How’s that for an enticing title?
Disclaimer #1: I am neither a linguist nor a historian.
Disclaimer #2: nothing here about national pride of any kind.
Warning: wall of text, yes it’s one of those :).
As a kid learning English in French schools several decades ago, a simple fact about the language was never brought up once. We all learned complex new words, and because they were spelled a bit different, and they were pronounced oddly, we didn’t recognize them for what they were: French words we already knew.
The story goes something like this: the Vikings (North Men) settle Normandy and assimilate local culture & language. Power vacuum in England, Battle of Hastings, and the Normans find themselves the ruling class of England.
And from this we get the well known noble/servant language separation we’ve heard a thousand times: pork/pig, beef/cow, mutton/sheep, venison/deer. What took me much longer to realize however, is how deeply the languages are intertwined to this day, almost a thousand years later. This entanglement goes much further than a little factoid about animal & food names being class based.
To illustrate, it’s worth mentioning that on average a good 30% of English is French. Pick up a random article online and you’ll be able to map about 30% of the words to French origins. That without many etymological convolutions, if any at all.
Here’s a random, non-cherry-picked article article from the local Herald, with French word highlighted:
Large animal veterinarians have played an important role in the lives of farmers and horse handlers keeping animals healthy and being there through sickness and crisis.
I feel blessed to know two special veterinarians whose careers have spanned 40+ years in central Vermont.
Tom Stuwe and Will Barry both established practices around the same time with their own styles, techniques, and stories. These veterinarians have stood by so many in the farming community, through the thick and thin. With a sick animal weighing a thousand pounds or better, veterinarians are nothing short of heroes.
These two extraordinary veterinarians have recently retired.
These two vets to write about as they hold a special place in my heart. They are not only farm acquaintances, they have also become friends over the years.
The good news is that there are a handful of new large animal veterinarians that are starting up practices in central Vermont so our animals won’t be left without care.
What makes this exercise tricky is that some of these words come straight from Latin, and I won’t do a good job at distinguishing between the 2. As I said, I’m not a linguist. The fact remains that the English of today is the result of a large assimilation of language into Old English. Sometimes the same word are imported twice, these words doubly borrowed often take a slight nuance: take warranty and guarantee. Normans used the W sound where later rulers from central France used the Gu sound in its place. That is in fact how we got wasp, warrior, and William from guespe, guerrier, and Guillaume respectively. But I digress, it’s easy to considering how languages are the accumulation of a million cool little stories.
Cohabitation
Where languages often borrow from others to fill a gap, this particular linguistic assimilation resulted in both sides (French and Germanic) coexisting today within English. There is a fairly clear Venn diagram of words from either side, and most fascinating is where they overlap. French words often have a Germanic counter part, but depending on the register of language, one or the other will be used. And as with pork & beef, the higher the register, the Frencher the word. In all the examples I could find, there simply seems to be more gravity to the French alternative. Here are a few examples I’ve compiled over time. It’s by no means an exhaustive list, just what I stumbled upon:
| Germanic | French |
| business | occupation |
| wise | sage |
| woods | forest |
| freedom | liberty |
| dark | somber |
| underground | subterranean |
| landscaping | terraforming |
| wide | large |
| work | labor |
| snake | serpent |
| build | construct |
| lift | elevate |
| necklace | pendant |
| disbelief | incredulity |
| maze | labyrinth |
| barn | grange |
| foreseeable | previsible |
| overseer | supervisor |
| hindsight | retrospect |
| folder | directory |
| in love | enamored |
| hearable | audible |
| deep | profound |
| luck | chance |
| meaning | sense |
| answer | response |
| understand | comprehend |
| thoughtful | pensive |
| answer | response |
| child | infant |
| outside | exterior |
| road | route |
| building | construction |
| body | corps |
| top | summit |
| by hand | manually |
| strength | force |
| fall | autumn |
| undone | defeated |
| flood | inundate |
| allow | permit |
| seek | search |
| teenage | adolescent |
| gift | present |
| focus | concentration |
| king | monarch |
| guilty | culpable |
| shake | tremble |
| sing | chant |
| start | commence |
| instead | in lieu |
| maze | labyrinth |
| trip | voyage |
Both sides coexist and are perfectly usable, but one side will be preferred depending on the gravity level you seek. To illustrate this, I will say that landscaping is when you dig a hole in your yard, and terraforming is when you shape another planet for colonization. Both amount to a shovel in the ground, but one involves interstellar travel and the other your backyard and a beer. We can also say that the administration regimenting work is the department of labor. Or that you raise a barn but you elevate consciousness. In all these examples, you could swap the Germanic and French words for they are functionally equivalent, but the French version just seems to have more importance imbued in it.
As a fun exercise, to further illustrate, I tried to “translate” movie titles from their original titles, to their “Germanic English” counter parts. Can you imagine if:
Star Wars, the Phantom Menace was in fact called Star Wars, the Ghost Threat
sounds silly doesn’t it? Yet the meaning is exactly the same.
Or if:
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was called O.E. The Outer Earther
Although this later example shows the limits of these alternate words. They might exist and be perfectly usable but they just sound too “off”, their meaning might have shifted to beyond usability as a drop-in replacement. You wouldn’t call “Gone with the Wind” “Departed with the Vent”. I mean you could, but that particular mapping yields a meaning different not just in gravity level. You can kind of see how gone is related to departed, and wind to vent, in fact those would be translations into French today, but in English they have shifted a bit.
