Anglais dans tous ses etats - A2FG002

Linguistics - Chapter 1. How English became English

Lecture 1
Key dates in the history of English
from Prehistory to printing
As a starting point I assume that a lot of you know at least a bit of Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. I’m sure
that you’ve noticed that numbers are very similar to numbers in French.

French Un Deux Trois

Italian Uno Due Tre
Spanish Un Dos Tres
Portuguese Um Dois Três
Romanian Un Doi Trei
Latin Unus Duo tres

Indeed figures are very similar in these languages and this is normal because they all belong to the same
family of languages called Romance Languages.

You can see them represented on this map where they even represented dialects of these languages. You can
see Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Romania and bits of Switzerland, Belgium as well.

But what about English?

English One Two Three

In this figure One, Two, Three, do not look like the ones we’ve seen, but you can still see some connections.

For instance in One, there’s an N.

In Two, remember that two was actually pronounced TUO, the DUO appear to be actually more similar
than one might think.
And Three as opposed to say Tres, the R is present in both cases.
English is not a Romance Language but it still has many connections with Romance Languages.

What are these connections?

The men who understood these connections was Sir William Jones who lived in the 18th century.

He grew up in London and learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and
some Chinese.

He worked in India and learned Sanskrit (the old language spoken in India)

He understood the link between European Languages, Persian and Sanskrit.

In this table you can see examples from 5 different languages.

Indo-European
French German Latin Greek Persian Sanskrit
ελληνικά (Fārsī) (सं स्कृतम्)
C‫فارسی‬
Père Vater Pater Pater Pedar Pitr
Frère Brüder Frater Adelphos Barâdar Bhratar
Un Eins Unus Ena Yek Eka
Deux Zwei Duo Theo Do Dva
Trois Drei Tres Tris Se Tri
Est Ist Est Esti Hast Asti
moi Mich/mir Me Eme Man Mam
Souris Maus Mus Mys Mus mus

 Persian is also called Farsi, it’s the language spoken in Iran and even jf the alphabet used is the Arabic, it
has nothing to do whith Arabic as a language.

As you can see, the words are all very similar even over a very vast stretch of land.

Adelphos is in grey because as you can see this one is not connected with the others.

As you can see family members often have very clear similarities in those languages.

As you can see souris is completely different but the others are very similar.

How come they’re all so similar?

Because they belong to the same big family of Languages which is known as Indo-European Language.
This map represents Language Families in the world.

Indo-European languages are in light green. As you can see they’re just one language family among many
others but it’s a language family which is spread quite a lot around the earth but obviously this is just a
recent phenomenon. Originally the area of settlement of Indo-europeans was much more limited.
Researchers think that the Indo-European people comes from the Caucasus Mountains and then spread to
many areas around Eurpe and Asia. Parts of Russia and also Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the northern part of
India and also Bangladesh.

Here is a representation of Indo-European languages with the form of a tree.

On the left-hand side you have Indo-Iranian languages, from the bottom you can see Persian, with all the
languages such as Kurdish, Punjabi, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, many Indian Languages and others of
the same area.

In the European branch we have Romance Languages. We also have the Slavic branch with Russian, polish.
The Germanic branch which is very important for us because as you can see English is a Germanic
language. Other interesting branch is the Celtic branch, as you can see it’s very small in this representation,
they have chosen to represent branches in terms of the number of speakers which is why English is huge
whereas those Celtic languages are represented in very small.

The Celtic influence

This map show the areas where Celtic people settled, the darker areas indicate places where the Celtic
culture is very noticeable. And in the even darker areas we can find where celtic languages are still spoken.

What impact did the presence of Celtic languages have on English?

There is an interesting hypothesis which relates the presence of two different forms of the present tense

 I play / I’m Playing

The simple form and the BE + Ing form

The hypothesis relates this distinction to the influence of Celtic languages, it’s impossible to verify because
at the time there was no writing, but the fact that English is the only Germanic language with two different
forms and also the fact that Celtic languages to form the present tense you need BE + verbal noun. While
these two elements tend to be interpreted as a sign that this distinction is due to Celtic influence but it’s
impossible to verify.

There are also many places with Celtic elements such as Kent, London, The Thames and many more.

The Latin influence

 As you can see the Roman empire covered a very vast area, all
around the Mediterranean Sea and it also includes England,
not Scotland or Ireland, just England, they built a wall in the
north of England to protect themselves from invaders from
Scotland.

The romans first entered Britain in 55 BC under Julius Caesar and left around 400 AD because they were
busy fighting against the Germanic tribes that were invading the Empire, so they built walls and streets and
many other things together.

