Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER

        A few years ago my wife and I flew on Icelandair to Europe.  On one of the doors in the airplane was the word Neytharutgangur.  I could figure out the utgangur part: it would be outgang in English if we had not adopted the Latin word exit.  In fact in some dialects outgang was an English word until the early twentieth century.  A little later, in Amsterdam, we saw signs saying Nooduitgang, and then in Berlin we saw Notausgang.  It finally dawned on me that Neythar, Nood, and Not are akin to English “need.”  So why don’t we say Needoutgang, like our three Germanic cousins, instead of “Emergency Exit”?  It’s because of the French.

        In 1066 the Normans conquered England, and soon also Wales and part of Scotland.  The Normans, though they were originally Vikings (“Northmen”), had given up Old Norse and spoke French.  French soon permeated the many dialects of Old English, a Germanic tongue, and added thousands of new words and displaced thousands of old words.  We kept “breakfast,” from good old Germanic (the meal where we break our fast), but “supper” and “dinner” are French and they replaced daegmete (“day-meat”) and some other words.  “Cow,” “steer,” and “ox” are Germanic, but “beef” is French; “sheep” is Germanic, but “mutton” is French.  “Speech” and “tongue” are from Old English, but “language” is from Old French.

French has been exporting words into English continually for almost a thousand years now.  In some cases we have imported the same French word repeatedly, as if we can’t get enough of it.  “Gentile” (meaning “pagan” or “non-Jewish”) we took directly from Latin, though it was also available in French; “gentle” (meaning “noble,” as in “gentleman”) comes from Old French gentil; we acquired “genteel” a few centuries later from the same word; and then “jaunty” (originally meaning “genteel,” and then “stylish” and then “lively” or “sprightly”).  Today’s French word gentil usually means “kind” or “nice,” and this fifth version of the same word has been heard on the lips of francophile Americans.

The Normans, however, did not speak Parisian French.  There were several differences.  Words that began with a gw-sound in Parisian (spelled gu-) began with just w- in Norman.  So in English today we have “guarantee” from Paris and “warranty” from Normandy.  “Gage” and “wage” both meant “pledge” once, but they have gone their separate ways (“gage” mainly as “engage”).  Paris gave us “guardian” and “guile,” while Normandy gave us “warden” and “wile.”  We make “war” but we might say C’est la guerre.

Another difference between these two types of French lay in the Parisian alteration of initial ca- to cha-.  The Normans said castel and the Parisians said chastel, both from Latin castellum; so English today has “castle” and “chateau.”   The Normans said cachi and the Parisians chasser; so we have “catch” and “chase,” both originally used in hunting.  Our word “cat” may have a Germanic origin, but it was reinforced by Norman cat, while in Parisian it is still chat. 

We go on a “campaign” but we drink “champagne.”  Both words go back to Latin campus, meaning “field,” used in America today for the grounds of a university.  The Parisian descendant is champ, well known to Americans who visit the Champs Elysées in Paris, the Elysian Fields.  When an army goes into the field for summer warfare they are on a campaign, and build camps; campagne means “open countryside,” mainly fields.  There is a particular countryside not far from Paris called Champagne, where they make a famous sparkling wine.  A Roman combatant in a campus or arena was a campio or campionem; that became Parisian French champiun and our word “champion.”  It’s not certain that these differences fall along the Norman/Parisian line, as Italian campagna and related words may have entered Parisian, but some dialect variations seem to be in play.

Italian also induced a similar doublet in French itself, and then in English.  The Parisian French word for a set of warriors on horseback was chevalerie, from cheval “horse,” from Late Latin caballus.  That gave us our word “chivalry,” because, we naively believed, mounted knights were courteous toward damsels in distress.  Then, in the sixteenth century, French borrowed Italian cavalleria, and passed it on to us as “cavalry.”

The same pattern is visible in the middles of words and their ends: our word “pocket” comes from Norman poket, meaning “little bag,” while the Parisian equivalent was puchete, which became modern French pochette, now replaced usually with poche.  We retain the word “poke,” of which poket was the diminutive, in our phrase “pig in a poke.”  We eat with a “fork,” from Latin furca and Norman fouorque, while the Parisians eat with a fourche or fourchet.

Norman French gave us “garden” while Parisians say jardin.  And it is because of the Normans that we eat “pears” (not “poirs”), and cherries (not “cerries”), and we may buy them both at a “fair” (not “foir”). 

A very interesting word in English is “cattle,” which today means “livestock,” mainly bovine, but its earliest senses were “property” or “goods” and then “money,” especially “capital” (from Latin capitale, from caput, meaning “head”); capitale is in fact the source of Norman cattel.  Since a person’s wealth often consisted of cows and oxen, the abstract term cattel became the concrete term “cattle.”  But meanwhile in Paris capitale had become chaptal and then chattel, and chattel passed into English, at first meaning “cattle” as “wealth” or “property” (and even “cows”), but now surviving mainly in the phrases “goods and chattels” and “chattel slavery.” 

A similar semantic path, but in reverse, we can see in “pecuniary,” which means “consisting of money” (an “impecunious” person has none of it); it comes from Latin pecunia (“money”) and that word comes from pecu, “herd” (of farm animals).  It’s a peculiar fact, too, that the word “peculiar” has the same Latin source.

All languages absorb foreign words, especially when their speakers are conquered and occupied by speakers of another language.  Japanese has domesticated thousands of English words since 1945.  So has German.  However we may feel about William the Conqueror (Norman “William” is “Guillaume” in Parisian) and the English defeat at Hastings, that event brought many more words into English than those it supplanted, and we are the richer for it. 

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.