, thi... as in "think".
In America they'll use the /s/ sound, but because the Internet usage both spellings are understood fine since "El Chavo del Ocho" times in Spain, Mexican/Venezuelan soap operas and, similarly, with todays' 'La Casa de Papel' from Spain overseas.
In a bar I would order "bocadillo con jamon y queso" and they'd say, "Oh, you speak Spanish!"
Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's about it... and let's not forget the Argies.
And shared a king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain
Speaking French was historically a strong class marker. The phrase "pas devant les domestiques" which as sufficiently commonly used to be contracted to just "pas devant" is a good example (you would not use it if the domestics would understand it).
I was born in a country (Sri Lanka) where speaking English is a class marker. Not simply whether you can or can not speak it (lots of people can speak it to some extent) but how well you speak it, your accent, and whether you are a native speaker (in that it is the language you use to talk to your family and friends) or not.
Spanish is now catching up and will likely over take in the next couple of years. Latest number of GCSE exam entrants were about 125K for French, 115K for Spanish and 35K for German.
Whereas many French derived words are either ostentatiously still-French like foodstuffs or would sound ridiculous with an attempted Anglo pronunciation, eg cafe. We don't exactly fall over to make marmalade or aviation sound French
Plus we're terrible at pronouncing the 'j' sound even when it's part of a Spanish person's name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...
That doesn’t mean that English speakers try to fully reproduce how a Spanish speaker would pronounce the word and I think that is appropriate. If you are speaking one language to completely switch pronunciation for one word just breaks the flow of speech. Some compromise can be found.
when billions retrain their mother tongue to learn English and accents, it would be a minimal respect to try to learn the origin.
For when, GWB invaded Iraq he didn't even ever have the decency to learn to pronounce the country's name - and neither does the populace still.
Imagine if “junta” had taken a trip up through Central Europe and then to the Scandinavians, then down, so we could pronounce it “yunta.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/assegaai
Berber -> Arabic -> Spanish -> Dutch -> English
each link makes sense if you consider (in order) Caliph Al-Walid, Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V (or Charles the Bold?), and William III
I suspect it has something to do with proximity to native speakers of the language, as France (effectively) borders the UK and Mexico borders the US.
And inconsistently so!
I've had jury duty several times, and nobody can agree on how to pronounce voir dire. Some courts say "vwahr deer" which is a decent approximation of the French pronunciation, and others say "vore dyer". And while I haven't heard it myself, I wouldn't be surprised if some people pronounce voir as "voyeur".
The use the public would be most familiar with is the interrogation of the jury pool, by both parties, to make sure they are suitable (e.g. suitably biased) jurors before trial:
And of course there is the famous "shedule" vs "skedule" pronunciation for schedule.
Are you saying people who don't pronounce their aches should use "a" and not "an"? Because that would sound weird trying to pronouce two vowels like that.
We have two main ways of saying words like "hotel". I (with a rather non-descript vaguely southern accent) pronounce the H in hotel, and so say "a hotel". Many people from London and the south east (especially Essex and the parts of the home counties that has a large influx of North Londoners) will generally drop their leading "H" and say "an 'otel".
There is a third accent which is a minority, the rather extreme upper class accent where they also drop a lot of their leading Hs, and therefore use "an". That's not "posh cockney", that's just "posh", a lot of them have always spoken like that. Even among the posh I'd rank that accent as relatively rare these days.
Id does all lead to the occasional argument among slightly dull people about whether you should write "an hotel" or "a hotel".
And I've never been able to figure out what the correct way to say "homage" is.
And that accent is almost never Spanish. It’s either Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. My Spanish accent is very much Chicano, because I grew up in such a neighborhood in Southern California. Castilian Spanish sounds effete to me, and of course I sound uneducated to someone from Madrid.
Also, these pronunciations are far more common in the coastal states than flyover country.