In terms of impact that Latin had on English at that moment there were place names qith the suffix -castrum
meaning a fortified place. (chester-Manchester cester-Liecester). Latin remains a major source of vocabulary
throughout the history of English.

Anglo Saxon influence

The Angles and the Saxons come from Denmark and the North of Germany. We can also see people called
the Jutes who also invaded England. When they invided England they pushed Celtic speaking people
gradually further west.

We can notice traces of these invaders through names such as East Anglia, a country in the East where angle
settled and there are also counties called Essex and Sussex.

The sex part of it means Saxons, so Essex means East Saxon, and Sussex means South Saxons.
It’s interesting to look at place names, here is an example of names ending in Ton, which means town, a
dwelling place. There are many -ton names in England but very few in Wales, this is a sign of how the
settlement occurred.

Here are other examples of elements we find in place names that are of anglo-saxon origin.

 -ton means farm

--e.g Middleton

 -ham means village

--e.g Birmingham

 -ford means river crossing

--e.g Oxford

 -ing means people

--e.g Reading

It's very interesting to see what Germanic languages have in common and how they differ from other Indo-
European languages.

A famous example would be the story of Hansel & Gretel, this story was written by the Grimm brothers who
were both German, one of the Grimm brother, Jacob Grimm was also responsible for what is known as
Grimm’s law, he understood how sound changed separating German language from other indo-european
languages, that’s very interesting because it can help us understand correspondences of sound between for
instance French or Latin and English.

Here are examples were the sound changes (apprendre)

What is the impact old English had and anglo-saxon had on English?

About ¾ of anglo-saxon words have now disappeared because they've been replaced by other words bust but
the most frequent words of English are of anglo-saxon origin so they include things like man, wife, child,
son, daughter, friend, etc.
 What is also very noticeable is that most grammatical
words have anglo-saxon origin such as to, for, but,
and, at, etc.

This means that in everyday conversation, almost ½

of words used are anglo-saxon origin, it really is the
basis of the English language.

The Scandinavian influence

In the middle of the Middle Ages, the Vikings, who

came from Burgundy, Denmark, Norway and Sweden,
they raided particularly among the coasts of Europe,
and they also managed to invade more inland using
rivers because they were using boats most of the time.
They invaded all of the British Isles. They also went
to Greenland and Canada, so interestingly Vikings are
actually the first Europeans who went to America, not
Christopher Columbus.

If we look at place names, we can see the areas where Scandinavians settled. Around 800 the Vikings or
Norsemen started to make sporadic raids on the east coast of Britain. They pillaged the towns and
monasteries f northern England, before turning their attentions further south. The Vikings had their own
kingdom for about a century called the Danelaw and here are the borders or the Danelaw.

The influence of the Scandinavian is very deep on the English language. There are many place names from
Scandinavian origin, in England in particularly, if you had to remember just one it would be with the word
BY (Bi) meaning settlement, dwelling place. There very frequent in the northeast of England.

Another very important cultural element thtat comed from Scandinavia is the way that surnames are created.
 On this map, the percentage of people
whose name has this pattern is much
higher in places of Scandinavian
settlement.

What impact did they have on English?

About 1,000 words of Scandinavian origin

were permanently added to English
vocabulary. They include many
fundamental words such as: sister,
husband, fellow, root, knife, etc and what
is even more striking is that the
Scandinavian language left very important
grammatical words to English such as:
they, them, their, with, until, both.

How do we know that these words come fron Scandinavian?

We had texts at the time but there are also interesting pphonetic differences that enable us to recognize that
these words are from Scandinavian.
Scandinavian language and Anglo-saxon are very closely related because they all come from areas including
Denmark. They were very similar at the moment but they had changed somewhat since the departure of the
angles and the Saxons.

For instance, the /g/ sound had disappeared in Anglo-Saxon language while it remained in Scandinavian,
this is why we now have
 /j/ : daeg (=> day), gese (=> yes)
 /w/ : agan (= own = possess)

--- Bag, egg, leg, hug, ugly, guess, get, give = Scandinavian

The same applies to the sound /sk/ which had become /ʃ/ in Anglo-Saxon

Instead of => Fisc (=>fish); Scip (=> ship)

But this sound change did not occur in Scandinavian, now when we see words in /sk/ such as skull, skin,
sky, skirt, scream or squeak we know that they come from Scandinavian.

