The English Language is a hybrid, a mongrel, with its origins murky and mysterious, wandering along absorbing words from Latin, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, Old Norse, Greek and Dutch into itself as it developed but still predominantly Germanic in its make up.
However its most notable and significant transformation occurred around a thousand years ago when Old English and French became inextricably intertwined post Norman Conquest. After William’s victory, over 95% of England was in French hands and that French influence forever made its mark on our language. In the following years a two tiered society was formed under William’s rule with the peasants and the nobility further separated linguistically as the former spoke West Germanic/ Old English and the latter speaking a Latin derived Gallo-Roman Old French.
Is this then, the reason most of our baser words have an uncanny resemblance to German? It takes very little imagination to translate the German ‘Arsch‘ into English yet the French word ‘Cul‘? You’d not guess its meaning had you not read the word arsch to give it some context would you? Perhaps then it is the very fact that the Aristocracy spoke French and the commoners speaking German that the Germanic language was deemed vulgar (meaning of the crowd) and these Germanic words have been forever deemed lowbrow.
Today’s English Language owes almost everything to the Germanic Language and although we don’t have very many truly German words in our every day vocabulary you would be surprised at just how many basic words have an easily visible Germanic root. Take the human body for instance, Haar, Hand and Fuss? Hair, hand and foot, it doesn’t take much to see where our terminology came from does it? Again with family members, Mutter, Vater, Bruder and Schwester, not hard to see where Mother, Father, Brother and Sister originated is it.
How about our homes? What do you live in? If you’re lucky (but not too lucky) you will live in a house the same as I do; the peasants of post Conquest England would have called their homes a ‘hus‘ (modern German haus) eerily similar yet again. Yet the nobility of that era, the French aristocrats and the English who hobnobbed with them? Oh they’d have called their huge homes their ‘Maison‘, which has evolved into? Yes, you have it, a Mansion. Even after a thousand years, those social differences still echo through our everyday language.
The names of farm animals? Cow, sheep and pig in Germanic are Cu, Sceap and Picg, because of course, the people involved in the rearing and husbandry of these animals were peasants and that was the language they spoke. Now put those meats on the dinner table where the Aristocracy would become acquainted with them; do the terms for these same animals remain Germanic and common? Of course not, they now become derivatives of the Upper class French language Moton (Sheep) Mutton, Beuf (cow) Beef and Porc (pig) Pork.
In fact throughout the English Language of today those social separations are continually echoed in how we register certain words; that is how we use them and what they convey for instance Bier versus Aperitif, hurt (Frankish German húrt) and pleasure (French Plaisir), it seems that although we continue to speak a Germanic language today, those French Aristocrats have persisted in ensuring that most luxurious and pleasurable things can still trace their etymology back to the French Language.
Apart from Cul-de-sac which (when literally) translated becomes Arse-of-bag, What are they trying to tell us?
These languages as they combined became known as Middle English, of which the most famous example is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Unlike Old English, Middle English can be read, albeit with difficulty, by modern English-speaking people.
By 1362, the linguistic division between the Aristocracy and the commoners was greatly reduced and they were once again speaking a language that was understood by all of England’s inhabitants. Notably it was that year that the Statute of Pleading was adopted, which made English the language of the courts and it began to be used in Parliament making Middle English the official Language of England.
The Middle English period continued on until around 1500 AD with the rise of Modern English which we speak today, well most of us TXT SPK HRTS MI EYZ!
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