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DOI: https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2022.58.10.14
How to Cite:
Oliinyk, I., Petrovsky, M., Ruban, L., Shevchenko, L., & Sviatiuk, Y. (2022). French loan words in modern American
fiction. Amazonia Investiga, 11(58), 134-139. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2022.58.10.14
French loan words in modern American fiction
Запозичення з французької у сучасній американській прозі
Received: November 1, 2022 Accepted: November 30, 2022
Written by:
Iryna Oliinyk51
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5933-6818
Mykola Petrovsky52
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3267-7123
Larysa Ruban53
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5539-931X
Liudmyla Shevchenko54
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4543-3876
Yulia Sviatiuk55
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8343-1890
Abstract
The paper deals with the origins of modern
English vocabulary and shows the relevance of
the influence of French on its modern state. The
article makes a survey of scientific literature
studying French heritage in English lexis. An
overview of linguistic and historical data is
provided to show the framework within which
linguistic borrowing from French was made
possible. A number of loanwords are mentioned
that appeared under different historical
circumstances. The article analyses borrowed
words that kept their meaning they had in French,
as well as those ones which experienced semantic
transformation. The paper concentrates on the
fact that frequency of English words having
French roots is high enough in the novel by J.
Grisham and they form a thick layer of common
words. The article demonstrates, what kind of
impact the change in culture-specific concepts
had on the meaning of the words borrowed from
French and highlights possible prospects of such
kind of studies. The paper emphasizes semantic
layers of loan words and shows that finance
vocabulary, the vocabulary of law and politics
and the vocabulary of health are closely
connected with borrowings from French.
51
Ph.D. Phil, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine.
52
Ph.D. Phil, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine.
53
Ph.D. Ped, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine.
54
Ph.D. Phil, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine.
55
Ph.D. Phil, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine.
Oliinyk, I., Petrovsky, M., Ruban, L., Shevchenko, L., Sviatiuk, Y. / Volume 11 - Issue 58: 134-139 / October, 2022
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/ October 2022
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Keywords: linguistic borrowing, etymology,
semantic transformation, synchrony, diachrony.
Introduction
If we take a closer look at the vocabulary of two
widely spoken in Europe languages – English
and French, even a person that is not an expert in
linguistics, will easily find a lot of parallels.
Without any problem we can identify a number
of similar words and establish their origin: and
we are speaking exactly about borrowings from
French, which constitute from one fifth to one
third from the whole lexical stock according to
various estimates. Looking at all this array of
words we are likely to ask ourselves a lot of
different questions, and the most interesting of
them are the following:
Why did such borrowings appear? Do loan words
keep the signifier and the signified? What kind of
changes can take place, if any? How often are
loan words used? Is their frequency higher, than
the frequency of their synonyms that have
another origin? What parts of borrowed
vocabulary were mostly affected by changes?
What are the main sources of information about
the current situation with borrowings?
We will try to touch upon everyone of these
questions and we are going to view loan words
through the lens of modern Anglophone fiction.
Thus, the object of our study is the detective
novel of a modern American writer John
Grisham the Whistler (Grisham, 2017), the
subject of our study represents the vocabulary of
French origin which is used in this novel. The
purpose of this study is to show whether the
elements of French origin have taken root in the
American variant of English and to what extent
this layer of vocabulary is relevant for modern
American prose.
With this in mind, we are going to make a review
of literature on this topic, starting from the
sources that assess the number of loan words
having French origin, through those ones that
consider different kinds of changes they have
undergone, particular semantic features they
have, historic background of loan words
appearance etc. After this we are going to
describe the way in which our research will be
conducted. In the section dedicated to results and
discussion we are going to stop at the main
characteristics of borrowings from French, that
can be found in The Whistler and the link that
exists between historical milestones on the one
hand, and phonetical and semantical evolution of
vocabulary, on the other. After we make sure
loan words constitute a significant layer of
vocabulary used by modern American prose, we
are going to define the major areas of research
and their perspectives in this field.