Let’s look at 2 examples

First example 

Imagine an encounter between an Anglo-Saxon and a Viking, and the Anglo-Saxon asks “what do you call
this” pointing upwards while the Viking probably answered sky, which originally meant cloud. This
suggests that indeed, the weather in England was already pretty cloudy at the time, and not very sunny.
Sky includes the /sk/ so it’s a Scandinavian word. Gradually Anglo-Saxons adopted Scandinavian words
but they originally had their own word to say “sky” but this word became restricted in its meaning which is
now the word “heaven”. Heaven used to be the regular sky but now it’s only restricted to religious
meaning.

Second example 
The words shirt and skirt are originally the same words, it’s only the pronunciation that differs. Shirt is of
Anglo-Saxon origin while skirt comes from Scandinavian. As these two words are closely related one may
imagine that at some point their meaning was not that different, they probably meant a piece of cloth worn
as a garment. But then as there were two different pronunciations each of them became more specific words
meaning two different things.

The French influence

The key date that must be memorized is 1066 which is the

date of the Norman Conquest. It is represented on this
famous tapestry on which you can read “Wilgelm Normanno
Ducem” which means “William the duke of Normandy” the
man who invaded England.

Impact of French on English

As William arrived, he implemented his own administration and government of England, the Normans (men
of the north) were also Scandinavian. They settled in Normandy two hundred years before that they had
adopted French on the French soil. They spoke French with their own accent which was different from paris
French.

One of the main differences is that they did not use sounds like /ʃ/ & /ʒ/,

Their dialect exhibits an absence of palatalization and that explains some of the differences that we see
today between contemporary French and English

Here are correspondences between words in English and words in French though the words in English do
not exhibit palatalization which means that the sounds that they include are /k/ and /g/ on the other hand
words in French include palatalized sounds /ch/ and /j/
On the second line we have catch and chaser, that's quite interesting because these two words no longer
mean the same thing even if they were originally the same word, because catch means attraper but you can
see the connection between the two because when you hunt, you catch things.

On the seventh line we have carry and charrier, once again the two words do not mean exactly the same
thing today because charrier means to drag but when you drag/carry something you're moving an object

how can we explain that?

In Normandy they spoke a dialect or variety of French in which palatalization had not occurred and this was
not only true in Normandy, but it was also true in Picardy. Even if these dialects have now more or less
disappeared, we can still have traces.

Some examples are

The film “Bienvenue chez les ch’tis” which evokes the dialect used in the north of France for instance they
give the example “On dit pas un chien, on di un kien” which reflects this non-palatilasation and we can even
now buy t-shirts reflecting the ch’ti dialect, on the Internet there is this showed lexicon which exhibits Ko
for chaud together with Kien for Chien and finally a reference to a very old song that says “On dit que j’ai
de belles gambettes” this reflects the dialect, the /g/ sound used in the northern dialect instead of /j/ because
obviously that means jambes.

Many words in English come from French , 7,500 words but contrary to Scandinavian there are very few
grammatical words coming from French apart from a few complex prepositions like “in front of”.

On the other hand, we have from French many abstract nouns such as nouns ending in -age ment, -ity, -
tion…

Many of these words are restricted to some semantic fields that reflect the social hierarchy of the moment
because these words usually evoke

Nobility: e.g. crown, castle, count, duke

high living: e.g money, jewel, banquet, spice, roast
Authority: e.g parliament, government, obedience
the court and law: e.g judge, accuse, arrest, prison, jail
war: e.g army, soldier, courage, peace, enemy, destroy
and art and literature: e.g art, colour, language poet, chapter

English during the Norman occupation

English had no official status, it lost all of its prestige and it had become the third language in its own
country after French and Latin, it was mostly spoken and not much written at the moment and so much so
that the number of regional dialects was very very high. It was so high that the people in one part of England
could not even understand people from another part just fifty miles away

Here is an illustration of this problem

 The difference between the north and the south.
The eggs pronunciation is that of the north
because you have the /g/ sound which comes
from Scandinavian. Mostly in the north of
England even if it is now the normal word for
egg, there was a great deal of diversity in terms
of the vocabulary.

Here is a very extreme example of spelling variation which was common at the time in many countries, this
word has over 60 different spellings, the word “night” so there were over 60 different spellings for one not
one word in extreme cases but this soon stopped with the advance of printing.

Printing (1500)

At the end of the Middle Ages printing arrived in Britain and that changed things a great deal because they
had to use one specific spelling, one specific variety of English when the books were printed this was the
variety that spread in the whole of the country, this very important event was followed by other events such
as the publication of very famous dictionaries together with the publication of the Bible and grammars of
English, all of these publications contributed to the standardization of English which mostly started in the
18th century.

