[HN Gopher] How French was medieval England?
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How French was medieval England?
Author : drdee
Score : 161 points
Date : 2024-01-26 05:24 UTC (1 days 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!
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I have always used 'bullock' to refer to a _juvenile_
| bull, but my dictionary lists that sense of the word
| under 'archaic'. It wouldn't be the first time that I've
| discovered I'm speaking Middle English!
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Very often the juveniles have had the snip so I wonder if
| that's the inflection point.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| he meant the slang term "Boeuf" -- basically an
| accusation of being a feminine male.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| boeuf is also gendered, it's just that "non-gendered" in
| French means defaulting to male. The same way that Scarlett
| Johansson is an actress, but Scarlet and Chris Evans are
| actors. You would never say that Scarlett alone is an
| actor.
| williamdclt wrote:
| There's not really the same distinction between "live animal"
| and "food", no!
|
| 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
| xaellison wrote:
| askbeeves.com
| gumby wrote:
| I just get a response 410: Mooooooo.
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| But you don't see things like "Strassenbahnhaltestelle" in
| English where you have four words mashed together. I'd
| translate that something like "streetcar stop," but
| literally it's "street car stopping place." Streetcarstop
| while reasonable would not be accepted English by native
| speakers. Tramstop on the other hand is (at least places
| where people say tram). So while we mash it's noticeably
| more limited.
| lmm wrote:
| As a native English speaker, even "tramstop" or "busstop"
| sounds wrong to me.
| vidarh wrote:
| As a native Norwegian speaker, I had to look it up to see
| whether a space was expected or not, as it seems entirely
| illogical for me to have a space there as they're so
| closely connected.
|
| The distinction between "fully merged" compounds,
| hyphenated ones, and ones with spaces is yet another one
| of those endlessly annoying quirks of English.
| User23 wrote:
| > 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.
| mathieuh wrote:
| But what's the difference grammatically if there's a
| space or not? Let's take "streetcar stop", although there
| is a space there, what function is "streetcar" performing
| other than being a noun? It's not an adjective, you can't
| say "that stop is streetcar", that doesn't sound right,
| you'd have to say "that stop is /for/ streetcars".
|
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| The difference is for the German compound word you only
| have to remember the endings for the last part. You don't
| need to worry about adjective declension. So yes it's a
| real grammatical difference and not just whitespace
| differences.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I think the difference is that in English you can create
| new nouns by simply lining up existing nouns (with spaces
| in between). Over time these words may or may not grow
| together.
|
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| We (my first language is Norwegian, German is my 3rd, so
| I'm speaking mostly from my experience with Norwegian)
| tend to see it as far less of an act of "creating a word"
| than English-speakers tend to when confronted with our
| languages, though.
|
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| A lot of this is historical accidents of when shorter
| alternatives for different parts have or have not been
| imported, though, and whether there's a culture for going
| "enough" and shortening things or importing terms.
| Germans seem to be far more tolerant of holding on to
| long compounds than most.
|
| 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.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| It sounds the same when you speak it it's just a cultural
| convention whether you use a space or hyphen or nothing
| at all.
| canjobear wrote:
| The main difference is really that English writes compounds
| with a space in between whereas German doesn't. There's no
| way to express compounds like "pedestrian crossing" or
| "windshield wiper" with a space in German. When a compound
| gets frequent enough in English people will stop writing
| the space (like "windshield") whereas in German the space
| was never there to begin with.
| tnecniv wrote:
| We don't do that with all compounds though. It's really
| more a cultural thing. At a certain point a pair becomes
| so common place that it becomes one word. Beehive, for
| example, isn't semantically different from bee hive but
| the pairing was common enough the space got dropped.
| philwelch wrote:
| English also constructs compound words out of Greek or
| Latin roots. For example "television" is a technology for
| seeing things that are happening far away (i.e. in a
| broadcasting studio); the German word is "Fernsehen",
| which would be cognate to "Far-sight", which is what
| "television" means. And sometimes we even have an Anglo-
| Saxon compound word alongside an etymologically
| equivalent compound word with classical roots, such as
| "manslaughter" and "homicide".
| naravara wrote:
| > manslaughter
|
| I never understood what they thought was so funny.
| gumby wrote:
| The joke is that they don't decline "man" properly
| ("mans" rather than "men").
