25. French loans.

The French language was brought to England by the Norman conquerors. The Normans remained masters of England for a sufficiently long time to leave a deep impress on the language. The Norman rulers and the immigrants, who invaded the South-Westem towns after the Conquest, spoke a variety of French, known as "Anglo-Norman". This variety died out about two hundred years later, having exerted a profound influence upon English; In the 13th and 14th c. English was exposed to a new wave of French influence; this time it came from Central, Parisian French, a variety of a more cultivated, literary kind.

The effect of these successive and overlapping waves was seen first and foremost in a large number of lexical borrowings in ME. At the initial: the speech of the aristocracy at the king's court; the speech of the middle class, who came into contact both with the rulers and with the ruled; the speech of educated people and the population of South-Eastern towns. Eventually French loanwords spread throughout the language space and became an integral of the English vocabulary. Early borrowings were mostly made in the course of oral communication; later borrowings were first used in literature — in translations of French books. The total number of French borrowings by far exceeds the number of borrowings from any other foreign language (though sometimes it is difficult to say whether the loan came from French or Latin). The greater part of French loan-words in English date from ME.

To the 13th c. no more than one thousand words entered the English language, whereas by 1400 their number had risen to 10,000 (75% of them are still in common use). The majority of French loan-words adopted in ME were first recorded in the texts of the 14th c. Chaucer's vocabulary, which amounts to 6,000 words, contains about 4,000 words of Romance origin, i.e. French and Latin borrowings.

Among the earliest borrowings are Early ME prisun (NE prison), Early ME castel (NE castle). Early ME werre (NE war). Late OE pryio, prut (NE pride, proud). The French borrowings of the ME period are usually described according to semantic spheres. To this day nearly all the words relating to the:

1.government and administration of the country are French by origin: assembly, authority, pertaining to the

2.Feudal system and words indicating titles and ranks of the nobility: baron, count, lord, lady, king, queen, earl, knight.

3.military terms: armour, arms, army, banner,

4.law and jurisdiction, : accuse,court, crime, damage

5. Church and religion, for in the 12th and 13th c. all the important posts in the Church were occupied by the Norman clergy: abbey, altar, archangel, Bible

6. house, furniture and architecture: arch, castle, cellar, chimney, column, couch, curtain,.

7. art: art, beauty, colour, design, figure, image, ornament, paint. Another group includes names of garments: apparel, boot, coat, collar, costume, dress, fur, garment, gown, jewel, robe.

8. entertainment, are: cards, dance, dice, leisure, partner, pleasure, adventure (ME aventure),

We can also single out words relating to different aspects of the life of the upper classes and of the town life: forms of address—sir, madam, and also mister, mistress, smith.

French influence led to different kinds of changes in the vocabulary. Firstly, there were many innovations. Secondly, there were numerous replacements of native words by French

The vocabulary was also enriched by the adoption of French affixes. Derivational affixes could not be borrowed as such; they entered the language in scores of loan-words, were unconsciously or consciously separated by the speakers and used in derivation. They could become productive in English only after the loan-words with those affixes were completely assimilated by the language; that is why the use of borrowed French affixes dates largely from the Early NE period.

Anglo-Norman words must have been very hard to pronounce as they contained many sounds which did not exist in English, such as J, nasalised vowels, the sound [y] and soft, palatalised consonants. The foreign features were lost and the words were adapted to the norms of English pronunciation. French sounds were replaced by resembling English sounds.

Ex.Palatalised [1'] and ln'1 were shown as ordinary [1] and [n] or as sequences [il, in], cf. e.g. 0 Fr faillir, which contained IF], and ME fallen, NE fail.

The stress in French loan-words was shifted in conformity with the English rules of word accentuation,

People freely added English grammatical endings to the stems of the borrowed words, and used them in all grammatical forms like native words

Since the French loan-words of the ME period were completely assimilated, it is not easy to identify a French borrowing and to distinguish it from native words or borrowings from other languages.