Lecture 2
The evolution of English
with a focus on vocabulary

In the first course we saw that English is the result of several types of influences from the celts, roman
occupation, the anglo-saxon settlements, then the Vikings, and then the Normans. English is usually split
into four different time periods.
Overview of the various periods

We’ll see the overview of the various periods of English with an exercise:

Here you have six excerpts from texts, and you need to rank them in the right chronological order, try to
read these passages and rank them in chronological order.

The clues that you can use are clues concerning intelligibility, spelling, grammar and vocabulary

The first type of clues that you can use has to do with spelling as you can see there are two excerpts which
include letters that no longer exist. We can guess that they're both very old but there's a difference between
these two excerpts.

For the first one the oldest one is number four, it’s from Old English. Now the second one
which also includes those letters which have disappeared is not from Old English, number five is written in
Middle English, it includes letters that no longer exist but it also includes words which are specific and did
not exist in Old English.
These words in blue come from French you can for instance recognize prison, castle and the last one is
justice. These terms coming from French show that this is no longer Old English and this period is called
middle English this is early Middle English.

The next one is number one which is more or less understandable but there are some words that we don't use
at all today such as bifel, desport, eek and inwith, the other difference that we find in this excerpt is the
spelling, many words are recognizable but the spelling which is used looks quite alien to us such as in
feeldes, hym, pleye, or wyf.
This passage also includes grammatical differences “upon a day bifel that he for his desport is went into the
feeldes hym to pleye” we would no longer say “is went” we would say “have gone” you notice that the
auxiliary “Be” would now be replaced with the auxiliary “have” and that the past participle was “went” but
today it would be “gone”.

In the second sentence “His wyf and eek his doghter hath he left inwith his house” we would have a
different word order today we would say “he has left his wife and also his daughter inside his house”, we
also noticed that there are differences in terms of grammatical morphemes you can see the suffixes in “hath”
and in “weren” that would no longer be used and we also have a prefix in the word “Yshette”. “Of which the
dores weren faste yshette” fast shut, the doors well shut.
The prefix “y” is actually related to the prefix “ge” it was spelled /ger/ that we had in Old English and you
can see it in passage number four. It's present in the words “geandwyrd” and word “genemnode” which
meant “answered” and “named”, they are past participles. This prefix “y” was gradually weakened “yshette”
and now it has completely disappeared.

You may know that it actually still exists in German

This text dates from the Middle English period it was written by a famous writer called Chaucer

The next passage in the chronological order is number six, it was written by
Shakespeare “Meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight, there will we rehearse,
for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogged with company and our device is known. I pray you fail me
not”
We notice that it's easily understandable but that there are some words that we would not use in the same
way such as “without” which means “outside”, “dogged” would be replaced with “bothered” today and “I
pray you” is no longer used, we would say “please”.

We also notice grammatical differences in this excerpt, there's an inversion there will we rehearse which is
very old-fashioned today we would say we will rehearse there and at the end of the passage you have failed
me not which is no longer possible in contemporary English we would say do not fail me indeed in
Shakespeare's time it was possible to use to create negative sentences without the use of the auxiliary do but
this is no longer possible do not fail me so this passage is in what is called early modern English
The two excerpts left are very understandable but one is older than the other one we can see that because
passage two includes terms that are old-fashioned “However I was to tender a mother still notwithstanding
what I had done the let this poor girl go about the world drudging for bread and in the midst of all my
prosperity this gave me great uneasiness” this sounds very old-fashioned in particular “notwithstanding”
which means “in spite off”, “drudging” and “midst” talk quite old-fashioned this corresponds to the late
modern English period, it's the 18th century.

The most recent one is number three “At the house in the upper reaches of the city he loses me and I move
from room to room and become momentarily disoriented when I see Trent Burroughs” this dates back to the
year 2000 and its contemporary English.

Spelling and syntax

A few words about spelling English uses the Latin alphabet but there are some letters which have been
added because they represent sounds that are absent from Latin such as :

Which are absent from Latin, and some of these letters like this one come from the runic alphabet which
was brought by the Scandinavians, this letter is known as “thorn”

Concerning the grammar the key idea is that English moved from a synthetic to an analytic language. It
means that Old English was a case language, you used suffixes to indicate the grammatical function of the
word, the subject, or direct object, a suffix was added to a word to indicate its grammatical function and
there are traces of that today such as the two forms:
Who (subject) => whom (object)
He (subject) => him (object)
‘s = genitive (= possession)

Old English was a case language it was a generalized method of indicating grammatical function but in
Middle English the cases started to disappear, cases are suffixes that are unstressed syllables, they were
phonetically reduced, and they ended up disappearing which means that today you cannot rely on those
suffixes to know whether a word is the subject or the object.