|
| Today we'd write it menslol.
| gumby wrote:
| Also Greek _and_ Latin roots like monstrosities like your
| example "tele" (Greek) + "vision" (Latin).
|
| The one that grates on me most is "monolingual"
| (unilingual/multilingual or monoglottal/polyglottal)
| taejo wrote:
| Live free! Embrace heteroradicalism!
| nickles wrote:
| I would typically use "crosswalk" in preference to
| "pedestrian crossing". The two terms are slightly
| different, but functionally equivalent. Is there
| something similar in German?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Crosswalk is American English. In the UK they are always
| pedestrian crossings.
| 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
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| The sort of compound words which we're discussing appear
| by a process of _synthesis_ :
|
| 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_
| :
|
| https://xkcd.com/739/
| gerdesj wrote:
| "Too bad Germany didn't get invaded by the French until
| Napoleon."
|
| Read up on the Holy Roman Empire. Germany, France etc are
| quite complicated concepts.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| To add some context here - the concept of a unified
| "Germany" has only existed four times in history. First
| under Charlemagne in the 800s, then under Otto von Bismarck
| in 1871, then under Adolf Hitler until the fall of the
| Third Reich in 1945 (assuming one considers annexation of
| the Sudetenland and the Anschluss to fully encompass
| Germanic people), and finally the modern state of Germany
| since 1990.
| usrusr wrote:
| Seems arbitrary. Why Bismarck's Kaiser but none of those
| between Charlemagne and Napoleon? How German was the
| realm of Charlemagne when it reached further across the
| Pyrenees than it reached across the Elbe?
| kergonath wrote:
| Charlemagne, of course, being king of the Franks and
| emperor of the Romans. Things back then do not match
| neatly to modern concepts such as a French or a German
| nation-state.
| rahen wrote:
| Weren't France and Germany essentially the same country
| during Charlemagne?
| kergonath wrote:
| Yes, they were. Actually the core of both countries was
| one and the Franks did not care much about our modern
| borders. Western Francia became eventually France, while
| Eastern Francia became Franconia (roughly, the borders
| were always blurry and shifted a lot over time).
|
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| Don't think anyone was considering themselves French or
| German yet. There were smaller subdivisions we forgot
| about (or I forgot about, I'm no historian). They just
| happened to be all under Charlemagne's rule.
| af3d wrote:
| Correct. The current regional concept of "Germany" proper
| probably started with the Treaty of Verdun, when the
| lands of Francia were divided amongst three of
| Charlemagne's grandsons. The inheritor of Francia
| Orientalis was in fact also known as "Louis the German".
| cenamus wrote:
| And not even all of those included all german speaking
| populations, i.e. a large part of Switzerland, Austria,
| Liechtenstein and all those regions/cities that were
| partly german, modern day Transylvania for example
| com wrote:
| The partial absence of Austria and the German-speaking
| cantons of Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and perhaps France
| in all possible variations of these "concepts" means that
| a United Germany has never been truly achieved I suppose.
| Probably a good thing for those folks own cultural and
| dialect identity...
| toyg wrote:
| Language is just one element of identity anyway. Also,
| the concept of "United Country X" is a XIX century
| invention, largely based on now-discredited racist
| ideologies. We should aim for something better.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| One of the best Christopher Hitchend quotes is about
| English/German compatibility:
|
| > Der Brand (The Fire), by the historian Jorg 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.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Hitchens*
| gerdesj wrote:
| On the beef thing: French: "biftek" from the English: "beef
| steak", beef from boef. The borrow words come full circle!
|
| 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!
| fuzztester wrote:
| >biftek
|
| Seen that word, with that spelling, IIRC, in Iranian
| restaurant menus in India.
| prawn wrote:
| I remember biftek in Turkey also? Bistek appears to be
| "beef steak" in the Philippines?
| bitbckt wrote:
| "Bistec a la X" for many types of X is part of the
| Spanish-speaking world, including the Philippines. The
| spelling with a "k" is a loan word into Tagalog.
| fuzztester wrote:
| And what does the X stand for in that?
