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Transcript
· Does English exist?
0:00 · The English language doesn't exist. It's just badly pronounced French.
0:03 · Those aren't my words. They're supposedly the words of this 20th century French statesman.
0:08 · And they're the name of a book by this French linguistics professor.
0:12 · who thinks the English-speaking world should be grateful to France.
0:15 · [Bernard Cerquiglini in French]: It's thanks to French that English is International.
0:18 · [Rob] Is he right? How French is English, after all? Let's find out in another RobWords.
0:25 · So English is a Germanic language. Some people will try to tell you it isn't, for reasons
· Where English comes from
0:32 · that'll become clear, but it is.
0:34 · Old English was brought to the British Isles by Germanic tribes. It was closely related
0:39 · to the languages that became German and Dutch,
0:42 · and in fact it's not totally ridiculous to claim that a modern day German would have
0:46 · a better chance of understanding Old English than a modern-day Brit.
0:51 · Old English is really nothing like the English that we speak today. It had grammatical gender,
0:57 · you had to put words in a different order, and it had all these complicated variable
1:02 · endings for nouns, adjectives and verbs.
1:05 · But a millennium and a series of historical events have changed our language completely.
1:11 · And perhaps the single biggest event was this.
· England's French kings
1:15 · In 1066, the French arrived - specifically the Normans - and English would never be the
1:21 · same again.
1:23 · As professor Cerquiglini puts it in his book:
1:26 · "Without the Normans, English would today be a second Dutch."
1:31 · Would that be so bad?
1:33 · And the thing is, he's sort of right. When the Norman King William the Conqueror seizes
1:37 · the throne of England, he initiates a period of enormous linguistic change.
1:43 · He kicks out all the English nobles and replaces them with his pals.
1:46 · He sacks all the English bishops - bar one - and puts Normans in their place.
1:52 · And suddenly, anyone with any power in England is speaking French.
1:57 · And that remains the case for a few centuries.
1:59 · You know, one of England's most celebrated kings - particularly by English nationalists
2:05 · - Richard the Lionheart
2:07 · spoke barely a word of English. That's if he spoke any at all.
· French words in English
2:12 · So French was the language of the elite. It became the language of government, chivalry
2:18 · and art - all French words, by the way.
2:21 · As a result, French words from these fields start to stream into the English language.
2:26 · You needed to know them to get anything done. And to this day, many of our words for power,
2:32 · justice and culture are from French.
2:35 · Words like parliament, council, court, judge, prince, battle, painting, music... I could
2:42 · go on.
2:44 · And I will.
2:45 · Tax, bill, jury, prison, baron, duke, culture, theatre, mayor, minister. I could still go
2:52 · on...
2:53 · And I will: words like attorney, rule, economy, faith, war, peace,
2:57 · I think you've got the picture.
3:00 · And what also happens is the names for trades and artisans start to change too. They take
3:05 · on more prestigious French names.
3:09 · The Old English flesh-monger is replaced by the Old French "butcher". The treewright
3:15 · becomes the carpenter. The chapman becomes the merchant.
3:20 · And we end up with barbers, drapers, grocers, masons and tailors. All words from French.
3:27 · And the power dynamic between the lowly English and the Norman nobility is apparent even in
3:32 · our language today.
3:34 · We've ended up with two words for a lot of animals - an Old English-derived one for
3:38 · when they are alive, and a French one for when they're served up for dinner.
3:43 · We have cow and beef, sheep and mutton, deer and venison.
3:50 · Because the English would encounter them on the farm, and the Normans would encounter
3:53 · them on the plate.
3:55 · You've perhaps heard all of that before. I'm by no means the first to point it out.
3:59 · In fact Walter Scott tackled it way back in 1820 in Ivanhoe, his tale of an Anglo-Saxon
4:05 · noble family surrounded by Normans.
4:08 · In it, the jester Wamba says "old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet,
4:14 · while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou,
4:18 · but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives
4:22 · before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him.
4:25 · Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires
4:32 · tendance,
4:33 · and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
4:37 · Many more of our words for a fancy banquet come from French too.
4:41 · A servant may bring you your dinner, or serve you a bottle with supper.
· Lingoda
4:46 · [ad text redacted]
· More French words
6:01 · Okay, back to the many French words in English,
6:04 · And like with the meats, our names for family members show the former prestige of the French
6:10 · language.
