[HN Gopher] How French Was Medieval England?
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How French Was Medieval England?
Author : drdee
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-01-26 05:24 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| drivers99 wrote:
| I'm really enjoying The History of English Podcast which covers
| this. It's about the English language along with all the history
| along the way.
| gumby wrote:
| Do they try to use appropriate pronunciation?
| timeagain wrote:
| Appropriate for what? The podcast covers soooo much and
| attempts to catalog all influences from proto-indo-European
| onward, with a focus on shared word origins and phonetic
| changes over time. So some of the pronunciation is
| speculative reconstruction.
| gumby wrote:
| That's what I meant: pronunciation (as best as can be
| reconstructed) of a word being discussed in a historical
| context.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Yup, the host goes into that. It covers from the Indo-
| Europeans up to Shakespeare (where the podcast is at
| currently). To get an idea of the show's perspective, the
| host is something of an amateur linguist and historian.
| So it's the historical and linguistic reasons that
| English is the way it is.
|
| All time great podcast, IMO.
| gumby wrote:
| These are fun little essays.
|
| 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.
| kraftman wrote:
| French is pretty similar isnt it?
|
| Pig/pork = cochon / porc
|
| cow/beef = vache / boeuf
|
| chicken/chicken = poulet/poulet
|
| fish/fish = poisson/poisson
| masom wrote:
| vache is gendered boeuf :D
|
| 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).
| Dodrekai wrote:
| More precisely, a "Boeuf" is a castrated bull which could
| explain the English meaning of the word..
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| Steer in English
| meheleventyone wrote:
| We use Bullock in the UK.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Bollocks, do we!
| mistrial9 wrote:
| he meant the slang term "Boeuf" -- basically an
| accusation of being a feminine male.
| xaellison wrote:
| askbeeves.com
| amaccuish wrote:
| > In both French and German the same word is used for the
| animal in the field and on the plate.
|
| Ehh, in German we talk about Rindfleisch, which comes from a
| Kuh.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| While not same, both are germanic words
| nowafizyka wrote:
| Rindfleisch comes from a Rind (which may be a Kuh, Bulle, or
| Ochse).
| zwieback wrote:
| I heard the same anecdote about the upper classes adopting
| French after 1066 but the farmers still calling the thing by
| its animal name. Trust the Germans to just continue smashing
| nouns together, Schweinefleisch, Rindfleisch and my American
| wife's favorite: "Hackfleisch" (hacked flesh). Too bad Germany
| didn't get invaded by the French until Napoleon.
| vidarh wrote:
| English "smashes words together" too - English is full of
| compounds (e.g. shopkeeper), it's just a much slower process,
| often goes via a long intermediate period of hyphenation, and
| the implied difference in meaning is a bit smaller.
|
| 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 =
| hakkebof (Danish) = boef hache.
|
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| French does that too so I think an invasion would not have
| helped.
| graywh wrote:
| in English, we refer to smashed-together word(s) as
| "portmanteau", a French word that is a portmanteau itself
| thebeardisred wrote:
| The one that endlessly peeves me is that English broadcasters
| (e.g. BBC, The Economist) will bend over backwards to pronounce
| French words yet for Spanish words they trample all over them.
| The frequency with which they mispronounce "junta" is maddening.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I think trying to get British people to pronounce Spanish words
| correctly may be a quixotic effort :)
| mc32 wrote:
| I don't know why people complain of this. Spaniards don't
| particularly pronounce English words in a very English manner
| either. They Spaniardize lots of English words: Football,
| Goal, Twitter, Pub, CD-ROM. Who cares!
| croisillon wrote:
| Jimi Hendrix!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was actually on an Explore trip through Spain & Portugal,
| where everyone was English but me.
|
| In a bar I would order "bocadillo con jamon y queso" and
| they'd say, "Oh, you speak Spanish!"