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Anything. Bistec a la Mexicana is "Mexican-style steak."
| Replace with any nationality or style or whatever.
| teknico wrote:
| "Bistecca" in Italian.
| narag wrote:
| _Bistec a la X" for many types of X is part of the
| Spanish-speaking world_
|
| Right, even for X = pork. But lately, it's fading in
| favour of "filete" (slice) of X, at least in Spain.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Yes. Not been to Turkey, but I read about cuisines, for
| fun, including on Wikipedia and food blogs. And IIRC,
| steak is called biftek in Turkey.
| cyberax wrote:
| It's also similar in Russian and Ukrainian: "beefshteks"
| nemo8551 wrote:
| This was definitely a tradecraft code word when two dudes
| passed a briefcase between each other in a cold park one
| day in Moscow.
|
| Heavy, heavy pronunciation going on to near comical
| effect.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Psst! Tovarisch! Next meeting at 11:00 p.m. Tuesday under
| the bridge just after Gorky Prospekt! Wear a grey checked
| coat, with a copy of Pravda under your arm. Da?
|
| Oops, too many spy novels plus a bad sense of humour ...
| ;)
| nemo8551 wrote:
| I think there used to be a kebab place in Glasgow called
| bifteki.
|
| It generally signalled the end of a night when you headed
| there.
| samstave wrote:
| Yep - Bistek is beef steak in PH. and Bifstek in India is
| likely due to colonialism. Its amazing that Chicken
| Makhani was actually invented in the UK.
| hackernewds wrote:
| you're thinking of Bistek, also in indonesia
| makapuf wrote:
| That spelling is not the generally used one in French (or
| other languages) : it's spelled bifteck
|
| (See https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bifteck)
| nottorp wrote:
| Romanian doesn't use K so it's "biftec" in menus and
| recipes :)
| donall wrote:
| > Then we have the collisions between the Brythonic languages
| (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cumbric, Cornish and the rest) and
| English
|
| Small correction: neither Irish nor the two languages people
| might refer to as Scottish are Brythonic languages.
|
| Drinkhail! ;-)
| gerdesj wrote:
| Noted. I'm just a linguistic civilian 8)
| samstave wrote:
| I have the etymology bug. Interestingly as I have been on
| meditative trail rides recently, I have been thinking about a
| desire to compile the etymology of the corpus of words used
| in tech.
|
| And was wondering if there might be an easy way to build a a
| tech geneology/etemology tree.
| fuzztester wrote:
| What about steer and heifer, which I've read of in English and
| Western novels?
|
| 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
| :)
| canjobear wrote:
| Steer is Germanic (German has "der Stier") but heifer is
| unknown origins.
| cenamus wrote:
| It does sound similar to Hufer (e.g. as in Paarhufer,
| literally sth like 'paired hoofers'), but the Wiktionary
| states it's indeed of different origin. Etymology is really
| fascinating sometimes
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Steer means something something more like Bull in modern
| German I think - it doesn't have the connotations of a
| castrated animal as in English.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Old English had cognates of all three words: feahr (porc), swin
| and picga.
| tnecniv wrote:
| Oh I'll say beefs when referring to cows as a joke. TIL it's an
| actual word!
| vijayr02 wrote:
| >"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on
| their four legs?" demanded Wamba.
|
| "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 Scott
| kalbadia wrote:
| small correction : it's boeuf ^^ also, fun fact "taper un
| boeuf" doesn't mean "hitting a beef" but musicians jamming
| together ^^
| deadfish wrote:
| I learnt the word beeves while reading the Doctrine (the PHP
| ORM) codebase. I assume it was in case someone had an entity
| called beef... So the collection would be beeves :) I wonder if
| anyone ever used Doctrine and had an entity called beef.
| TomK32 wrote:
| The same example is mentioned in The Adventure of English, a
| series presented by Melvyn Bragg.
| 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!
| twic wrote:
| "Gin tonic"!
| kergonath wrote:
| The whole discussion is not very useful. There are sounds
| in Spanish that don't exist in English and things that are
| just weird. And it's the same the other way around. Not to
| mention, the same word can sound different with different
| Spanish accents, so which one should be used? There is
| nothing wrong with people adapting words from other
| languages or pronouncing them their way.
|
| Besides, it's cute when they try, but it's not like most
| English people can pronounce French, either.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Trying to use my European learnt Spanish in the USA
| always gets laughs from the Latine population, when they
| can finally figure out what I'm saying.
| 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!"
