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This is the second in a series of three Swadesh list posts:
- Middle English
- Norman French
- Why not both?
The surprise tool that will help us later I alluded to in my Old English post is that I also simultaneously did the same exercise for Norman French, to get a better sense of what extent English actually is a weird French-German creole language. To recapitulate, from 1066 to 1327, the kings and queens of England (including Richard the Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitaine!) only or mostly spoke French. The nobles mostly spoke French and the peasants mostly spoke English, so the French vocabulary borrowed during this period tends to read more high class. In this essay I will thoroughly demonstrate that effect.
Compiling this list was more difficult than I expected, due to needing to determine which words were borrowed specifically from Norman French. Not part of the later wave of Middle French borrowings, not part of the later and continuing wave of Latin borrowings, and not part of the current wave of Modern French borrowings. Most of the words I could think of fell into one of those other three categories, which makes sense; Norman French words feel more foundational and inherent to English than later borrowings.
Here’s the list of words where we still use the Old English word for its original meaning, but also adopted the Norman French word to mean something else:
| Norman French | Meaning |
|---|---|
| comment | how |
| total | all |
| deuce | two |
| trey | three |
| quarter | four |
| peasant | heavy |
| straight | narrow |
| strait | narrow |
| meager | thin |
| peer | father (!) |
| arbor | tree |
| grain | seed |
| foil | leaf |
| herb | grass |
| cord | rope |
| grease | fat |
| plume | feather |
| chief | head |
| chef | head |
| main | hand (!) |
| beverage | drink |
| succour | suck |
| oyez (the attention-getting court word) | hear |
| stink | smell |
| battery | fight |
| catch | hunt |
| gist | lie down |
| lever | stand |
| chant | sing |
| joy | play |
| cool | flow |
| inflame | swell |
| powder | dust |
| fume | smoke |
| ardor | burn |
| rouge | red |
| blank | white (!) |
| plain | full |
| novel | new |
| ancient | old |
| boon | good |
| trenchant | sharp |
| noun | name |
That list is totally wild to me. Every Main Street everywhere is named after a word that once meant “hand”! It’s stunning just how essential some of those words feel to English. As well they should; they’ve been there for over 700 years.
As an addendum, here’s a shorter list where we kept the Norman French word, but only in an inflected form:
| Norman French | Meaning |
|---|---|
| verm(in) | worm |
| sang(uine) | blood |
| (uni)corn | horn |
| mang(y) | eat |
| pens(ive) | think |
| dorm(ant) | sleep |
| ten(nis) | hold |
| con(geal) | freeze |
delve
This is the first in a series of three Swadesh list posts:
- Middle English
- Norman French
- Why not both?
Since learning about the obsolete Middle English word scyld, meaning debt, I’ve been bitten by the “what other surprising obsolete Middle or Old English words are there?” bug. The problem is, how can you determine what words aren’t used any more? It’s like trying to notice all the annoying habits your friend doesn’t have. You could enumerate all the common annoying habits and laboriously go through them one by one, and still be nowhere close to thorough.
Anyway, I found a way to enumerate all the common words and laboriously went through them one by one. (I know it would be easier to find a list made by someone who’s already gone through this exercise, but there are two additional upcoming parts to this investigation that would have been much more difficult if I did.) Lexicostatistics is a subfield of historical linguistics that tries to clade languages based on the magnitude of differences between their common words. So linguists have spent decades coming up with lists of which words work best for this that I can repurpose. The lowest-hanging fruit I found is that Wiktionary keeps Swadesh lists (the first commonly-used list of meanings, from 1952) for hundreds of different languages, including the dead one I care about right now.