Word order has a much more important role to play indeed if you want to say “John hit bill” it means
something very different from “Bill hit John” which means that it's only the word order that indicates where
the subject is and where is the object.

Something else happened which we saw in the Shakespeare excerpt from the
previous exercise and it's the appearance of auxiliary “do” in early modern English

Here is a graph that illustrates the increase in the use of “do” for questions and negative sentences from 1400
to 1700.

In the early periods of English, people said “go you not”, “go you”, or “you go not” for questions and
negative sentences and gradually this was replaced by “do you not go”, “don't you go”, “do you go” and
“you do not go”.

The “fail me not” corresponds to this green line and Shakespeare wrote around 1600 so it
course it would be there.

“fail me not” would be said “do not fail me”. There's an interesting trace of this way of asking questions or
making negations in the name of the flower “forget-me-not”s which is called “myositis” in French, we have
kept the name “forget-me-nots” whereas in everyday English in contemporary English we would say “don't
forget me”.

Vocabulary

• French Borrowings. A glimpse at medieval French

What is very interesting to notice is that looking at English today helps us to understand what French looked
like in the Middle Ages, for instance today in English we find words that are now archaic in French such as:

- “beverage” which comes from Breuvage (boisson)

- “coward” meaning (l’âshe, pas courageux), which is related to the word couard
That we no longer use. This is very typical of our Middle Ages. The word has disappeared from French but
“coward” its cognate lives on in English.

-“proud” actually comes from the word preux we know the phrase c’est un preux chevalier and we notice
that preux which refers to courage has become “proud” which actually refers to “pride”, there's been a slight
semantic change between the two.

Looking at English today also helps us understand what French looked like in terms of archaic forms, not
just the words but also the forms, for instance in English we quite often have an “S” which is disappeared
from French and has been usually replaced by a circumflex accent and in other cases we find an “L” in
English which has disappeared from French.

Examples:
Moist, îsle, Castle, master, bastard Castle, false, falcon, veal
Moite, île, château, maître, bâtard Château, faux, faucon, veau

Cognate words (words that are related)

Regarding correspondences between French and English you can imagine people asking
what this animal is

Une Loutre in French but then the english-speaking person did not really
understand correctly where the determiner was and where the noun was and it
wasunderstood as being “L’outre” which is now why in English the word for
Loutre
is “Otter”.

We observe a similar phenomenon to explain the link between the two things that you have here
The first one in French is un napperon and the second one is un sablier

Watch the connection between the two - you can imagine the connection by thinking
of aprons that have lace on them

what about the words?

Imagine an english-speaking person asking a french-speaking person “what you call this?” and the French
person said un napperon but it was misunderstood as being “un apperon”

The “N” was understood as being a linking “N” coming from the determinant which is why now “Un
tablier” is “an apron”.

It comes from the French word napperon but it has become more or less unrecognizable today because
there's been a change in the way the words are separated.

• Processes of meaning change

We're going to look at five different processes that can explain how meaning
changes

BROADENING

This is a special type of mushroom called Mousseron

in French but then the word Mousseron was adapted into English under the form
“Mushroom” and now it refers to all types of mushrooms no matter what they look
like.

This phenomenon is known as broadening which means that a word originally referred only to one type of
“mushroom” and now it means all types of mushroom, so the word is broadened if you compare it with the
French equivalent.

NARROWING

The opposite phenomenon is known as narrowing this is the case of the evolution of the word “hound” in
German the word “Hunt” still exists and it means “dog”
but in English the word “hound” which originally meant
“dog” was narrowed and gradually used only to mean
“hunting dog” so these are all “dogs” but these are not all
hounds only one of them is a hound.

EUPHEMISM
The word “Duff” were “Daft” now means stupid but
it originally meant “humble”

how can we explain the evolution from humble to

stupid?

It's because people started to say “he's humble”

when they actually meant “he’s stupid”, this was a
euphemism.

what's a euphemism?

A euphemism is a mild or indirect way of saying something which is considered to be too harsh.

So as it was considered too harsh to say “he is stupid” people said “he is humble” but gradually people said
that so often that it became very clear to everyone that actually “humble”/“daft” meant “stupid” and not
“humble”, it's by dint of using this euphemism very often that it has changed its meaning.

METAPHOR

The use of the name of one thing instead of another which it resembles

This is a metaphor which is illustrated on this picture.

The metaphor, “the legs on the table” is considered a dead metaphor because
when people set their legs on the table they never really think about actual
legs.