6:11 · Our closest family have Anglo-Saxon names - mother, daughter, father and son - these
6:16 · words have been with us since Old English.
6:19 · But niece, nephew, aunt, uncle, cousin: they're all French words. You need to be able to describe
6:26 · non-nuclear family members
6:27 · when it comes to matters of hierarchy and succession,
6:30 · but not necessarily if you're only ever handing the family farm down to the next generation.
6:36 · During this period, which we call the Middle English period, the appetite for taking French
6:40 · words is pretty much insatiable.
6:42 · In fact in some cases, we even took on the same French words twice, but in slightly different
6:48 · forms.
· Different dialects
6:49 · William the Conqueror and his lot brought over a specific dialect of Old French, Norman
6:53 · French.
6:54 · It was spoken in northern France, and was a version of Old French influenced by Germanic
7:00 · pronunciations.
7:01 · The Normans were essentially Vikings who had settled in northern France and learned the
7:04 · lingo.
7:05 · It's what the word Norman means.
7:08 · But a bit less than a century after William first claimed England for himself, the crown
7:12 · passed down to the Plantagenets,
7:15 · a dynasty that spoke a different dialect to William. One that came from central France.
7:21 · So check this out:
7:22 · where Norman French used a "w" sound at the start of a word, the Central French dialect
7:28 · tended to use a '"g".
7:30 · The Normans made a "k" sound where their counterparts to the south made a "ch".
7:34 · And they made a "ch" sound where central French had a "s".
7:40 · Now, during the Middle English period, English took on versions of the same word from both
7:46 · dialects,
7:47 · many of which remain with us today.
7:49 · We took both warden and guardian, warranty and guarantee, wage and gauge, catch and chase.
8:00 · Now, these words meant the same as each other, but when we took them on, we charged each
8:05 · with its own nuance.
8:07 · And that tactic of borrowing a word but giving it a slightly narrower meaning is a tactic
8:12 · that has helped make English the gloriously rich that language it is.
8:16 · Because, instead of French words replacing Anglo-Saxon words, a lot of the time they
8:21 · sat alongside them.
8:23 · For example, we can still "ask" for something, but we can also "demand" it.
8:29 · We can "answer" and we can "respond".
8:33 · We can "wish" and "desire", "begin" and "commence".
8:37 · We have the Anglo-Saxon versions and the French-derived versions.
· After the French kings
8:42 · So English takes on vast amounts of French words during this Middle English period.
8:46 · But it also never really gets out of the habit, even after French stops being the language
8:51 · of the ruling class.
8:53 · A process that begins when the English crown losing Normandy in 1204
8:57 · and ends arguably with the Hundred Years War between England and France,
9:02 · when speaking French in England was no longer de rigeur, but something of a faux pas.
9:09 · Over the centuries since then, we've continued to take on French words, mainly because French
9:13 · has always been a bit prestigious. It's...
9:17 · It's fancy!
9:18 · We've given various Anglo-Saxon nouns florid French adjectives.
9:23 · Things concerning the brain are "mental". Things in our house are "domestic". And
9:27 · our towns are "urban".
9:30 · A lot of that's just the result of a fashion in the 15th century.
9:34 · And as the professor points out, in the 18th century a mania for all things French saw
9:39 · us borrow ballet, connoisseur, coquette, coterie, intrigue and soubrette.
9:44 · I actually had to look up "soubrette". Apparently it's "A maid-servant or lady's
9:50 · maid as a character in a play or opera,
9:53 · usually one of a pert, coquettish, or intriguing character."
9:59 · "Pert"?
10:00 · The upshot of all that is that it's now thought just shy of 30% of the words in modern
10:05 · day English come from French.
10:09 · That's huge.
10:11 · And if you take into account the Latin-derived words in English too, you see that the minority
10:16 · of English words are actually Germanic.
10:19 · On the face of it, that seems like a win for those who say English is more of a Romance
10:23 · language than a Germanic one.
10:26 · But not so fast.
10:27 · Because what's important here is precisely which words come from where.
10:32 · Because yes, there are lots of French words in English, in terms of raw numbers.
10:36 · But the vast majority of the words we actually use day to day are Germanic.
10:41 · Our core vocabulary is overwhelmingly from Old English.
· English words in French
10:47 · On this list of the 100 most frequently used words in English, only one of them is from
10:54 · French.