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| The English side of Cypress is a trip... You're more likely
| to find an English pub than Cypriot (or Turkish!) food
| tomcam wrote:
| Which is nice because they're disappearing from England
| at an alarming rate
| lebuffon wrote:
| But the butter chicken is to die for!
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Do you mean the sovereign base areas? Those are pretty
| much UK territory.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Limassol, Pissouri, Paphos, basically the whole
| southwestern coast
| noneeeed wrote:
| Nice :)
| 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
| SllX wrote:
| Not a highlight in English history as it was a rather
| bloody time.
| graemep wrote:
| There is still an expectation that even mildly posh British
| people know how to pronounce French words at least
| approximately correctly.
|
| 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.
| 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...
| Tagbert wrote:
| Are you in the UK? In the US it would sound very off to hear
| "junta" with a hard "j".
|
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Californian. I've only ever heard it pronounced by non-
| Spanish speakers with a hard j.
| hackernewds wrote:
| That is basically the colonial mindset, one could argue :)
|
| 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.
| 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."
| lainga wrote:
| I might put forth _assegaai_ (a type of throwing spear)...?
|
| 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
| 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
| renaudg wrote:
| French person here, I have no idea what "voir dire" means.
| It's literally "see say".
| hollerith wrote:
| _Voir dire_ has a technical meaning among lawyers in the
| English-speaking countries.
| akavi wrote:
| It's Anglo-Norman[0], and means "to tell the truth"
| ("voir" being cognates with modern French "vrai", not
| "voir")
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language
| VHRanger wrote:
| It's a court procedure where you ask questions to an
| expert witness to verify they know what they're talking
| about
| qingcharles wrote:
| Interesting that you mention that use. I've spent
| thousands of hours in court and never heard the term
| applied to expert witnesses, perhaps because their
| background is often stipulated.
|
| 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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voir_dire
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Did the various pronunciations cause any problems? If I'm
| honest, it doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
| jhbadger wrote:
| And yet The US pronounces "herb" correctly (as "erb") while
| the UK, pronounces it like the name Herb, with an H.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| And the British still insist on using article "an" before
| aspirated H-words as if they're all pretending to be posh
| cockneys.
| lebuffon wrote:
| But some American dialects (midwest?) have dropped the
| use of "the" with a long 'e' before words beginning with
| a vowel.(ie: thee apple) It sounds bizarre to me to use
| the short 'e'.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Some Americans whom I've met (I think Midwest ones, but
| not sure), also pronounce the word "often" as oft-en (but
| without any pause). I don't know how the British
| pronounce it. In India (having learnt somewhat British
| English), we pronounce it as "ofen", sort of rhyming with
| oxen.
|
| And of course there is the famous "shedule" vs "skedule"
| pronunciation for schedule.
| noneeeed wrote:
| You've lost me a bit on this.
|
| 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".
| devilbunny wrote:
| US English calls herbs "erbs", regardless of whether or
| not one is an aitch-speaker or not. Whereas "historic" is
| largely pronounced with the aitch, but you will find
| hypercorrectors who say "an historic" without dropping
| the aitch.
| qingcharles wrote:
| As a Britisher in the USA, the use of a/an for H-words
| over here is super confusing to me.
|
| And I've never been able to figure out what the correct
| way to say "homage" is.
| tomcam wrote:
| > most Spanish words are at least pronounced properly
| (sometimes with an accent)
|
| 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.
| 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!
| tomcam wrote:
| I wonder how Newfies pronounce the word "founder"
| injb wrote:
| Just ask someone from Wexford
| tomcam wrote:
| Deep cut
| Tagbert wrote:
| That would make French just badly pronounced Latin. And that
| Latin was just a puffed up corruption of Proto-Indo-European.
| Of course, language history is just turtles all the way down.
| All languages change as we speak them.
| usrusr wrote:
| > English is just badly pronounced French
|
| 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.
| Bayart wrote:
| It's not as butchered as you think. Some of it is simply
| older (Norman-)French pronunciation fossilized in English.
| It's similar to how you can find Middle Chinese across
| Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese or Proto-Germanic in Finnish.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Norman French is still used in the House of Commons
| sometimes:
|
| https://youtu.be/xBcR-s8QtoQ?si=hm8sHgRZUQ_A5dNy&t=6
| 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
| twic wrote:
| Except when it's used in reference to blood or the West Ham
| strip.