It's now the normal word for referring to this

Other examples of metaphor that you may think of include things like elle est à la tête de son entreprise it's
a metaphor tête actually is a metaphorical use here.

Other example such as “you are the sunshine of my life” people are not “rayon de Soleil” so it's a
metaphorical use.

By dint of using metaphors very often,

words sometimes end up changing
meaning.

Another phenomenon illustrated by this

very striking example it's the example of
the word “bead”, originally a “bead” was
a “prayer” and now a “bead” is a kind of
“pearl”

How can we explain the evolution from one to the other?

It's related to the religious practice of counting beads while praying, people counted prayers and uttered the
prayers gradually.

This means that the word “bead” changed from “prayer” to “pearl” and this is a metonymy which is the fact
that people use the name of one thing instead of another which it is closely associated.

With famous cases of metonymy include in French Boire un verre, you don't actually drink the glass, you
drink what's inside the glass so it's a metonymy.

Another famous example is faire de la voile, when you sail, you don't use the sail, you use a boat, so it's not
really the voile but bateau.

ANALOGY

Another very striking phenomenon can be illustrated with

this “God be with ye”, when people departed they usually
uttered a prayer such as “god be with you” in order to
wish good luck to the people before they left. This
expression “god be with you” was repeated very often
when people left a room or departed and it was repeated
so often that it started to be pronounced more rapidly and
so some phonemes started to disappear so instead of
“God be with you”, people started saying “God be wi ye”
and then “Godbwye” and by analogy with other greetings
such as
“good morning”, “good day”, “good evening” and “good
night” people ended up saying goodbye.

The process of analogy is a process by which irregular forms are regularized to fit recurrent
patterns

So in people's brains there was this pattern “good morning” “good day” “good evening” for greetings and
people ended up saying “goodbye” as well but actually the difference is that there is no such thing as a “bye”

Morning, day, evening, night are nouns but “bye” does not exist it's not a word

In “goodbye”, “good” wasn’t “good” originally it was “God”.

The prayer got pronounced so fast so often that it's pronunciation got reduced and then by analogy with
other greetings people started to say “goodbye”

A very striking example:

When we think of traveling we think of Pleasant moments, like going to interesting places, meeting new
people maybe go to the beach, Very pleasant moments

How can it be related to an instrument of torture which was called “Trepalium” in Latin?

It was called “trepalium” because it was made up of three poles

What's the connection? How can we account for this very extreme semantic change?
The missing link between the two is travail the French word. The notion of “work” was associated to the
notion of pain and suffering and it's still present in the expression être en travail in French for women giving
birth, a notion of pain and suffering but then the notion of pain and suffering was gradually removed from
the notion of “work” but you still have the notion of “difficulty” which explains the link between travail and
“travel”. This is not obvious to us because now we have cars and planes but imagine in the Middle Ages to
travel filled with obstacles and difficulties, it was tiring, that's how you can explain the link between travail
and travel.

• Consequences of borrowings on contemporary vocabulary

As you've understood there are many words in English that come from French and you've also understood
that several processes mean that meaning can often change, this entails that now we can have two words that
sounds quite similar but do not mean the same these are called False Friends.

You are familiar with them because it's very important as students who study English to be very wary of
these words.

Exercise:
Fill in the blanks, try to find the equivalent in French or in English and so, do not be misled by these false
friends

The second consequence of those many words from French is that you can have what is known as doublets
which means that you have quasi synonyms one from anglo-saxon and one from French and so you have
more words in English than in French for this reason.

Quite often these words are not synonyms and the word of French origin can have a restricted meaning or it
can be of a more formal register quite often

There's a special sub case of doublets that is quite interesting to look at

On the one hand you have animals

You have doublets here cow versus beef, pig versus pork etc…

Now how can we explain this difference between the animal on the one hand and the meat on the other
hand?

As you've noticed words on the left-hand side are from anglo-saxon, whereas words from the right hand side
come from French because they resemble the French words beuf, porc, mouton, veau, and the final one is
venaison (it's a word that is limited to hunting and that we don't use very often)

What is very interesting is that

on the one hand you have anglo-
saxons who were peasants, they
lived in more rural areas and
they had to take care of the
animals when they were alive
and on the other hand you had
the French aristocracy
remember when we talked about
how William the Duke of Normandy implemented an aristocracy, a government and the administration in
England.

The french-speaking people were high in the hierarchy, in the social hierarchy of England while the english-
speaking people were much lower in the social hierarchy, they were the ones in the fields taking care of the
animals while the french-speaking people were those who were in castles eating at banquets and feasting,
which is why the words related to meat - food in this particular case come from French while the words
referring to the animals come from anglo-saxon.