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I suppose this is because in the UK there is still this whiff
| of upper class and culture if you can speak French. The new
| King Charles was the first monarch to give a speech in the
| French parliament (afaik), and he did it in French, for
| instance.
|
| Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's
| about it... and let's not forget the Argies.
| rgblambda wrote:
| >Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's
| about it.
|
| And shared a king:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain
| switch007 wrote:
| Ignorance is a sport in England
| rhplus wrote:
| This is because French is/was the defacto choice for foreign
| language option in secondary schools throughout the UK, at
| least up until the 2000s. French was after all the language of
| diplomacy and quite a bit more useful in European business last
| century than Spanish was.
|
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think "junta" has had anglicised equivalents for pretty much
| as long as it's been a word in Spanish
|
| 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
| telesilla wrote:
| Many words have been anglicized and so 'junta' wouldn't mean
| anything to English speakers with a Spanish j. But with a hard
| j, it has exactly the same meaning to us as it does to you.
| English is an excellent thief but not respectful of the
| origins. Even the giant % of the English language that is
| French, we pronounce in our own way.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...
| bee_rider wrote:
| For some reason this has made me wonder what the most
| circuitous route for a loan word has been.
|
| Imagine if "junta" had taken a trip up through Central Europe
| and then to the Scandinavians, then down, so we could pronounce
| it "yunta."
| baryphonic wrote:
| In America, the reverse is true. Most French words are
| butchered, most Spanish words are at least pronounced properly
| (sometimes with an accent).
|
| 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.
| amyjess wrote:
| > In America, the reverse is true. Most French words are
| butchered
|
| 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".
| shinycode wrote:
| vwaar deer is close enough but the prononciation is
| condensed so the r and double e are not strong. No emphasis
| whatsoever
| jhbadger wrote:
| And yet The US pronounces "herb" correctly (as "erb") while
| the UK, pronounces it like the name Herb, with an H.
| vidarh wrote:
| If you want to feel better about British willingness to butcher
| French too (ignoring the huge chunk of older loanwords from
| French - e.g. most -ion words and -ment words, maby other large
| groups), look up the English village of Beaulieu (named by
| French monks, so it's the French "beau lieu"), and how the
| English pronounce it.
|
| 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)
| bbarnett wrote:
| Go to youtube and see how NewFoundLand in Canada is
| pronounced. People just want a single word.
|
| It cracks me up that the Foundland wasn't good enough (some
| place in the UK), so off they went to find New!
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| > bend over backwards
|
| That is literally a valid movement of the tongue to produce a
| retroflex [l].
|
| In contrast, Spanish phonology lacks retroflex entirely.
| hammock wrote:
| And that's a new thing, historically the British would
| purposely trample on French words.
|
| For example "claret" meaning Bordeaux blend wine is pronounced
| with a hard t
| TMWNN wrote:
| The classic English-language (not just British) example is the
| name of Chile's former dictator. "Pinochet" should be
| pronounced with a hard 't' at the end, as is the case in
| Spanish, and not the French silent 't'.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Mushroom <-- Mousseron (a type of Mushroom/"Champignon")
| ithkuil wrote:
| > One of Charlemagne's last descendants to be king of West
| Francia - the predecessor kingdom to France - grew up in the
| court of his uncle, King AEthelstan of Wessex in the tenth
| century.
|
| 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.
| krona wrote:
| > The Norman Conquest brought French kings
|
| 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.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Weren't the Normans more culturally French than anything else
| at that point? William the Conqueror did speak it as his first
| language.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Normans were definitely French speaking, though their
| cultural pecularities made them a specific unit. For example,
| they were considered very warlike, and even Norman clergy was
| inclined to carry weapons and engage in combat, which wasn't
| typical elsewhere.
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is somewhat unwise to stop reading at the _subtitle_.
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I notice that the great universities and scholars of the English-
| speaking world have created a Dictionary of Old English (in
| progress at U. of Toronto), Middle English Dictionary (completed,
| at U. Michigan), and the grand historical dictionary of early
| modern and modern English, the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford
| U.).
|
| 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)
| valarauko wrote:
| I'm currently reading "Queens of the Crusades" by Allison Weir,
| about the lives of England's Medieval queens, starting from
| Eleanor of Aquitaine. From the book, the model I have to
| understand the context of French culture in Medieval England is
| to think of it as yet another principality within the much larger
| French cultural umbrella of continental Europe. Eleanor spoke not
| "French", but Lengadoc or Occitan. She learned Norman French
| later in life. Her daughter-in-law, Berengaria of Navarre, spoke
| Castilian like her Castilian mother, and the rest of the
| Navarrese nobility, along with some Occitan. Later queens came
| from from the duchy of Provence. Through marriage, they were also
| duchesses of Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, Gascony - regions that,
| like England, had cultural and linguistic similarities with the
| Kingdom of France, but their own independent political history.
| Some were held nominally as vassals of the French court, some
| not.
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