10:55 · And that's the word "people" - a word that we've recently handed back to the French
10:58 · and they're using it to describe their celebrities.
11:01 · Actually, it's funny how French has started reborrowing words that it gave to English
11:06 · in the first place.
11:07 · It's one of the big themes of Professor Cerquiglini's book.
11:09 · [Cerquiglini in French] Many of the anglicisms that we're borrowing at the moment are actually
11:15 · old French words.
11:16 · We know this for "tennis", which is "tenez" in real tennis, when sending the ball over.
11:23 · [Rob] His point is that French-speakers should actually take heart in the fact that French
11:27 · has permeated the English language so deeply that English is now redistributing it to the
11:32 · rest of the world.
11:33 · [Cerquiglini in French] Organization of the United Nations: three French words.
11:36 · International English is French. Be proud!
11:38 · [Rob] Yeah, also "United States". That's two words from French.
11:43 · States is an interesting one actually. I dedicated a large chunk of a previous video to this
11:47 · next bit
11:48 · but a surprising number of "st" words in English have a Modern French equivalent
11:53 · with É T.
11:55 · In the case of state, it's État.
11:57 · But also "stage" has "etage", "stranger" has "etranger".
12:04 · That's because the Old French versions of these words started with an E S T. English
12:10 · dropped the E, and French dropped the S.
12:13 · So we may have put our own spin on them, but French words really are everywhere in our
12:19 · language
12:20 · and undoubtedly, vocabulary is the most profound way in which French has influenced English.
12:25 · But it's not the only way.
· French grammar
12:27 · The grammar of English has changed significantly since Old English, and a large amount of that
12:33 · change happened as the Normans arrived and Old English became Middle English.
12:38 · Now, it's hard to know how much of this change is attributable to French influence.
12:43 · English, for example, has just come into a great deal of contact with the language of
12:47 · the Vikings, Old Norse, too.
12:49 · But there are at least a couple of changes for which French has to be the prime suspect.
12:55 · One of them is that we developed a second way to indicate that something belongs to
12:59 · someone or somewhere and we still have both now.
13:02 · So nowadays we can say "The king's sword" or "The sword of the king".
13:07 · The first of those reflects the Old English construction, and the second is applying the
13:12 · same formula as French does.
13:14 · It uses a word to suggest possession - in French "de", in English "of" -
13:19 · instead of just adding letters to the end of whatever is doing the possessing like Old
13:25 · English did.
13:26 · In Middle English, it also becomes possible to put an adjective after a noun, although
13:30 · it's not something we do that often these days.
13:33 · But we can say, for example, "move to pastures new" instead of "new pastures".
13:38 · And we can speak of "time immemorial".
13:41 · This is a French construction that we also see in a lot of job titles like Attorney-General,
13:47 · Procurator-Fiscal, Notary Public or when we speak of an heir apparent.
· H dropping
13:52 · And could it even be that the French changed the way we pronounce the words we already
13:56 · had?
13:57 · Almost certainly yes.
13:59 · Because during the Middle English period, H's start to drop like flies to an 'orrible
14:05 · extent.
14:06 · Especially at the start of words. In Old English, Lord and Lady both begin with an H.
14:14 · We also see H-dropping that is more familiar to us now, i.e. Hs being dropped before a
14:20 · vowel.
14:21 · But far from it being something that was seen as a sign of a lack of education back then
14:25 · as it occasionally is now,
14:27 · it was probably seen as the opposite. Because who is terrible at Hs?
14:31 · [Inspector Clouseau:] I would like to buy a 'amburger
14:35 · [Rob] To drop your Hs was to sound more French and therefore more prestigious.
14:40 · This might even explain why H-dropping is - even now - more prevalent in areas that
14:45 · were historically of administrative and commercial significance, like London and the southeast
14:50 · of Englan.
14:51 · because in areas that would have had much less French influence people are less likely
14:57 · to drop their Hs. Think about how some people in Scotland will say "hwat" or "hwear".
15:02 · They're emphasising the Hs if anything.
15:05 · And a remnant of this idea that dropping your Hs like a French-speaker is prestigious is
15:09 · the fact some people still insist on saying "an hotel" or "an historic", effectively
15:16 · treating the H like it isn't there.
· Poetry
15:19 · I think perhaps some people think "an historic" is more poetic
15:23 · which brings me onto another profound change that the French are very likely responsible
15:28 · for.