Here is an example of triplet, not just a doublet but a triplet, we have three different words to translate what
would be called peau in French and this is due to the fact that we have words from different origin.

The one you're familiar with is the one in the middle, this is skin as you recognize (SK), this one is from
Scandinavian.
We have Hide, is more specific than skin it refers to the thick tough skin of a large animal as in this case an
elephant and the word hide is from anglo-saxon, it was replaced by skin but not completely replaced, it
became more specific and very limited in its meaning .

On the right hand side we have what is known as pelt which is an animal skin with the fur still on it and Pelt
comes from French peau ,petite peau.

Because there are words of different origin in English it means that you have more words than in French and
it also means that these words can have a specific meaning.

You have differences in meaning that we don't really have in French which is why it's very interesting and
why it's also very important to constitute a lexicon and really have your own word book, so learn new words
and make it a big effort when it comes to learning new terms in English because there are so many of them
due to these borrowings.

Lecture 3
English Today
American English
In this recap we should add this line at the beginning of the 17th century US settlements occurred.

American English is different from British English in several aspects, first as is usual in such cases there is
some colonial lag which means that there are some changes which occurred in British English, and which
did not occur in American English, to some extent American English is more similar to English as it was
before the 17th century, this is true notably of the fact that the “r” is still pronounced in every position in
American English.

For instance, you say “a car” in American English whereas we say “a car” in British English but that's a
change that affected British English later and did not affect American English.

Conversely American English also includes many innovations so words that have been invented in the U.S.
and not in the UK and they include many compound nouns such as “raincoat” “skyscraper” “worthwhile”
and “moneywise”

American English is also different from British English because of the various influences of the immigration
and also people who were originally there before Americans arrived. There are words from Native American
languages, not many words, the mostly place names and some animals like a “moose” and a “raccoon”
You also have influence from immigration, so with the Irish immigration “buddy” meaning friend, quite a
lot of slang used in the U.S. comes from African American vernacular English like “cool” “hip” meaning
cool “chill Out” meaning to relax. Quite a lot of words come from Italian and in particular Spanish,
remember that many people speak Spanish in Mexico and in the south of the U.S. We also have words from
German, there's a substantial amount of people of Germanic origin in the U.S. like “fresh” meaning cheeky
meaning excellent and also quite a lot of Jewish immigration meaning that now we have words like a bagel
and shmock which is an insult for somebody who's despicable.

Because of these various influences, American English is now different from British English in a
lot of aspects: This chart for example

American English British English

Sidewalk Pavement
Faucet Tap
Drapes Curtains
Elevator Lift
French Fries Chips
Vacation Holiday
Apartment Flat
Candy Sweets
Pants Trousers
Subway Underground

Empire imports

As Britain was part of a very vast empire and its height in the 19th century, the British Empire was covered
all continents, because of that and also because of trade there are many borrowings from foreign languages
in English

Here is an example that shows this particular fact.

You can see some of the examples already attributed to their country of origin for instance the word
“marmalade” comes from Portuguese and means “quince” a fruit

The word “tulip” comes from Turkish

The word “shampoo” comes from an Indian language

The word “tattoo” comes from Polynesian languages from the Polynesian islands and New Zealand, you’re
probably familiar with the fact that tattoos play a very important cultural role in these areas.

“Piano” comes from Italian in Italian it means softly, slowly

Tea comes from China together with the actual object tea, that's quite frequent, a word comes along with the
object that it refers to

The words “Algebra” and “Alcohol” you can notice a pattern here, these two words start with al which is the
trace of the determiner in Arabic

The word “Chocolate” comes from Mexico

The word “Tsunami” comes from Japanese

The word “jazz” interestingly is a word that comes from West Africa, the musical style jazz comes from the
U.S. and as you know it started with African Americans and this is an element that they had taken with them
from Africa.

Models of English: Varieties of English and how they can be represented on the form of the
model

So let's start this first model of world Englishes this one is very interesting because it shows all the various
areas geographically where English is spoken and there's a historical dimension to it
as well because it really is like a genealogical tree.

You can tell from this tree for instance that in Puerto Rico the English that is spoken is closer to American
English than to British English whereas in the Caribbean it is closer to British English than to American
English, it's a very interesting model of English's that has a geographical and historical dimension.

