TOPIC 42: THE NORMAN CONQUEST.THE INFLUENCE OF FRENCH ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. BORROWINGS AND CALQUES. 1. INTRODUCTION & JUSTIFICATION The English language of today is the language that resulted from the dialects spoken by the Germanic tribes who came to Britain in 449ac. However, during the first seven hundred years of its existence in England, English was brought into contact with three other languages which had a great influence on it: the language of the Celts, the Romans, and the Scandinavians. Then, in 1066, "a final cataclysm awaited the English language: the Norman conquest. French thus has been a major influence in the English language, that’s why English is composed of many French borrowings. The concept of ‘borrowing’ can be defined as a process in which one language adopts a linguistic feature from another. This process is most often realized by means of ‘loanwords’ and ‘calques’ (Durkin, 2014). Thus, a loanword is a word adopted from a foreign language with little or no modification. On the other hand, a calque is a word or phrase taken from one language and translated literally, word-for-word, into another language. French loanwords establish a relative similarity between the two languages, Spanish and English, since French is a Latin family language like Spanish. This similarity may be useful when learning English as students can capitalize on it. In both, the Foral Decree 25/2015 of 22 April, and the Royal Decree 24/2014 , lexis is considered an important content for communicating effectively in a foreign language. In order for English teachers to help students learn new lexis, it would be useful for them to know the historical background of the French calques and loanwords in English through history. This essay thus will examine the French influence on the English language under an historical approach focusing on the Norman Conquest of Britain. 2. THE PERIODS IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH According to Durkin (2014), the history of the English language is divided into four main linguistic periods: Old English (450AD to 1150), Middle English(1150 -1500) and Modern English(1500-1800), the latter being divided into Early Modern English and Later Modern English. These periods reflect some major changes in grammar, lexis and pronunciation. Regarding the influence of French, it is of course after the Norman conquest, and during the Middle English period, when French became the main influence on English. 3. THE NORMAN CONQUEST. Normans invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 AD. The invasion overthrew six centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule in England, and marked the beginning of a new social and linguistic era in Britain. The Normans were Vikings who had settled in northern France 200 years before. Like the Celtic Britons before them, they had given their name to a French province, Normandy. But unlike the Celts, they had abandoned their language and much of their culture and became French in manner and speech. So, when William the Conqueror became king of England, , he faced early rebellions, but once he had overcome them, he radically reshaped England, replacing its old ruling class with Anglo-Norman aristocracy, and bringing the feudal system of landholding prevalent in Normandy to England. The main influence on English during this period was of course French, namely Norman French, a French dialect that had considerable Germanic influences,in addition to its basic Latin roots. No king of England spoke English for the next 300 years, and French took over as the language of the courts, administration, and the literature. In fact, within just 20 years of the invasion: -almost all the religious houses were under French -speaking superiors and several new foundations were solely French. -Large numbers of French merchants and craftsmen crossed the channel to take advantage of the commercial opportunities provided by the regime. -And aristocratic links remained strong with Normandy, where the nobles kept their states. As a result, whereas English was used by the majority of the commoners or low strata of society, many English people learned French to gain advantages from the aristocracy and during more than a century French became the main language of the new hierarchy. 4. HOW ENGLISH CHANGED BECAUSE OF THE FRENCH INFLUENCE The influence of French is of crucial importance for the history of English lexis. Following Durkin (2014) the nature and structure of English were transformed in three distinctive ways: ■ The English derivational morphology was transformed by the accommodation of word families from French. ■ Some native vocabulary was lost and existing terms showed meaning changes. ■ The great increase in loanwords led to the layering in the English lexis and dissociation in semantic fields. (e.g. the adjective corresponding to the noun hand is manual, which is etymologically unrelated). 