Theoretical Framework
We should highlight the existence of a great deal
of studies that consider loan words having French
origin in English.
The majority of them concentrate on defining the
number of loan words, as for example T.
Finkenstaedt and D. Wolff, based on the 80,000
words of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd
edition), presented the following data: Old
French and Norman provided English language
with 28.3% of words, that constitute the
wordstock of modern English (Finkenstaedt &.
Wolff, 1973). A French linguist H. Walter, for
her part, claims that more than two-thirds of
English words are of French origin, while the
borrowings from French to English barely
exceed 4% (Walter, 2012). Sometimes
researchers concentrate on the frequency of use
of French loanwords in modern English texts that
refer to different fields of knowledge (Petrak,
2015) or examine borrowings from a few
languages, their functions and semantic features
(Muhammed, 2017), data confrontation; the
study of French loan words in a few languages
can also be of great interest (Tokdemir Demirel,
2013; Phuong, 2021).
The others make accent on the reasons why such
borrowings appeared, on the changes borrowings
underwent, on their semantic features etc. For
instance J.B. Nadeau, P. Durkin and J. Coleman
believe it is necessary to examine French loan
words from different points of view and, first of
all, it allows researchers to follow the evolution
of words, starting from phonetic changes and
finishing by semantic shifts that took place
(Nadeau, 2006; Durkin, 2014; Coleman, 1995).
L. Sylvester, M. Tiddeman, R. Ingham and
J. Jurcic underline the motives that made appear
a number of French loan words, such as an
intention to name new objects and notions under
changing cultural circumstances and the desire to
become part of prestigious French culture,
providing access to the highest levels of society
(Sylvester, Tiddeman & Ingham, 2020; Jurcic,
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2003). Sometimes researchers, such as S.
Kemmer, P. Faure, de Jong consider different
periods, when borrowings from various
languages and especially from French took place
and define the most important semantic fields, to
which loan words correspond: law and
government, church, nobility, military, cooking,
culture, luxury goods etc. (Kemmer, 2019), or
address exactly those layers of English
vocabulary that, as they state, were particularly
influenced by French (Faure, 2018; de Jong,
1996).
Methodology
First of all, we are going to look at the historical
background that made the appearance of such an
impressive layer of French borrowings possible,
and on the basis of that information we will try to
predict what linguistic phenomena we can
encounter in the text of The Whistler. Afterwards,
with the help of Online etymology dictionary
(Harper, 2001), we are going to identify the
lexical elements of French origin in the text of
the Whistler and break them down into a few
categories according to their semantic features,
changes they underwent, time of borrowing etc.
We will also pay a special attention to
quantitative indicators that let us speak about the
frequency of use of separate elements of
language or particular linguistic phenomena.
Results and Discussion
The first borrowings date back to the time of the
landing of Norman king William the Conqueror
in England in 1066. At the time, the
representatives of his court spoke a sort of French
called today Franco-Norman (or Anglo-
Norman), such kind of French that contained a
number of Nordic words, coming from the
Vikings who had conquered northern France a
century earlier. After this the new meaning of
Norman that originally counted for "man of the
North" appeared: from then on, it was an
"inhabitant of the Duchy of Normandy"
(Bruneau, 1955). Consequently, Franco-Norman
became the official language of England.
Villagers and the poorest section of town
dwellers, however, spoke Anglo-Saxon. Taking
into account the fact that clergy, clerks and
scholars wrote in Latin, the real state of things
looked as follows: three languages were used in
England in this period of time: Franco-Norman,
Anglo-Saxon and Latin (Bragg, 2011).
On the other hand, the language of the King of
France, French was adopted by aristocrats and
high level representatives of the Church of
England (Baugh, 1935). Besides, it was largely
used in cultural and artistic life and the nobility
wanted their children to learn French, either in
France itself or in specialized schools.