| 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'.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| But Pinochet is a French family name why would the French
| mispronounced it?
| graemep wrote:
| Surnames should be pronounced the way the person who has it
| pronounces it.
|
| 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.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Honest, I have literally never heard anyone ever say "junta"
| with a hard /j/ sound. Is this really a thing?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yes, this is a real thing
| mcmoor wrote:
| It's adapted into my language as junta with hard /j/ so yes,
| it's a thing
| mahkeiro wrote:
| Don't worry the French are not better as the word is junte
| in French with a [Z] sound
| kergonath wrote:
| There is no equivalent to the Spanish /j/ in French.
| Besides, the -e ending instead of the Spanish -a should
| tell you that it has been adapted and is used as a
| loanword, a French word of Spanish origin, not a Spanish
| word.
|
| 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.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| It was a joke! And in French we tend to either keep or
| not the original pronunciation. A funny one is mojito
| where the j is always replace by a French r.
| desas wrote:
| Definitely a thing in the UK, it's how the Oxford English
| Dictionary says it's pronounced (noting that it's different
| in the US).
|
| I have heard too many people say "jally pea no", but the most
| frequent pronunciation of jalepeno is with a hard j
| gerdesj wrote:
| You would go absolutely postal over our pronunciation of
| Icelandic volcano names 8)
|
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| In the USA it is a national sport to trample on French origin
| words.. look at the Motor City "Detroit" !
| lebuffon wrote:
| "Foyer" is the classic example.
| noneeeed wrote:
| "Niche" is the one that bugs me every time I hear someone
| pronounce it to rhyme with "itch". For some irrational
| reason that just irritates :)
| vinay427 wrote:
| I don't think most people including those from the area would
| even associate the name with French, so there isn't the same
| intentionality. It's the same with indigenous language-origin
| or Spanish-origin place names in the US/Canada, our place
| names in general that are often centuries old and
| conceptually separate from their origins, and feels quite
| distinct from intentionally trying to emulate a foreign
| language pronunciation for one language but butchering words
| in another language (not that that's unique to the UK).
| el-salvador wrote:
| I didn't know Detroit had French Origin.
|
| Spanish slang from the 90s in my country imported Detroit and
| Spanish-ized the pronunciation as ditroy.
|
| Since it has the same consonants as detras, Spanish for
| behind, it can be used a a synonym for behind and also as an
| euphemism for the behind part of the body.
| renaudg wrote:
| > I didn't know Detroit had French Origin.
|
| It means "strait".
| rahen wrote:
| It's a lesser known fact but Chicago also has French
| origins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chicago
| mahkeiro wrote:
| Yes but for an unknown reason Des Moines was not completely
| butchered
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I'm more upset at how few 'educated' English speakers can
| pronounce archaic English. I'm so sick of hearing about the
| Anglo-Saxon poem "Bay O'Wolf".
| 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.
| canjobear wrote:
| And the original "lingua franca" wasn't French!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
| ithkuil wrote:
| Because the people of the Mediterranean were as imprecise as
| westerners are when referring to other people. They called
| "franks" any people in the west that didn't speak Greek. In
| the same way as many today call arabs any people that are
| Muslim even if thet are Turks or Iranians
| Bayart wrote:
| > Franks were a Germanic people and were much more culturally
| affine to the Anglo-Saxons.
|
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| High German didn't exist yet, though. The High German sound
| shift hadn't happened yet.
|
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| > Latin substrate in the territory of modern France was so
| strong that it gradually took over the Germanic ruling class
| over centuries
|
| 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).
| johncoltrane wrote:
| s/hautesse/hauteur
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The Frankish nobility would have been a minority in a land
| which was majority Romance speaking (Gaulish having
| unfortunately died out out by then). And at a certain point
| they were very interested in emulating and continuing the
| lineage of the western Roman empire, explicitly taking up late
| Roman styles and practices. Adopting Latin and Gallo-Romance
| speech would be just part of this.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| amyjess wrote:
| > instead of "French", it should say "French-speaking"
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes, but we are talking about the situation 1000 years ago,
| when languages weren't standardized and, as a result, much
| more fuzzy. Today you can say where, say, German ends and
| Dutch begins; but it used to be a continuum. Same with
| 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.
| seszett wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| qwytw wrote:
| > by true French speakers
|
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You are being downvoted in part because if you'd kept reading
| you'd find that info is all in the article.
