 | Latin influence in English: Encyclopedia II - Latin influence in English - Middle Ages
Latin influence in English - Middle Ages
The Norman Conquest of 1066 gave England a two tiered society with an aristocracy that spoke Anglo-Norman and a peasantry that spoke English. From 1066 until Henry IV of England ascended to the throne in 1399, the royal court of England spoke a Norman that became progressively Gallicised through contact with French. However, the Norman rulers made no attempt to suppress the English language, apart from not using at all in their court. In 1204, the Anglo-Normans lost their continental territories in Normandy and became wholly English. By the time we see Middle English in the 14th century, the Normans had contributed roughly 10,000 words to English, of which 75% remain in use.
While the Norman aristocracy largely ignored English, the language was both absorbing French words via the conduit of Norman and simulateously undergoing a process of grammatical simplification, the result of which was the loss of grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives, the beginnings of the loss of the case system from Old English, simplified conjugations, and an overall loss of inflections. For example, of adjectival forms that existed in Old English, only two forms remained in Middle English, marking the singular and the plural, before becoming one form as in Modern English.
Old English had six ways of marking plural nouns. French, in common with all languages of the Western Romance branch, marked plurals with -s. Middle English, under influence from Norman, had only two ways of marking plurals: -en and -s. The French -s eventually became the preferred form for marking regular plurals. In fact, only three instances of the -en form remain: brethren, children, oxen.
The combination of a largely French speaking aristocracy and a largely English speaking peasantry gave rise to many pairs of words with a Latinate word in the higher register and a Germanic word in the lower register. For example, the names of barnyard animals tend to be Germanic, from the names the English farmers and herders used: chicken, cow, ox, sheep, swine. The names of the animals when they appear on one’s plate, as the aristocracy saw them, are of Latin origin: poultry, veal, beef, mutton, pork. Other such doublets include: bellicose/warlike; benediction/blessing; close/shut; commence/begin; decapitate/behead; desire/wish; gentle/mild; labor/work; novel/new; verity/truth.
During the reign of the Normans, many words related to the ruling classes and the business of government entered English from French. Among these words are: attorney, bailiff, baron, city, conservative, countess, county, damage, duchess, duke, empire, executive, felony, govern, judicial, jury, justice, legislative, liberal, marriage, nobility, parliament, perjury, petty, prince, prison, regal, representative, republic, royal, senator, sovereign, state, traitor, viscount. A few words retain the French construction of noun followed by adjective, in contrast to the typical English construction of adjective plus noun: attorney general, court martial, malice aforethought.
Other related archives1066, 1204, 1399, 14th century, 1500, 1650, 17th, 18th centuries, 6th century, 7th century, Accuracy disputes, Angles, Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Normans, Anglo-Saxon, English, English Renaissance, English language, French, Frisians, Gallicised, Germanic, Germanic tribes, Greek, Henry IV of England, Inkhorn term, Italian, Jutes, Latin, List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents, List of Latin words with English derivatives, Middle English, Norman, Norman Conquest, Old English, Portuguese, Roman Empire, Romance, Romanian, Saxon, Spanish, grammatical gender
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Middle Ages", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