15:29 · Let me show you something.
15:30 · This is Caedmon's Hymn. Written sometime in the 7th century, it's one of the earliest,
15:35 · if not the earliest attested example of an Old English poem.
15:40 · The key characteristic of this, and indeed all Germanic poetry from the time, is that
15:45 · it contains amazing amounts of alliteration.
15:48 · It repeats the sounds at the start of words over and over.
15:53 · Let's have a listen to this marvellous reading by Kara Shallenberg.
15:56 · Note the alliteration, but also just see if you spot something else too.
16:02 · [Kara Schallenberg] Nū sculon herigean heofonrīces Weard,
16:07 · Meotedes meahte ond his mōdgeþanc,
16:11 · weorc Wuldorfæder, swā he wundra gihwæs,
16:17 · ēce Drihten, ōr onstealde.
16:21 · So hopefully you heard the alliteration in there, but did you also notice something else?
16:26 · It didn't rhyme.
16:27 · Now, I know poetry doesn't have to rhyme, but in Old English it never did, it was all
16:34 · about the alliteration.
16:36 · Poetry in English only starts to rhyme after the French turn up.
16:42 · French poetry was known for its rhymes at the end of lines and that becomes the fashion
16:47 · in England too.
16:49 · Without doubt the best known writer of the Middle English period is Geoffrey Chaucer,
16:53 · and look at this.
16:54 · He ends every line, with a lovely little rhyme.
16:59 · And Chaucer was well versed, so to speak, in French.
17:02 · [Cerquiglini in French] Chaucer, working in customs in London, is working in French.
17:06 · [Rob] Yeah, and in The Canterbury Tales he's using a rhyming technique taken from across
17:11 · the English Channel.
· Conclusion
17:12 · So our poetry, our grammar, our vocabulary and the way we speak. The people of France
17:18 · can indeed claim a part in shaping English into the language it's become.
17:23 · [Cerquiglini in French] It's thanks to French that English is international.
17:28 · [Rob] Well, maybe.
17:29 · Colonialism, Hollywood and the internet might also have played their part though, right?
17:32 · Nevertheless, it seems to me that the sheer number of borrowed words in our language
17:37 · means we 1.5 billion English speakers around the world are at least some of the time
17:44 · just speaking badly pronounced French.
17:47 · If you've enjoyed this video, I think you should watch this one next.
17:52 · And if you can read French, check out the professor's book. It's actually really
17:55 · great.
17:56 · I've got a totally free newsletter about word facts and language fun - in English.
18:00 · You should sign up to that and I'll see you in the next thing.
18:06 · A la prochaine.
18:07 · Cheerio.

French is a Romance language, inherited from the Romans. English most certainly is not. Proto-English was Brittonic, barely influenced by the Roman invasion (only a few nouns survive) then heavily mingled with Old Saxon but less influenced by the Danes. Then came the Normans.

English continued to exist in England after the Battle of Hastings, it just went underground. French became the language of court and the gentrified folk, but the peasants still only spoke the language left in Briton by the Saxons.

This is still reflected in the modern English language and its words for food and the sources of those foods. Cows make beef because "kū"* was the Saxon word the commoners used for the bovine animal. What the lords an ladies ate was "bœuf."

* And "kū" became "cow" after The Great Vowel Shift

Same with cealf (calf)/veal, sceap (sheep)/mutton, and right on down the line with all the other farm animals. The commoners named the animal but the gentlefolk named the product of the animal that came to the dinner table.

I can read Chaucer (with difficulty) in the original Middle English. What I can't read, not even a single complete sentence, is his French contemporaries such as de Machaut or Porete. I find it absurd to suggest there is a connection.

Then came the Black Death. People died so fast that the survivors piled up the dead bodies on random street corners and set them alight. The cities stank, both from rotting flesh and roasting flesh, so the nobles abandoned the cities and fled to their country estates.

The nobles probably never realized but leaving the crowded and rat-infested cities saved their lives because the bubonic flea infestation was much lower in the countryside. But the servants they left behind to maintain their estates didn't fare so well. They died almost to a man. When the plague burned out, the gentlemen came back to the cities but found skilled domestic servants in extremely short supply. So the upper classes sent for their servants from the country.

