French Words Came Into English

Thus French words came into English, all sorts of them There were words to do with government: Parliament, majesty, treaty, alliance, tax, government; church words: Person, sermon, baptism, incense, crucifix, religion; words for foods: veal, beef, mutton, bacon, jelly, peach, lemon, cream,  biscuit; colors: blue, scarlet, vermilion; household words:  curtain, chair, lamp, towel, blanket, parlor, play words:  dance, chess , music, leisure, conversation; literary words  story, romance, poet, literary; learned words : study  logic, grammar, noun, surgeon, anatomy, stomach; just  ordinary words of all sorts: nice , second , very , age ,  bucket , gentle , final , fault , flower , cry , count ,  move , surprise , plain. 

All these and thousands more poured into the English vocabulary between 1100 and 1500 until, at the end of that time, many people must have had more French words than English at their command. This is not to say that English became French. English remained English in sound structure and in grammar, though these also felt the ripples of French influence. The very heart of the vocabulary, too, remained English. Most of the high-frequency words - the pronouns the prepositions, the conjunctions, the auxiliaries, as well as a great many ordinary nouns and verbs and adjectives – were not replaced by borrowings.

Middle English, then, was still a Germanic language but it differed from Old English in many ways. The sound system and the grammar changed a good deal. Speakers made less use of case systems and other inflectional devices and relied more on word order and structure words to express their meanings. This is often said to be a simplification, but It Isn’t really. Languages don’t become simpler; they merely exchange one kind of complexity for another. Modern English is not a simple language, as any foreign speaker who tries to learn it will hasten to tell you.

The period of Early Modern English that is, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - was also the period of the English Renaissance, when people developed, on the one hand, a keen interest in the past and, on the other, a more daring and imaginative view of the future. New ideas multiplied, and new ideas meant new language. Englishmen had grown accustomed to borrowing words from French as a result of the Norman Conquest; now they borrowed from Latin and Greek. As we have seen, English had been raiding Latin from Old English times and before, but now the floodgates really opened, and thousands of words from the classical languages Poured in.

Pedestrian, bonus, anatomy contradict, climax, dictionary, benefit, multiply, exist, paragraph, initiate, scene, inspire are random examples. Probably the average educated American today has more words from French in his vocabulary than from native English sources, and more from Latin than from French. 

The greatest writer of the Early Modern English period is of course Shakespeare, and the best-known book is the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611. The Bible (if not Shakespeare) has made many features of Early Modern English perfectly familiar to many people down to the present time, even though we do not use these features in present-day speech and writing. For instance, the old pronouns thou and thee have dropped out of use now, but  they are still familiar to us in prayer and in Biblical  quotations , such as " Whither thou goest, I will go ."

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