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| The Normans were ethnically Vikings from Norway (i.e. North-
| men). In 911 the Franks made a treaty giving them Normandy so
| they would stop raiding and ally with France. After a while
| they resumed their raiding habits, invaded England and also
| Sicily and southern Italy.
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norman-people
| 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.
| noneeeed wrote:
| That sounds interesting, I think I need to put that on my
| reading list.
|
| 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.
| gerikson wrote:
| I can recommend "Vanished Kingdoms" on the subject of pre-
| modern Europe:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanished_Kingdoms
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Wait wait wait...a few days ago some American scientist dared to
| say that adding a small pinch of salt to a cup of hot tea will
| help with bitterness in the tea. England almost split a spleen!
| Now we hear of the word subsumed?
|
| What the hell does subsumed even mean?!? (just kidding, I know it
| means adding up something under water.)
| cenamus wrote:
| The pinch of salt also really helps improve bad coffee.
| Something about the chemistry of the salt ions interacting with
| taste receptors makes really bitter or sour coffee taste
| somewhat drinkable
|
| Of course James Hoffman did a video on it.
| [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PUWQQ-joKE]
| dockd wrote:
| French left its mark on the legal system and the tradition lives
| on in America. Several phrases use both the French and English
| word:
|
| * cease and desist
|
| * aiding and abetting
|
| * assault and battery
| canjobear wrote:
| Those words are all French origin, none of them are English
| origin.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Well, the "and"s are all English... :)
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| What a coincidence that I'm reading your comment on the day I
| learned about the origin of 'culprit'
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culprit
|
| > 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.
| jdriselvato wrote:
| If you have an interest in English and the evolution of the
| language you must check out the YouTuber Simon Roper.
|
| There'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
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXaXnQv6knQ
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWI_dFxbzyg
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| There's also _The Story of English_ on Youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FtSUPAM-uA&list=PL6D54D1C7D...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Simon Roper is great. I was amused how I could understand the
| 'English' by the late 14th century pronunciation, but
| understood less when I was in Dublin in the 21st century when
| native hiberno-English speakers conversed together.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Of course, if you are into podcasts, there is the fantastic
| "The History of English" podcast by Kevin Stroud.
|
| 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.
| ilove_banh_mi wrote:
| while one can have a laugh about some French words in English,
| the most common and essential words are pretty much all Norse --
| such as tree, root, boat, grass, bloom, man, egg, house, husband,
| hand, heart, skin, skull, cake, cow, lift, seat, from, hound,
| warm, blend, back, foot, cast, hate, water, bark, ford, etc.
| canjobear wrote:
| Even within the Germanic words there are multiple origins. For
| example "shirt" and "skirt", "shatter" and "scatter", one from
| Anglo-Saxon and the other from Norse.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| users may find this related article and comments interesting:
| (from 4 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37607851
| "French was the official language of England from 1066 till 1362
| (frenchleeds.co.uk)"
| mrangle wrote:
| There's a lot of cause and effeect assumptions in the article.
|
| 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.
| canjobear wrote:
| No, the Frankish monarchs did not speak French, nor did "lingua
| franca" ever refer to French.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankish_language
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
| mrangle wrote:
| Virtually all Western European Monarchs spoke French,
| traditionally and after the formation of France.
|
| 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.
| canjobear wrote:
| Charlemagne spoke Frankish, a Germanic language. The
| Normans who came later did speak something related to
| modern French.
|
| 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.
| Bayart wrote:
| > Charlemagne spoke Frankish, a Germanic language
|
| The only proven linguistic characteristic of Charlemagne
| is that he wasn't very good with Classical Latin.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Reminds me of a scene from the Vikings TV show where Rollo tries
| to learn French.
|
| https://youtu.be/i5ZdBsbj8K0
|
| _I was a savage but now I am a man of great wealth and civility_
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It was a time in history which had such an insanely wide gap
| between the elite and the common folk, and when there was zero to
| little literacy among the common folk, and basically no written
| history of them...
|
| 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.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| > Previously predominant links to Scandinavia were replaced by
| ones with France
|
| 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...
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