90% of the speech outside of the big towns/cities, the Castilles and maybe Cantabria will sound uneducated or 'hick' to a Madrileño. Specially Aragon, Murcia, Extremadura and the infamous Andalusia where even the Risitas guy can be extremely hard to understand to natives outside Andalusia.
It was maddening to me when visiting the place.
But as Alexandre Dumas reputedly said, English is just badly pronounced French (ok, so that is an exaggeration; and I cant be bothered to check if that statement is apocryphal or not)
It cracks me up that the Foundland wasn't good enough (some place in the UK), so off they went to find New!
At least it got me (barely) passing marks in French lessons at my German school: to write French, I would set up the sentence in my head in English, shake it around violently until all the words not sufficiently French-sounding where replaced with roughly synonymous words that did and then improvised accents and conjugation. Unfortunately that cheat is terribly useless in real life.
That is literally a valid movement of the tongue to produce a retroflex [ɭ].
In contrast, Spanish phonology lacks retroflex entirely.
For example “claret” meaning Bordeaux blend wine is pronounced with a hard t
My family do nor pronounce our Dutch surname "correctly" - but its centuries since the ancestor we got the name from left the Netherlands. We use an archaic spelling too.
Spanish itself is full of loanwords, particularly from Arabic, which are not pronounced like in Arabic either (which Arabic, anyway?)
There is no better or worse, there are just words that travel across languages.
I have heard too many people say "jally pea no", but the most frequent pronunciation of jalepeño is with a hard j
I do accept that junta should be pronounced "hunta" (in English). Spanish is easily an important enough language that most people that use a Roman style alphabet should be able to fix up pronunciation of those words/letters to suit the language in play.
I often notice that BBC news starts off with an awful pronunciation for a place, concept or whatever that might be considered obscure and then it gets better later on, once someone has noticed and the message has been passed through to the news reader.
I think that the last time our news readers had to deal with the pronunciation of junta was in the 1980s and Argentina. It's 2024 now and I hope we treat Spanish with the respect it is due.
Spanish slang from the 90s in my country imported Detroit and Spanish-ized the pronunciation as ditroy.
Since it has the same consonants as detrás, Spanish for behind, it can be used a a synonym for behind and also as an euphemism for the behind part of the body.
It means "strait".
All time great podcast, IMO.
It's hard for people now to think about history outside of the context of the relatively ordered national boarders that exist today. Most of the modern countries of Europe didn't exist in the medievil period, and many are less than a couple of hundred years old. I think it would surprise a lot of people if you told them that "Italy" as a country, is younger than the USA, or that "Spain" was a pretty young country when Columbus sailed the Atlantic.
And as you say, even ones like France, that had a "top king" so to speak, were really loose associations of dukedoms and minor kingdoms.
William the Conqueror actually was a distant but direct descendant of Rollo [1], a viking who invaded Normandy. The influence of Scandinavian language was quite strong, as many names come from scandinavian [2]. So the French William brought to England was probably still a bit scandinavian.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollo [2] (French only) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymie_normande#Toponymie_n...
* cease and desist
* aiding and abetting
* assault and battery
> From Anglo-Norman cul. prit, contraction of culpable: prest (d'averrer nostre bille) 'guilty: ready (to prove our case)', words used by prosecutor in opening a trial, mistaken in English for an address to the defendant.
What the hell does subsumed even mean?!? (just kidding, I know it means adding up something under water.)
Of course James Hoffman did a video on it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PUWQQ-joKE]
Yes, the aristocracy was profoundly Norman French & French influenced. But I'm willing to bet the vast majority of actual humans were speaking English -- with various levels of influence from Danish/Old Norse -- and completely unable to process French words of any kind and encountering it about 0 times in their daily lives.
Even today the level of "class" and "sophistication" of an English language user is unconsciously tied to how many Latin & French origin words they toss into their speech and writing.