In short, as ordinary people continued to use their
Anglo-Saxon, until the 14th century four
languages were used in the country. At the same
time Anglo-Saxon was adopting elements from
Latin, Franco-Norman and French. But it is
necessary to mention that being a variety of
French, Franco-Norman mixed with French, that
is why it makes sense to speak in general about
borrowings from French and not from Latin, as
we will do later.
It was only during the reign of Henry IV (1399-
1413) that the first king of England knew how to
speak English as a mother tongue. The
vocabulary of Middle English, for its part, had
been radically transformed, mainly because of its
borrowings from Franco-Norman and especially
from the French of Paris. According to some
researchers (Stehr, 2007; Rothwell, 2005),
English nobility and clergy, who generally knew
French and English, introduced French words
relating to government, church, army, titles of
English nobility and court life in general as well
as the arts, the education and medicine. A century
after the arrival of William the Conqueror, over
1,000 Norman words had been introduced into
Middle English. Subsequently, it was French
words, of the order of several thousand words
(about 10,000). In reality, English and Franco-
Norman merged to such an extent that they
formed a lexical set characterized by great
flexibility and a great abundance of terms.
However, it is not always easy to distinguish in
today's English elements coming from Franco-
Norman and coming from French (Trotter,
2003) .
Let us go deeper into the examples of French
borrowings in The Whistler. First of all, we tried
to determine the quantity of vocables of French
origin in all in the novel. We have counted all the
cases of their use, even those which indicate the
multiple appearance of the same word. So we got
a pretty impressive number – 5780 examples,
where a word of French origin is used. These are
mostly verbs, nouns and also adjectives. Our next
step was to identify the most frequent terms,
which were used more than 100 times. Let us
consider them in details. It should be noted that
in this article they are placed in the order in which
we have encountered them in the text. These are
30 words, such as first of all access, vehicle,
employee, collection, rear, suit, size, delay, stuff,
impression, authority, doubt, drug, store,
purchase, average, depend, enjoy. We can also
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give examples of very common English vocables
that are of French origin, which frequency is also
very high in the Whistler – more than 50 uses of
the same word in the text – accept, arrive, to
close, involve, serious, sure, prove, view,
apartment, to move, question, describe, concern,
touch, possible, continue, cover, require,
divorce, marriage, reason, cancel, decide, sign,
air, change, conversation, to assess, reply, to
increase etc.
If we try to break down the most commonly
found French loan words that can be found in the
Whistler into semantic groups according the area
of knowledge where they are used, we will notice
three large categories, to which some of them can
refer. These are terms related to finance – cost,
transaction, luxury, to count, an account, wallet,
purse, wallet, purse, salary, expense, amount,
receipt, coin, assets, check, those ones related to
law and politics - crime , plot , suspect , evidence
, judge , prison, arrest, officer, suspicion,
interrogate, charge, jail, confine, indictment,
refuge, damage, conspiracy, complaint, court,
declare and at last the vocabulary concerning
health and medicine – hospital, drug, desease,
infection, aid, pill, treatment, fatigue.
Our next step is to take a closer look at the
correlation between signifier and signified.