The problem with that plan was most of the servants on their country estates were farmers and milkmaids, not domestics, and they'd never had need to learn to speak French. So when the Middle English-speaking servants outnumber the French-speaking gentry by 20-to-1, what do you do? In the end it was just easier for the gentry to learn Middle English than to try to teach French to people who'd never been exposed to any formal teaching before. The result was Early Modern English, which still was recognizable as Middle English but with a lot more French "loan words."

There had been tension between the Norman Kings of England and the King of France ever since 1066 because William, King of England, also was Duke of Normandy, the largest of all the French provinces. The King of France wanted the Duke of Normandy to pay tribute (tax) to his king but William, King of England wouldn't even consider it. Tension finally permanently pulled the two apart and in 1205, King John severed all ties with France and ordered all his subjects with allegiances to the French king to leave his country. This was when English began its return to dominance.

In 1362, Edward III opened Parliament in English, and Parliament passed the "Statute of Reading," making English the official language.

Is it French spoken poorly? You'd only think that if you flunked HOTEL.

Transcript
	·	Does English exist?
0:00	·	The English language doesn't exist. It's just badly pronounced French.
0:03	·	Those aren't my words. They're supposedly the words of this 20th century French statesman.
0:08	·	And they're the name of a book by this French linguistics professor.
0:12	·	who thinks the English-speaking world should be grateful to France.
0:15	·	[Bernard Cerquiglini in French]: It's thanks to French that English is International.
0:18	·	[Rob] Is he right? How French is English, after all? Let's find out in another RobWords.
0:25	·	So English is a Germanic language. Some people will try to tell you it isn't, for reasons
	·	Where English comes from
0:32	·	that'll become clear, but it is.
0:34	·	Old English was brought to the British Isles by Germanic tribes. It was closely related
0:39	·	to the languages that became German and Dutch,
0:42	·	and in fact it's not totally ridiculous to claim that a modern day German would have
0:46	·	a better chance of understanding Old English than a modern-day Brit.
0:51	·	Old English is really nothing like the English that we speak today. It had grammatical gender,
0:57	·	you had to put words in a different order, and it had all these complicated variable
1:02	·	endings for nouns, adjectives and verbs.
1:05	·	But a millennium and a series of historical events have changed our language completely.
1:11	·	And perhaps the single biggest event was this.
	·	England's French kings
1:15	·	In 1066, the French arrived - specifically the Normans - and English would never be the
1:21	·	same again.
1:23	·	As professor Cerquiglini puts it in his book:
1:26	·	"Without the Normans, English would today be a second Dutch."
1:31	·	Would that be so bad?
1:33	·	And the thing is, he's sort of right. When the Norman King William the Conqueror seizes
1:37	·	the throne of England, he initiates a period of enormous linguistic change.
1:43	·	He kicks out all the English nobles and replaces them with his pals.
1:46	·	He sacks all the English bishops - bar one - and puts Normans in their place.
1:52	·	And suddenly, anyone with any power in England is speaking French.
1:57	·	And that remains the case for a few centuries.
1:59	·	You know, one of England's most celebrated kings - particularly by English nationalists
2:05	·	- Richard the Lionheart
2:07	·	spoke barely a word of English. That's if he spoke any at all.
	·	French words in English
2:12	·	So French was the language of the elite. It became the language of government, chivalry
2:18	·	and art - all French words, by the way.
2:21	·	As a result, French words from these fields start to stream into the English language.
2:26	·	You needed to know them to get anything done. And to this day, many of our words for power,
2:32	·	justice and culture are from French.
2:35	·	Words like parliament, council, court, judge, prince, battle, painting, music... I could
2:42	·	go on.
2:44	·	And I will.
2:45	·	Tax, bill, jury, prison, baron, duke, culture, theatre, mayor, minister. I could still go
2:52	·	on...
2:53	·	And I will: words like attorney, rule, economy, faith, war, peace,
2:57	·	I think you've got the picture.
3:00	·	And what also happens is the names for trades and artisans start to change too. They take
3:05	·	on more prestigious French names.
3:09	·	The Old English flesh-monger is replaced by the Old French "butcher". The treewright
3:15	·	becomes the carpenter. The chapman becomes the merchant.
3:20	·	And we end up with barbers, drapers, grocers, masons and tailors. All words from French.
3:27	·	And the power dynamic between the lowly English and the Norman nobility is apparent even in
3:32	·	our language today.