I was a savage but now I am a man of great wealth and civility
https://doe.artsci.utoronto.ca/ - free with registration
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti... - free
https://oed.com - ~$100/yr
Somehow, one major era of English language history has been overlooked, one that "contributed so much vocabulary to medieval English that, alongside Latin, it remains the largest source of non-English words", and so prevelant that "Early printing of French books outweighed that of English in England.". Chronologically slotted between Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) and Middle English, it is of course Anglo-French (or Anglo-Norman).
One of the article authors says out loud the great implicit fear of the English(-speakers), and then comforts them:
"Did this make the English partly French? Only if you project back the 19th century’s nationalising image of French and English as the mutually exclusive properties of two nation-states."
Thank goodness. Someone remove this abomination from the front page! (/s)
I stopped at the first sentence. It's historically illiterate to say the Normans were 'French', in particular William I. If that were the case, then Edward the Confessor was just as 'French' as the Normans who replaced the house of Wessex.
The etymology of the word Norman tells you all you need to know.
If we consider 911 to be the year when Normandy was founded, it took just two centuries for Norman power to expand from Normandy to England, South Italy and Palestine, which is quite a remarkable feat. In contrast, power of the Capetian kings remained limited to the region around Paris. Which is a testament to the aforementioned warlikeness of the Normans.
Subtitles are often chosen by editors, not authors, and may not reflect the author's competence.
Plus, the subtitle only requires one correction to become entirely true: instead of "French", it should say "French-speaking". Because by the time of the Conquest, the switch of the Normans' vernacular from Old Norse to Old French was long complete. By some four to five generations or so.
Mostly true, but the Norman language isn't 100% the same as French, and the differences affected the development of the English language. For example, if England had been conquered by true French speakers, the words "war" and "cat" would have been something like "guar" and "chat" instead.
In fact, there are a few doublets where we borrowed both the Norman and French versions of a word into English. A good example of this is "warranty" and "guarantee"; the former is Norman, and the latter is French. Another is "cattle" and "chattel"; again, the former is Norman, and the latter is French.
Even Medieval Latin spoken by the learned people was a bit different from Classical Latin of Cicero, and that was a language which was taken care of by educated, literate people. Vernaculars of the day ... well, tended to be different from region to region, because there was no one with enough influence and authority to codify them.
Looking at that situation, I am fine with classifying 11-th century Norman as "basically French". Mutual intelligibility was certainly fairly high. William the Conqueror would need no interpreter when talking to some Parisian merchant. There were some Norse leftovers present, but such was the situation everywhere.
Even today there are dialects in France where people say "cat" (with a silent t) instead of "chat", and nobody would call them "not French", or not French-speaking, for that.
Was that really a thing in the middle ages? Every region had its own dialect and people living in the half of the territory of modern France didn't even speak any form of "French". e.g. Occitan is as Italian or Spanish as it is French.
French has long been the lingua franca of the top tier of the international upper class, due to history changing outcomes of the Frankish dynasties. In fact, the French language's status, as such, is indirectly where we get the term lingua franca. Modern English Royalty, for example, may not always be fluent in French (many are) but they are more likely to have second language instruction in French than in other languages. Knowledge of certain French words and phrases is essential to English language literacy. There isn't another language for which the same can be said in the context of the English language. The invading Normans were as likely to be fluent in English, Dutch, and/or German and they were in French. The medieval conflicts between the Norman-English and French Kings are best characterized as a conflict between different Houses of the Franks.
To clarify: your assertion is that the Frankish Monarchs, after whom France is named, and specifically the Frankish Carolingians, etc, and the Frankish Normans didn't speak French?
I said "indirectly". Meaning, that Frankish power in Western Europe, mythologically rooted in their claimed link to Rome, is the root of both the term lingua Franca as well as the status of the French language as the shared language of Royalty. The French language is the lingua Franca of the Western European Upper class, especially in a historical context. This isn't up for debate.
The term "lingua Franca" means "language of the Franks" and the term Frank was used at the time to refer to all Western Europeans. It never referred to the French language in particular.
The only proven linguistic characteristic of Charlemagne is that he wasn't very good with Classical Latin.