Make English Great Encore (Anglish)
There exists a small movement to clean up English to only use Germanic origin words, and even push words which don’t currently exist into English. For example Vocabulary could become Wordstock, and Solar Panel could be Sun Board. I can’t say I’d be opposed to it, it was honestly a bit disappointing to go through great effort to master a language only to realize it was in retrospect quite close to your native tongue. And in general I appreciate the richness of diversity. Alas, languages tend to evolve in spite of conscious efforts to shape them. I do find myself picking more carefully between the 2 flavors when they are both available. I love English and have a penchant for words rooted in Old English, from my non-native perspective they convey more culture and history from beyond 1066, and the English language is my privileged view into that.
For example, I find it fascinating to find in language artifacts of how a culture sees the world. When you take the words happy, perhaps, mishap and happen, one can see in “hap” a deeper notion of chance. One which can be used to describe joy, potentiality, bad luck, and something coming to pass. I can kind of see it when I think about it, but to an Old English speaker, there was something more obvious there about how they interpreted the world.
Another great example that is challenging to a learner is the word bear. The many ways it can be used seems to indicate a world view where a baby being born is the same concept as bearing (carrying/wearing) something. I see it, your mom carried you around and this is now over so you’ve been born. But what kind of world view does it take to relate the deep human experience of childbirth, with the menial task of carrying something? I speculate here, but I think it’s a world in which people carried a lot more stuff by hand: wood, water, supplies. Carrying was important, omnipresent, manual, and closer in hardship to pregnancies than it is today. I think it’s fascinating how language today reflects a human experience from the depths of time.
Lastly, and because I just used it in the previous paragraph, the word wear links the notion of use with that of decay. You are ever reminded by language that the sheer act of wearing your favorite shirt implies its earlier demise. And again I find myself thinking of the ancient world in which these 2 notions are linked, likely one with more scarcity.
Translating without Learning
Here’s are a few tricks to translate French into English today without knowing a word of it
replace é by s:
- état – state
- écureuil – squirrel
- éponge – sponge
- étranger – stranger
- épice – spice
- étoile – star (a bit more far fetched)
- épinard – spinach (a bit more far fetched)
add an s after a ˆ
- tempête – tempest
- hôtesse – hostess
- maître – master
- coût – cost
- arrête – arrest
- hôpital – hospital
- pâte – paste
- huîstre – oyster
replace gu with w
- guerre – war
- guêpe – wasp
- guardien – warden
replace ch with c
- chat – cat
- chapeau – cap
- char – car
replace eu with o
- majeur – major
- interieur – interior
I’m sure there’s many more such tricks & examples, to me it was mind boggling to realize that a large fraction of English had little to no daylight with French. It’s a fact hidden in plain sight.
The Probabilities of it All
Well, I’m reaching the end of my observations here. I actually created this post several years ago when I first realized how far this entanglement went. I know this realization is not news to many, but it arrived late here, and I loved exploring it from the completely non-academic perspective of some dude going about his daily life in the U.S.. So I added to this post over the years as I ran into little nuggets of knowledge on the subject. And I am eager to put it behind me, I feel like I’ve gone around and turned the stones I wanted to turn. Particularly, I was interested in doing computation on corpora of English to answer several questions:
Do English & French converge, diverge or remain stable overtime and until today?
Can we see both poles (Germanic & French) in the language and how do they progress over time? Is a statistical loss for a pole a gain for the other? Do world events bring out one side over the other?
If we can associate “gravity” to the Frencher turns of phrases, can we also associate context (science, religion, spoken)? More slippery, can we associate ideology? Would a speech from a more socialist leaning person be statistically closer to French?
I launched into it and threw a lot at it. I used my Markov chain models as a statistical model to compare against. Given a previously analyzed probability distribution letter for French, Dutch, or German, I found various corpora of English to compare against them, only to find mitigated results… First it’s been harder than I thought to find decent corpora to analyze. I think I need more data, and so if you are still reading and have any recommendations for a nice clean corpus of data of a lot of English over a long time, please drop me a note. Another challenge has been that my previously analyzed probability distributions of languages were done on modern languages which included many poison pills of exchanged words ruining statistics. So I instead used Old French, Old Norse and Old English as my points of reference to compare against, I figured these would be “cleaner” from these exchanges. There again maybe what I really need is a good corpus of data from which I could parse word origin to remove these poison pills from my statistical models. This introduced an interesting concept which is obvious in retrospect:
English is evolving away from its Old self
The data analyzed above are news articles from the sample provided by COHA (I can’t justify spending the money on the full thing). On the vertical axis is a proximity grade that is of an arbitrary unit so the number isn’t meaningful except when related.
I suppose I should have expected English to keep evolving over time, but this downward progression makes for a more complex baseline.
Of course it is also evolving away from Old French (red) and Old Norse (orange):
So far we’ve learned nothing, and I don’t see many peaks and dips I could map to world events. But on the analysis of the U.S. State of the Union speeches you can see world wars, and it’s easy to speculate that concerns and word choices would be different in a time of war. I like the stability of this corpus, but I don’t like that a single president and his language predispositions could be single-handedly responsible for a peak or a dip.
I do wonder why the post WWI era seems more unstable than the pre, more speculation here but maybe that is a sign of an accelerating world. What we don’t find are zero sum swings between a Germanic and a French pole so that theory I had doesn’t work, but I’m honestly not sure why.
Lastly for ideology and context, I analyzed a few subreddits to give them that same grade against Old English, Old French and Old Norse. There does seem to be some correlation but it too isn’t as telling as I thought it might be.
All in all this statistical analysis isn’t as revelatory as I thought it would be which is a bit of a disappointment given how much I tried. Oh well, It still shows a couple of curious artifacts.
In conclusion, because it does feel like such a long post should be wrapped up with a paragraph starting with “in conclusion”, I will simply say that I’ve loved my journey into linguistics and culture through learning English. It is a beautiful language, and clearly the Lingua Franca of its time (double entendre very much intended).