According to the data from Online etymology
dictionary (Harper, 2001), we can see a number
of terms that were adopted by English without
any changes in the signified. These are for
example question (the first mention refers to
XIVc.) from Old French question ’question,
problem’, matter (XIIIc.) from Old French
matere ‘subject, theme’, aid (XVc.) from Old
French aide ‘aid, help’, expert (XIVc.) from Old
French expert, espert ‘experienced, skilled’,
opinion (XIVc.) from Old French opinion ‘view,
judgement’, story (XIIIc.) from Old French
estorie ‘story, history’, to push (XIVc.) from Old
French poulser ‘push’, testimony (XVc.) from
Old North French testimonie ‘evidence, proof’,
money (XIIIc.) from Old French manoie ‘money,
coin’, to marry (XIVc.) from Old French marier
‘to get married’, to return (XIV c.) from Old
French retorner ‘turn back, return’, indictment
(XIVc.) from Old French enditement
‘accusation”, margin (XIVc.) from Old French
margin ‘edge, border’, authority (XIIIc.) from
Old French autorite ‘right, permission’, to enjoy
(XIVc.) from Old French en+joir ‘to give joy’,
afraid (XIV c.) from Old French affrai, effrei,
esfrei meaning "disturbance, fright", bargain
(XIV) from Old French bargaine ‘business,
trade’, choice (XIVc.) from Old French chois
‘one’s choice’, mayor (XIII c.) from Old
French maire ‘head of a city or town
government’, cause (XIII c.) from Old
French cause ‘cause, reason; lawsuit, case in
law’, cost (XIII c.) from Old French cost ‘cost,
outlay, expenditure’, transaction (XV c.) from
Old French transaccion ‘exchange, transaction’,
peer (XIVc.) Old French per ‘equal’, city
(XIIIc.) from Old French cite ‘town, city’,
residence (XIc.) from Old French residence
‘residing’, government (XIVc.) from Old
French governement ‘control, direction’ etc.
The others kept their signified with minor
changes, such as the adjective patient (XIVc.)
from Old French pacient ‘bearing, suffering’,
sure (XIIIc.) from Old French seur, sur ‘safe,
secure’, inquiry (XIVc.) from Old French
enquerre ‘ask’, familiar (XIVc.) from Old
French famelier ‘related, friendly’, declare
(XIVc.) from Old French declarer ‘explain,
elucidate’, to grant (XIIIc.) from Old French
granter ‘assure, promise, guarantee’, favor
(XIVc.) from Old French favor ‘approuval’,
modest (XVIc.) from French modeste ‘moderate,
gentle’, disease (XIVc.) from Old French desaise
‘lack, trouble’, to rehearse (XIVc.) from Old
French rehercier ‘to repeat’, jail (XIVc.) from
Old French jaiole ‘a cage’ etc.
And at last, in much smaller number of cases we
have observed significant shifts in meanings:
drug (XIVc.) from Old French droge ‘supply,
stock’, humor (XIVc.) from Old French humour
‘liquid, dampness’, to sign (XIIIc.) from Old
French signier ‘to make a sign to someone’ (in
these two cases we can state the expansion of the
meaning of words, taking into account that the
original meanings of ‘liquid’ and ‘making a sign’
also remain), hospital (XIIIc.) from Old French
hospital, ospital ‘hostel, shelter’, to surprise
(XIVc.) from Old French sorprendere ‘overtake,
invade’, to suit (XIV c.) from Old French
suite, sieute ‘the action to follow someone’, size
(XIV s.) from Old French sise ‘sitting’ (past
participle from asseoir – to sit down), delay (XIV
s.) from Middle French delaie ‘down+leave”,
stuff (XIVc.) from Old French estoffe ‘furniture,
material’, impression (XIVc.) from Middle
French impression ‘mark, stamp’, doubt (XIIIc.)
from Old French doter ‘be afraid of’, store
(XIVc.) from Old French estore ‘fleet, army’,
purchase (XIV s.) from Middle French
porchacier ‘look for, crave for’, average (XV s.)
from French avarie ‘damage to ship’, to depend
(XVc.) from Middle French dependre ‘to hang’,
asset (XVIc.) from Old French assez ‘enough’, a
check (XIVc.) from Old French eschec ‘the game
of chess’, to arrest (XIVc.) from Old French
arester ‘to stop’, to confine (to imprison) (XVIc.)
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from Old French confiner ‘to border’, slot
(XIVc.) from Old French esclot ‘a print of
horse’s hoof’, mess (XIVc.) from Old French mes
‘a dish in a meal’, file (XVIc.) from French file
‘line’, a glance (XVc.) from Old French glacier
‘to escape’, to suppose (XIVc.) from Old French
poser ‘to put’, engine (XIVc.) from Old French
engine ‘skill’ etc.