Another very famous representation of English around the world is Braj Kachru’s three circles of English

So what we've got here is that we have an inner circle which includes countries where English is the native
language of the population so the UK, the U.S. and Australia

Then we have the outer circle where English is not necessarily the native language but where it plays a very
essential part even within the country at a national level this is for instance the case of India, Nigeria and the
Philippines
And then we have the expanding circle which is a composer of countries where English is spoken as a
foreign language so that includes Germany, Japan, China, Russia, etc…

Braj Kachru’s was interested in this idea because he was from India and what he wanted to show was that in
India are many people who speak English, as well as English people or American people, even if they have
another mother tongue language.

He wanted to get rid of the notion of native speaker and he introduced the notion of functional nativeness
which means that many Indian people are not necessarily native speakers of English, they're multilingual
they speak other languages but they can function as well as a native speaker of English.

Therefore he wanted to introduce this notion and create this distinction between the inner circle and the
outer circle without always referring to native speakers as if they were the only ones who knew English

Based on this question here you have five excerpts that identify the varieties of English and plus an intruder.

As you can see some words or constructions are in bold which is meant to help

As you can see the English is pretty similar to American or British English except for some vocabulary
which is different

Let's finish with a third model of English which is also quite interesting
This is a 1990s model and as you can see here what happens is that we have the common core in the middle
and then varieties are represented on the sides.

British English or American English are put on the same footing as foreign language speakers and other
varieties

This is the idea that English no longer belongs to native speakers

British English American English is put at the same level as the English spoken by foreign language learners
so English does not really belong to native speakers any longer.

International English

English is spoken by many people as a first language in dark green areas mostly not only but mostly and also
in other countries where it is either an official or a very important language such as countries as India &
Nigeria but also in countries belonging to the expanding circle, countries like France, Russia or China where
people speak English but more at an international level when they want to communicate with people from
other countries.

It's been noticed that for instance when French speakers talk to Spanish speakers when they speak English
together they will speak a reduced type of English a type of English which is deprived of idiomatic
expressions with a simplified vocabulary and this is what is sometimes called Globish.

Globish is a simplified International English that is used among non-speakers of English

In France we do speak a lot of English internationally but we've also introduced quite a lot of English in our
French and this is known as Franglais but what is important to know as learners of English and students at
the university level is that quite a lot of the franglais that we use in French can actually be called fake
anglicisms which means that we use terms in French thinking that they are the appropriate terms in English
but they don't work the same way in English they cannot be used the same way in English

Just to show you an example

Un jogging is not called jogging in English it's called a tracksuit or sweatpants

So be extremely careful when you translate into English, do not think that the anglicisms that we use in
French are always correct in English

Un parking is a car park or a parking lot

Un camping is a campsite

Un clip is a music video

Un planning is a work plan or a schedule

Un smoking is a dinner jacket in British English and a tuxedo

in American English

Du babby foot is table football in British English table soccer in American English

Des basket are trainers in British English sneakers in American English

Un tennisman is a tennis player

Un puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle

Varieties of English

Let's look at some key notions regarding varieties of English

First important distinction to make is to differentiate accents which describe phonetic features from dialects
which are a combination of phonetic grammatical and lexical features, vocabulary features

In many English speaking countries people choose how they speak along what is known as a speech
continuum

If we take the example of Scotland they can choose how they speak just to match standard English more
saying for instance “I don't know” they can use a broader Scottish accent and say “Ah don’know” or they
can even speak what is known as Scots and say “Ah dinna Ken”,

Scots is a close sister language or dialect of English it's hard to say exactly if it's a separate language or a
dialect usually the concept used to differentiate dialects from languages is the notion of mutual intelligibility

But it's not always as simple as that, sometimes people understand each other but for political reasons they
choose to say that they speak different languages

It's for instance the case of Norwegian and Swedish they're actually easy to understand. Norwegians
understand Swedish as Swedish people understand Norwegian but these are two countries so they are called
two different languages

Other key notions include a pidgin which is a contact language with a limited vocabulary and limited
functions and this is very different from a Creole which derives from a pidgin but it's now taught to babies
and as a mother tongue it has developed new means of expression to fulfill all the functions that other
languages fulfill

Here is an example of sentences in varieties of English and they’re meaning in standard English

English variety Standard English

English-based creole
Mi nuh biznizz (Patwa: Jamaican Creole) It is not my business/ I don’t care
Ah ken fit wye the bairn didna greet. (Scots) I know why the child didn’t cry
Mi go waswas (Tok Pisin : Papua New Guinea I’m going swimming
Creole)
A bayg paddin (Krio: Sierra Leone) Excuse me
Dowan. (Singlish : Colloquial Singaporean English I don’t want this
Mi stap tasol. (Tok Pisin: Papua New Guinea I’m not doing anything
Creole)