From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12985
Date: 2002-04-02
----- Original Message -----From: x99lynx@...Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 8:40 AMSubject: [tied] Re: Gothic prestige and borrowing> <<Did Chaucer and other Middle English writers use French words to improve communication with fellow Englishmen? There's little reason to think so.>>
> Yikes! Actually there is every reason to think so. The remarkable masterpiece that is the Canterbury Tales carries no excess baggage. Every word is efficient, effective and advances meaning. There is no indication of a word chosen because it was the "prestigious" word. Chaucer used the right word to convey pin-point meaning - in English - even though it might have been a borrowed word. And the reason he could do that was because English finally had the tools (including the borrowed ones) to tell that story. If you'd like to substitute "Saxon doublets" into Chaucer (or Shakespeare) be my guest. But don't expect it to tell the same story. Or tell it very well.Ah, this is (1) subjective, (2) still circular: that the words used by Chaucer by whose time are efficient and selected for the best effect is inferred from the fact that the result is a masterpiece (let me ignore Shakespeare, by whose time the influx of French words had lost its earlier dynamic and become a steady trickle). Your appreciation of Chaucer's skill does you credit (I'm a great fan of Chaucer myself), but I remain unconvinced that French vocabulary was imported on such a massive scale to help poets in their search for the right word (or shall I say the mot juste).Chaucer spoke perfect French and at least passable Italian. He was also a courtier and a diplomat; his friends and acquaintances included continental writers, ambassadors and officials. He was immersed up to his ears in the French and Italian literary traditions, and quite certainly regarded them as far superior to the native traditions of England. In his particular case prestige = elegance = courtly diction = "the more French-sounding, the better". If he (and other writers of his time) needed new words, why did they rely so exclusively on French? There are 101 ways of enriching your lexical resources, even without borrowing. Of course Chaucer would not read the same if he'd used only barbarian Germanic grunts instead of the mellifluous and vowelly polysyllabic Romance loans :) -- but the very fact that his aesthetic sentiments were what they were testifies to the cultural dominance of French in Western Europe at the time.
> A good example of how much English had been powered up thanks to its borrowing is Poul Anderson's essay "Uncleftish Beholding" which describes "Atomic Theory" using "only Anglo-Saxon words" and is reproduced in part on the web. The Journal of Irreproducible Results in 1979 noted that "essay" was "legendary among physicists because of how well it illustrates the total inadequacy of naked 'English' in communicating modern scientific concepts..." Naked English here meant English without words borrowed from Latin, Greek,
French or Arabic.Of course you can't wind back the clock and ignore a cumulative process that has been going on for centuries -- except for comic relief. However, there are languages (e.g. German, at least until recently) that have borrowed less freely and have made the best use of their inherited resources. The French are now trying to do without using English loans to power up their language, God knows why. Loans should be paid back ;).
> <<Innumerable French loans replaced perfectly functional Anglo-Saxon synonyms...>>
> Piotr, don't believe it for a minute. The words you list were not equivalent. That is an artifact of dictionary definitions and convenience. When you look at context, you can see that these words served different functions and had different connotations from the start. The "substitution" actually reflected material changes and new meanings in English culture at the time. Calling them "perfectly functional Anglo-Saxon synonyms" is just not accurate. ... [examples follow]
I think you are wrong, Steve. A language often borrows a redundant word, and then employs it for a particular stylistic effect or creates a new semantic niche for it, relocating its resources, as it were. You project the new distinction on the pre-borrowing stage of the language, suggesting a pre-existing gap waiting for a loan to come along and fill it. However, a new word often ousts an older (near-)synonym entirely -- why, if _both_ were allegedly needed in the first place, if I understand you correctly? You claim, for example, that the meaning of <eme> (OE e:am) was different from that of <uncle>, the latter having special legal connotations, so both were needed to express different semantic shades. So far so good. But the speakers of Middle English can't have been too pedantic about the distinction: <uncle> was used in the sense 'one's father brother' or 'an aunt's husband' already in Middle English times, replacing <eme> completely as a kinship term. Why didn't it happen the other way? Why didn't <eme> add a legal touch to its meaning and kick the newcomer out?I've checked the earliest references to <eagle> in the Oxford Dictionary. There are too few of them to be sure that the primary meaning of <eagle> was emblematic rather than ornithological: both are attested. I'll look the word up in Kurath's big _Middle English Dictionary_ tomorrow, if I don't forget. Wycliff uses the words interchangeably and, as far as I can see, there is no real suggestion of a different specific reference. Anyway, <eagle> soon came to means what <earn, arn, ern(e)> meant in Old English, the latter word surviving only as a redundant synonym for the sea _eagle_.As for <inwit>, whatever the Old English meaning of a coincidentally similar but etymologically different word, it meant virtually the same as <conscience> in Middle English, since the meaning of <conscience> was more general at the time and included things like 'awareness, knowledge, mind, sense, understanding'. As a matter of fact, ME <inwit> was coined (<in-> + <wit>, cf. OE gewitt 'understanding') to translate <conscientia> in the sense 'inner knowledge'. In Dan Michel's _Ayenbite of Inwyt_ the meaning is equivalent to that of Mod.E conscience.Piotr