When it comes to the signifier, we can argue that
in the majority of cases borrowed words kept it
intact, as in such words, as air, issue, favor,
fatigue, face. We can ascertain only slight
modifications in jacket from jacquet, collar from
coler, vehicle from vehicule, employee from
employe, voice from voiz, garden from jardin etc.
If we try to look at those ones which signifier
underwent changes, we will understand that thay
are really few, such as rear (XVIIc.) from Middle
French rieregarde ‘a part of military troops,
moving at the end’, to spoil (XIVc.) from Old
French espillier ‘to cut into pieces’, several
(XVc.) from Old French seperalis ‘distinct’, to
vanish (XIVc.) from old French esvanir
‘disappear’ etc.
We can also highlight the appearance of multiple
synonyms in the text of the novel, based on loan
words from French on the one hand, and those
ones that have purely Germanic origin, such as
aid (French origin)/help (Germanic origin),
testimony, evidence (French origin)/witness
(Germanic origin), fatigue (French
origin)/tiredness (Germanic origin), to cease
(French origin)/to stop (Germanic origin), to
return (French origin)/to come back (Germanic
origin), tax (French origin)/fee (Germanic
origin), chief (French origin)/leader (Germanic
origin), entire (French origin)/whole (Germanic
origin), vessel (French origin)/ship (Germanic
origin), opinion (French origin)/mind (Germanic
origin), battle (French origin)/fight (Germanic
origin), attorney (French origin)/lawyer
(Germanic origin). In a number of cases we can
state the use of two or more synonyms, having
French roots: question/inquiry, problem/issue,
vanish/disappear, trip/journey,
lucrative/profitable, benefit/profit,
occur/appear, counsel/attorney. And at last a few
examples of etymological doublets, i.e. words
having the same French origin, but different
signifiers and signified in Modern English, can
be found in the Whistler: report/rapport,
hotel/hospital, imply/employ, legal/loyal,
story/history etc.
Looking at the data we found in Online
etymology dictionary (Harper, 2001), we can
state that the most part of borrowings dates back
to the period of Middle English, when aristocrats
spoke French, but English with newly emerged
French borrowings was recognized official
language of the court, and all the official
documents were written in it since then .
Conclusions
In conclusion, we note that in general we have
identified more than 100 words of French origin
which have been used in the text more than 50
times, among them – 30% are those which have
undergone semantic shifts, but only 10% are
made by those ones, where changes are really
major, and 20% kept their signified with only
slight changes. As we can see, in the vast
majority of loan words the signified remained the
same, as it was originally in French.
As for the signifier, the most part of vocables
kept it without any changes, and only in 5% of
loan words significant changes can be found.
Owing to the fact that The Whistler is a detective
novel, it has a whole layer of lexicon that is
related to law and politics. Such terms are, in
most cases, of French origin. We have also
identified the existence of two more vocabulary
layers that can be mostly attributed to borrowings
from French, these are finance and health.
Besides, a large amount of common words we
met in The Whistler are also of French origin. The
study of synonyms having Germanic and French
provenance enables us to say that Germanic ones
mainly refer to neutral and colloquial vocabulary,
and French ones – to neutral and scientific one.
If we take a closer look at the synonyms that have
purely French origin, we can state the existence
of specialization of the meaning of words
reflecting the same notions.
All of this gives us reason to suppose that the
frequency of use of old French vocables in
modern American fiction is quite high, and
words of French origin are very common and
even abundant in modern English. With this we
see that the great part of the words in question
passed into English at the time of Old and Middle
French, rarely – at the time of Classical French.
Thus, we see that over time the vocabulary of
French origin has survived in the English
language and has existed in many cases without
semantic changes. On the other hand, changes in
everyday life, technological and scientific
progress have conveyed some semantic shifts,
which can be interesting in the long term. We
also want to highlight the roots of polysemy of
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terms of French origin and highlight the
particularities of etymological doublets. All this
constitutes the perspectives of research in the
field of the lexicon of French origin in modern
English prose.
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