Extraordinaire !

One doesn’t often stop to consider this, but it is extraordinary how many French words our language has absorbed since about 1450. Most of the English words with French origins entered our language further back even than that, in a period when English kings still held extensive lands in France. Many of the kings from William the Conqueror on were virtually Anglo-French, and their families and the nobles and many leading churchmen spoke the language as well or better than they spoke English. If you take a passage of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chaucer died in 1400) you may expect to find an average of (say) one French-derived word in every ten-syllable line - often the longer words, like countrefete, superfluytee, lecherye, difference, dampnacioun, compaignye - so that in terms of syllables, some 20%* of Chaucer's output may consist of words that only entered the English language in the previous four hundred years.

* This is not official: it is this pedant's guess after hastily perusing some of the Tales and making calculations. I am sure others will have noticed this before me, but I get the impression that some of the tales have more 'French' words in them than others. Perhaps this shows Chaucer modifying the language of each tale to suit the status of the teller.

But that was all in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. It’s not those earlier words that I want to talk about here. I’m amazed at the number of French words that we have adopted in the five centuries since Chaucer right up to the present day. Some of them are cooking terms, of course - crêpe suzette, marinade, hors d’oeuvres and so on. But I have listed hundreds of others, some from every-day conversation (avant-garde, brochure, chalet, débris, élite, fiancé, garage, hospice, intrigue, journal, language - we could run through the alphabet with familiar examples), and others less frequently on our lips, but recognisable as soon as we hear or read them, such as camaraderie, bourgeoisie, pointillism(e), renaissance, badinage . . . . .

What set me going on this topic was noticing how many of the words in my list started with the letter C; so I counted them, and found they totalled exactly 100: capsule, camouflage, carousel, catalogue, chalet, coterie, compère, chagrin, cliché, champagne, collage, crèche, courtesan, courgette and over eighty others.

The list is still growing.

So what ? (I thought I had better say that before you do.)

Extraordinaire !