3:34	·	We've ended up with two words for a lot of animals - an Old English-derived one for
3:38	·	when they are alive, and a French one for when they're served up for dinner.
3:43	·	We have cow and beef, sheep and mutton, deer and venison.
3:50	·	Because the English would encounter them on the farm, and the Normans would encounter
3:53	·	them on the plate.
3:55	·	You've perhaps heard all of that before. I'm by no means the first to point it out.
3:59	·	In fact Walter Scott tackled it way back in 1820 in Ivanhoe, his tale of an Anglo-Saxon
4:05	·	noble family surrounded by Normans.
4:08	·	In it, the jester Wamba says "old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet,
4:14	·	while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou,
4:18	·	but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives
4:22	·	before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him.
4:25	·	Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires
4:32	·	tendance,
4:33	·	and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
4:37	·	Many more of our words for a fancy banquet come from French too.
4:41	·	A servant may bring you your dinner, or serve you a bottle with supper.
	·	Lingoda
4:46	·	[ad text redacted]
	·	More French words
6:01	·	Okay, back to the many French words in English,
6:04	·	And like with the meats, our names for family members show the former prestige of the French
6:10	·	language.
6:11	·	Our closest family have Anglo-Saxon names - mother, daughter, father and son - these
6:16	·	words have been with us since Old English.
6:19	·	But niece, nephew, aunt, uncle, cousin: they're all French words. You need to be able to describe
6:26	·	non-nuclear family members
6:27	·	when it comes to matters of hierarchy and succession,
6:30	·	but not necessarily if you're only ever handing the family farm down to the next generation.
6:36	·	During this period, which we call the Middle English period, the appetite for taking French
6:40	·	words is pretty much insatiable.
6:42	·	In fact in some cases, we even took on the same French words twice, but in slightly different
6:48	·	forms.
	·	Different dialects
6:49	·	William the Conqueror and his lot brought over a specific dialect of Old French, Norman
6:53	·	French.
6:54	·	It was spoken in northern France, and was a version of Old French influenced by Germanic
7:00	·	pronunciations.
7:01	·	The Normans were essentially Vikings who had settled in northern France and learned the
7:04	·	lingo.
7:05	·	It's what the word Norman means.
7:08	·	But a bit less than a century after William first claimed England for himself, the crown
7:12	·	passed down to the Plantagenets,
7:15	·	a dynasty that spoke a different dialect to William. One that came from central France.
7:21	·	So check this out:
7:22	·	where Norman French used a "w" sound at the start of a word, the Central French dialect
7:28	·	tended to use a '"g".
7:30	·	The Normans made a "k" sound where their counterparts to the south made a "ch".
7:34	·	And they made a "ch" sound where central French had a "s".
7:40	·	Now, during the Middle English period, English took on versions of the same word from both
7:46	·	dialects,
7:47	·	many of which remain with us today.
7:49	·	We took both warden and guardian, warranty and guarantee, wage and gauge, catch and chase.
8:00	·	Now, these words meant the same as each other, but when we took them on, we charged each
8:05	·	with its own nuance.
8:07	·	And that tactic of borrowing a word but giving it a slightly narrower meaning is a tactic
8:12	·	that has helped make English the gloriously rich that language it is.
8:16	·	Because, instead of French words replacing Anglo-Saxon words, a lot of the time they
8:21	·	sat alongside them.
8:23	·	For example, we can still "ask" for something, but we can also "demand" it.
8:29	·	We can "answer" and we can "respond".
8:33	·	We can "wish" and "desire", "begin" and "commence".
8:37	·	We have the Anglo-Saxon versions and the French-derived versions.
	·	After the French kings
8:42	·	So English takes on vast amounts of French words during this Middle English period.
8:46	·	But it also never really gets out of the habit, even after French stops being the language
8:51	·	of the ruling class.
8:53	·	A process that begins when the English crown losing Normandy in 1204
8:57	·	and ends arguably with the Hundred Years War between England and France,
9:02	·	when speaking French in England was no longer de rigeur, but something of a faux pas.
9:09	·	Over the centuries since then, we've continued to take on French words, mainly because French
9:13	·	has always been a bit prestigious. It's...
9:17	·	It's fancy!
9:18	·	We've given various Anglo-Saxon nouns florid French adjectives.