So I came up with a long list of meanings where Modern English uses a completely different word than Old English did. For comparison, I’m including cognates from other related languages. German (Gm.) last shared a common ancestor with English about 1500 years ago; Norwegian (Nor.) shared one about 1700 years ago; and Latin (L.) shared one about 4000 years ago. I’m saving some of the words for a subsequent post, but the remainder are:
Words that are completely disused now:
| Old English | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| fele | many | Gm. viel |
| swire | neck | |
| swelt | to die | |
| snithe | to cut | Gm. schneiden |
| quethe | to say | past tense preserved as quoth |
| tee | to pull | |
| welkin | cloud | Gm. Wolke |
| swart | black | adjective preserved as swarthy; Gm. schwarz |
| sweethra | right | |
| winestra | left | L. sinestra |
| mid | with | Gm. mit |
Words with different meanings now:
| Old English | Former Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| were- | man | L. vir- |
| rind | (tree) bark | |
| ridge | (a person's) back | |
| wit | to know (a fact) | Gm. wissen |
| ken | to know (a person) | Gm. kennen |
| to sting | to stab | |
| to sell | to give | |
| twinge | to squeeze | |
| mist | fog | |
| heaven | sky | Gm. Himmel |
| right | straight (not askew) | |
| stump | dull (not sharp) | Gm. stumpf |
| for | because | Nor. fordi |
Words we still use, but only in a more specific context now:
| Old English | Former Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| broad | wide | Gm. breit |
| man | person | "woman" comes from wif- "female" + -man "person" |
| fowl | bird | |
| hound | dog | |
| flesh | meat | |
| womb | belly | |
| canny | knowledgeable | |
| cleave | to split | |
| delve | to dig | |
| to stick (with a pointy thing) | to stab | Gm. stechen |
| knead | rub | Nor. gni |
| mere | lake | |
| barrow (location) | mountain | Gm. Berg |
| evil | bad | |
| foul | rotten | Gm. faul |
debt
The word for a thing that is owed debt first appears in English in the 1200s as a borrowing from Old French dete. As a reminder, in the 1200s in England, the peasants spoke English and the nobility spoke French. The King of England did not speak English. Usually, we retain the English words from that period, but sometimes we retain the French word instead, or both words (e.g. English-derived help and French-derived aid, or English-derived lake and French-derived lagoon). In the case of debt, we retained just the French word and lost the Middle English word shild (Old English scyld, German cognate Schuld).
So wait, if we borrowed the word from dete, and spelled it dette as pronounced in the 1300s, where did the silent ‘b’ come from? In the 1400s, literate people in England typically knew Latin and believed English should be more like the ursprache Latin. Well, in Latin, there’s this word dēbitum, meaning debt, that the French word is descended from. So scribes from that period all ended up agreeing to put the vestigial ‘b’ back into the spelling, cursing us to this day.
Dēbitum would of course later be borrowed into English on its own merits as debit, but that wouldn’t happen for several hundred years.
quark
The subatomic particle quark gets its name from one of the two physicists who independently proposed its existence in 1964, Murray Gell-Mann. Incidentally, Murray is the same person Gell-Mann amnesia (the tendency to take media reporting at face value in fields you don’t know well, despite seeing how inaccurate it is in fields you do know well) was named for by Michael Crichton.
Murray reports he knew what sound he wanted to associate with the theoretical particles, /kwork/, before deciding how to spell it. He came across the spelling in James Joyce’s 1939 book Finnegans Wake, where it is used as a mocking nonsense word, but is pronounced to rhyme with “bark” and “mark”. Making sense of James Joyce’s inspirations is where the trail ends, though it’s often proposed that the nonsense word is ultimately from a German word of Slavic origin, “Quark”, meaning “cottage cheese” or “rubbish”.
Quarks were later proven to actually exist in a 1968 experiment. Murray’s initially proposed three flavors (aligning with Joyce’s usage, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”) were eventually extended to their current count of six in a 1975 paper. I love the poetic names truth and beauty for the fifth and sixth flavors, but they are now typically called top and bottom. Notably, the top quark was not confirmed to exist until 1995.
George Zweig, the other physicist who proposed the existence of quarks in 1964, instead favored the name ace for the class of particles.
stan
The devotional verb stan begins appearing in 2008 as a generalization of the noun stan. The noun originates from a 2000 song by Eminem, titled “Stan”, about an encounter with an eponymous obsessive fan. This usage didn’t start catching on until after 2005, but by 2015 it was notable enough to merit an entry in the OED’s blog. By 2017, it warranted a full entry in the big dictionary.
As a given name, Stan is short for Stanley, which seems to mostly originate from places named Stanley in England. Stanley is Old English for “stone meadow” (stān + lēah), which seems like a reasonable name to give to a bunch of different places.