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