9:23	·	Things concerning the brain are "mental". Things in our house are "domestic". And
9:27	·	our towns are "urban".
9:30	·	A lot of that's just the result of a fashion in the 15th century.
9:34	·	And as the professor points out, in the 18th century a mania for all things French saw
9:39	·	us borrow ballet, connoisseur, coquette, coterie, intrigue and soubrette.
9:44	·	I actually had to look up "soubrette". Apparently it's "A maid-servant or lady's
9:50	·	maid as a character in a play or opera,
9:53	·	usually one of a pert, coquettish, or intriguing character."
9:59	·	"Pert"?
10:00	·	The upshot of all that is that it's now thought just shy of 30% of the words in modern
10:05	·	day English come from French.
10:09	·	That's huge.
10:11	·	And if you take into account the Latin-derived words in English too, you see that the minority
10:16	·	of English words are actually Germanic.
10:19	·	On the face of it, that seems like a win for those who say English is more of a Romance
10:23	·	language than a Germanic one.
10:26	·	But not so fast.
10:27	·	Because what's important here is precisely which words come from where.
10:32	·	Because yes, there are lots of French words in English, in terms of raw numbers.
10:36	·	But the vast majority of the words we actually use day to day are Germanic.
10:41	·	Our core vocabulary is overwhelmingly from Old English.
	·	English words in French
10:47	·	On this list of the 100 most frequently used words in English, only one of them is from
10:54	·	French.
10:55	·	And that's the word "people" - a word that we've recently handed back to the French
10:58	·	and they're using it to describe their celebrities.
11:01	·	Actually, it's funny how French has started reborrowing words that it gave to English
11:06	·	in the first place.
11:07	·	It's one of the big themes of Professor Cerquiglini's book.
11:09	·	[Cerquiglini in French] Many of the anglicisms that we're borrowing at the moment are actually
11:15	·	old French words.
11:16	·	We know this for "tennis", which is "tenez" in real tennis, when sending the ball over.
11:23	·	[Rob] His point is that French-speakers should actually take heart in the fact that French
11:27	·	has permeated the English language so deeply that English is now redistributing it to the
11:32	·	rest of the world.
11:33	·	[Cerquiglini in French] Organization of the United Nations: three French words.
11:36	·	International English is French. Be proud!
11:38	·	[Rob] Yeah, also "United States". That's two words from French.
11:43	·	States is an interesting one actually. I dedicated a large chunk of a previous video to this
11:47	·	next bit
11:48	·	but a surprising number of "st" words in English have a Modern French equivalent
11:53	·	with É T.
11:55	·	In the case of state, it's État.
11:57	·	But also "stage" has "etage", "stranger" has "etranger".
12:04	·	That's because the Old French versions of these words started with an E S T. English
12:10	·	dropped the E, and French dropped the S.
12:13	·	So we may have put our own spin on them, but French words really are everywhere in our
12:19	·	language
12:20	·	and undoubtedly, vocabulary is the most profound way in which French has influenced English.
12:25	·	But it's not the only way.
	·	French grammar
12:27	·	The grammar of English has changed significantly since Old English, and a large amount of that
12:33	·	change happened as the Normans arrived and Old English became Middle English.
12:38	·	Now, it's hard to know how much of this change is attributable to French influence.
12:43	·	English, for example, has just come into a great deal of contact with the language of
12:47	·	the Vikings, Old Norse, too.
12:49	·	But there are at least a couple of changes for which French has to be the prime suspect.
12:55	·	One of them is that we developed a second way to indicate that something belongs to
12:59	·	someone or somewhere and we still have both now.
13:02	·	So nowadays we can say "The king's sword" or "The sword of the king".
13:07	·	The first of those reflects the Old English construction, and the second is applying the
13:12	·	same formula as French does.
13:14	·	It uses a word to suggest possession - in French "de", in English "of" -
13:19	·	instead of just adding letters to the end of whatever is doing the possessing like Old
13:25	·	English did.
13:26	·	In Middle English, it also becomes possible to put an adjective after a noun, although
13:30	·	it's not something we do that often these days.
13:33	·	But we can say, for example, "move to pastures new" instead of "new pastures".
13:38	·	And we can speak of "time immemorial".
13:41	·	This is a French construction that we also see in a lot of job titles like Attorney-General,
13:47	·	Procurator-Fiscal, Notary Public or when we speak of an heir apparent.
