Курсовая работа: French Borrowings in the Modern English Language

There is a diagnostic situation, with French the high-prestige, English the low-prestige variety.

Norman French has lost its status, and Parisian French as the preferred norm.

Large numbers of French loans enter English.

State of English 1300

1300-1400

English becomes the dominant language, but French remains dominant in literature and at the court.

Increasing evidence of imperfect knowledge of French

Table 4. Norman French chronology

· 1334-1453 The Hundred Years' War with France.

· 1348-9 The Black Death.30% mortality. Labour shortage, wage rises, increasing importance of the English-speaking classes

· 1386 English accepted in the courts ('Statute of Pleading')

· Two major English poets at the end of the 14th century:

Gower writes mostly in French (but composes one long work Confessio amantis , in English)

· Chaucer writes almost entirely in English.

· Evidence of private letters:

· 1350: French is the rule.

· After 1400: English becomes common.

· After 1450: English is the rule.

· Use of English in schools.

The influence of French on English in the early modern period

Influence on English phrasing

Aside from borrowing and word formation, French considerably influenced English phrasing. The loan translations range from polite turns of speech, such as at your service, do me the favour, to engage somebody in a quarrel, to make ( later: pay ) a visit, to idiomatic phrases like by occasion, in detail, in favour of, in the last resort, in particular, to the contrary.

ME pronounciation

The English language of the middle ages is different from the modern one. Here are two extracts from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to compare:

From the General Prologue Whan that April with his showres soote The droughte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veine in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;

Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, And smale fowles maken melodye That sleepen al the night with open yл - (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages) - Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende, The holy blisful martyr for to seeke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.