4.1. French influence on vocabulary. French then became the most dominant influence on the growth of Middle English vocabulary and by the 13th century some 10000 words came into English. These words were largely to do with the mechanism of law and administration though they also included words from fields such as medicine, art and fashion. Also, many of the new words were quite ordinary, everyday terms. Over 70% were nouns and a large number were abstract terms constructed using such new affixes such as cpn-, trans-, pre-, -ance, -tion and -ment. About three quarters of all these French loans are still in the English language today. As new words arrived, there were many cases where they duplicated words that had already existed in English from Anglo-Saxon times. In such cases, there were two outcomes. Either one word would supplant the other; or both would co-exist but develop slightly different meanings. The first outcome was quite common, in most cases the French word replacing an old English equivalent such as the case of leod giving way to people or stow to place. Hundreds of old English words were lost in this way. The second outcome produced the most highly distinctive feature of Middle English vocabulary, the emergence of sets of two (or three including Latin) lexical terms all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, such as in the cases of kingly/royal/regal and ask/ question/ interrogate or deer/venison, child/infant, wedding/marriage or wish/desire were very common. Bilingual/trilingual word lists were compiled as early as the mid 13 century to aid intelligibility between English and French. For many scholars, the English/ French/Latin trilingual environment in Britain, particularly in England, was especially important for the transformation of present-day English vocabulary. Indeed, these three languages were used in distinct ways depending on who used them. In this respect, Latin was the language of the Church, whereas government and legal business used Latin or Anglo-French and the commoners kept using English. Nonetheless, this situation changed in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, when English began to have professional functions, and Latin and Anglo-French words changed from a specific to a general use. In addition, by 1362, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over as English was made the language of the courts, and it began to be used in Parliament. The Middle English period came to a close around 1500 AD with the rise of Modern English. 4.2. French influence on English syntax. Regarding syntax, French influence has to do with the position of adjectives. In this sense, even though in English they are always placed before the noun ,(e.g. an interesting book), as a result of the French influence, there are some fairly rare constructions that place the adjective after the noun, (attorney general), which are also derived from French. The gradual decline of the English singular pronouns thou and thee, and their replacement with ye and later you, have been linked to the parallel French use of vous in formal settings. Another instance has to do with the use of the infinitive, and present participle forms of the verb in English since it is used as in French. Hence, the English counterpart of the French expression aller chantant is go singing. Finally, it was during the Middle English period that English developed its prepositional system, some of the prepositions being taken from French (e.g. French en general, English in general). 4.3. French influence on English orthography. In the centuries following the Norman conquest, English was written mainly by Norman scribes (copistas in spanish). Thus, according to Crystal (1995), French spelling conventions had a great effect on the development of English orthography. Innovations that arose then include the following: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● "qu-" instead of "cw-" (queen) "gh" instead of "h" (night) "ch" or "cch" instead of "c" (church) "ou" instead of "u" (house) "sh" or "sch" instead of "sc" (ship) "dg" instead of "cg" or "gg" (bridge) "o" instead of "u" (love, son; the "u" that was originally in such words was considered difficult to distinguish from the surrounding letters) doubling of vowels to represent long vowel sounds (see) doubling of consonants after short vowels (sitting) more use of "k", "z" and "j" 5. CONCLUSION AND DIDACTIC IMPLEMENTATION As we have seen through this essay French was a major influence on English during the Middle English, its influence as we have seen changed English in many important ways. As a result English borrowed a lot of French words still used nowadays. However, many of the French loanwords have adopted different meaning in English. These are known as the false-friends terms and they are often mistakenly used by students. Based on the similarities between French and Spanish, no doubt to raise awareness of loanwords and false friends will benefit students learning. Dealing with false friends can help remove a major source of common mistakes for our students. It is useful for a teacher to be aware of the common false friends and to anticipate problems when looking at materials for lessons. In order to do so teachers can create activities to learn some false friends. There are many activities a teacher can do to work on false friends. For example, one simple but effective activity compulsory secondary students usually enjoy doing, is simple translations of sentences containing false friends, and this can result in amusing mistranslations, which help learners focus on the correct version. 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY . Baught, A. and Cable, T. (2002) A History of the English Language. Routledge. Crystal D. (2005) The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English language. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history