	·	H dropping
13:52	·	And could it even be that the French changed the way we pronounce the words we already
13:56	·	had?
13:57	·	Almost certainly yes.
13:59	·	Because during the Middle English period, H's start to drop like flies to an 'orrible
14:05	·	extent.
14:06	·	Especially at the start of words. In Old English, Lord and Lady both begin with an H.
14:14	·	We also see H-dropping that is more familiar to us now, i.e. Hs being dropped before a
14:20	·	vowel.
14:21	·	But far from it being something that was seen as a sign of a lack of education back then
14:25	·	as it occasionally is now,
14:27	·	it was probably seen as the opposite. Because who is terrible at Hs?
14:31	·	[Inspector Clouseau:] I would like to buy a 'amburger
14:35	·	[Rob] To drop your Hs was to sound more French and therefore more prestigious.
14:40	·	This might even explain why H-dropping is - even now - more prevalent in areas that
14:45	·	were historically of administrative and commercial significance, like London and the southeast
14:50	·	of Englan.
14:51	·	because in areas that would have had much less French influence people are less likely
14:57	·	to drop their Hs. Think about how some people in Scotland will say "hwat" or "hwear".
15:02	·	They're emphasising the Hs if anything.
15:05	·	And a remnant of this idea that dropping your Hs like a French-speaker is prestigious is
15:09	·	the fact some people still insist on saying "an hotel" or "an historic", effectively
15:16	·	treating the H like it isn't there.
	·	Poetry
15:19	·	I think perhaps some people think "an historic" is more poetic
15:23	·	which brings me onto another profound change that the French are very likely responsible
15:28	·	for.
15:29	·	Let me show you something.
15:30	·	This is Caedmon's Hymn. Written sometime in the 7th century, it's one of the earliest,
15:35	·	if not the earliest attested example of an Old English poem.
15:40	·	The key characteristic of this, and indeed all Germanic poetry from the time, is that
15:45	·	it contains amazing amounts of alliteration.
15:48	·	It repeats the sounds at the start of words over and over.
15:53	·	Let's have a listen to this marvellous reading by Kara Shallenberg.
15:56	·	Note the alliteration, but also just see if you spot something else too.
16:02	·	[Kara Schallenberg] Nū sculon herigean heofonrīces Weard,
16:07	·	Meotedes meahte ond his mōdgeþanc,
16:11	·	weorc Wuldorfæder, swā he wundra gihwæs,
16:17	·	ēce Drihten, ōr onstealde.
16:21	·	So hopefully you heard the alliteration in there, but did you also notice something else?
16:26	·	It didn't rhyme.
16:27	·	Now, I know poetry doesn't have to rhyme, but in Old English it never did, it was all
16:34	·	about the alliteration.
16:36	·	Poetry in English only starts to rhyme after the French turn up.
16:42	·	French poetry was known for its rhymes at the end of lines and that becomes the fashion
16:47	·	in England too.
16:49	·	Without doubt the best known writer of the Middle English period is Geoffrey Chaucer,
16:53	·	and look at this.
16:54	·	He ends every line, with a lovely little rhyme.
16:59	·	And Chaucer was well versed, so to speak, in French.
17:02	·	[Cerquiglini in French] Chaucer, working in customs in London, is working in French.
17:06	·	[Rob] Yeah, and in The Canterbury Tales he's using a rhyming technique taken from across
17:11	·	the English Channel.
	·	Conclusion
17:12	·	So our poetry, our grammar, our vocabulary and the way we speak. The people of France
17:18	·	can indeed claim a part in shaping English into the language it's become.
17:23	·	[Cerquiglini in French] It's thanks to French that English is international.
17:28	·	[Rob] Well, maybe.
17:29	·	Colonialism, Hollywood and the internet might also have played their part though, right?
17:32	·	Nevertheless, it seems to me that the sheer number of borrowed words in our language
17:37	·	means we 1.5 billion English speakers around the world are at least some of the time
17:44	·	just speaking badly pronounced French.
17:47	·	If you've enjoyed this video, I think you should watch this one next.
17:52	·	And if you can read French, check out the professor's book. It's actually really
17:55	·	great.
17:56	·	I've got a totally free newsletter about word facts and language fun - in English.
18:00	·	You should sign up to that and I'll see you in the next thing.
18:06	·	A la prochaine.
18:07	·	Cheerio.