S.P.E.
TRACT No. V

FRENCH WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I

The English language is an Inn of Strange Meetings where all sorts and conditions of words are assembled. Some are of the bluest blood and of authentic royal descent; and some are children of the gutter not wise enough to know their own fathers. Some are natives whose ancestors were rooted in the soil since a day whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; and some are strangers of outlandish origin, coming to us from all the shores of all the Seven Seas either to tarry awhile and then to depart for ever, unwelcome sojourners only, or to settle down at last and found a family soon asserting equality with the oldest inhabitants of the vocabulary. Seafaring terms came to us from Scandinavia and from the Low Countries. Words of warfare on land crossed the channel, in exchange for words of warfare at sea which migrated from England to France. Dead tongues, Greek and Latin, have been revived to replenish our verbal population with the terms needed for the sciences; and Italy has sent us a host of words by the fine arts.

The stream of immigrants from the French language has been for almost a thousand years larger than that from any other tongue; and even to-day it shows little sign of lessening. Of all the strangers within our gates none are more warmly received than those which come to us from across the Straits of Dover. None are more swiftly able to make themselves at home in our dictionaries and to pass themselves off as English. At least, this was the case until comparatively recently, when the process of adoption and assimilation became a little slower and more than a little less satisfactory. Of late French words, even those long domiciled in our lexicons, have been treated almost as if they were still aliens, as if they were here on sufferance, so to speak, as if they had not become members of the commonwealth. They were allowed to work, no doubt, and sometimes even to be overworked; but they laboured as foreigners, perhaps even more eagerly employed by the snobbish because they were foreigners and yet held in disrepute by the more fastidious because they were not truly English. That is to say, French words are still as hospitably greeted as ever before, but they are now often ranked as guests only and not as members of the household.

Perhaps this may seem to some a too fanciful presentation of the case. Perhaps it would be simpler to say that until comparatively recently a foreign word taken over into English was made over into an English word, whereas in the past two or three centuries there has been an evident tendency to keep it French and to use it freely while retaining its French pronunciation, its French accents, its French spelling, and its French plural. This tendency is contrary to the former habits of our language. It is dangerous to the purity of English. It forces itself on our attention and it demands serious consideration.

II

In his brief critical biography of Rutebeuf, M. Clédat pointed out that for long years the only important literature in Europe was the French, and that the French language had on three several occasions almost established itself as the language of European civilization—once in the thirteenth century, again in the seventeenth, and finally when Napoleon had made himself temporarily master of the Continent. The earlier universities of Europe were modelled on that of Paris, where Dante had gone to study. Frederick the Great despised his native tongue, spoke it imperfectly, and wrote his unnecessary verses in French. Even now French is only at last losing its status as the accredited tongue of diplomacy.

The French made their language in their own image; and it is therefore logical, orderly, and clear. Sainte-Beuve declared that a 'philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French'. As the French are noted rather for their intelligence than for their imagination, they are the acknowledged masters of prose; and their achievement in poetry is more disputable. As they are governed by the social instinct, their language exhibits the varied refinements of a cultivated society where conversation is held in honour as one of the arts. The English speech, like the English-speaking peoples, is bolder, more energetic, more suggestive, and perhaps less precise. From no language could English borrow with more profit to itself than from French; and from no language has it borrowed more abundantly and more persistently. Many of the English words which we can trace to Latin and through Latin to Greek, came to us, not direct from Rome and Athens, but indirectly from Paris. And native French words attain international acceptance almost as easily as do scientific compounds from Greek and Latin. Phonograph and telephone were not more swiftly taken up than chassis and garage.

But chassis and garage still retain their French pronunciation, or perhaps it would be better to say they still receive a pronunciation which is as close an approximation to that of the French as our unpractised tongues can compass. And in thus taking over these French words while striving to preserve their Frenchiness, we are neglectful of our duty, we are imperilling the purity of our own language, and we are deserting the wholesome tradition of English—the tradition which empowered us to take at our convenience but to refashion what we had taken to suit our own linguistic habits.

'Speaking in general terms,' Mr. Pearsall Smith writes, in his outline history of the English language, 'we may say that down to about 1650 the French words that were borrowed were thoroughly naturalized in English, and were made sooner or later to conform to the rules of English pronunciation and accent; while in the later borrowings (unless they have become very popular) an attempt is made to pronounce them in the French fashion.' From Mr. Smith's pages it would be easy to select examples of the complete assimilation which was attained centuries ago. Caitiff, canker, and carrion came to us from the Norman dialect of French; and from their present appearance no one but a linguistic expert would suspect their exotic ancestry, Jury, larceny, lease, embezzle, distress, and improve have descended from the jargon of the lawyers who went on thinking in French after they were supposed to be speaking and writing in English. Of equal historical significance are the two series of words which English acquired from the military vocabulary of the French,—the first containing company, regiment, battalion, brigade, division, and army; and the second consisting of marshal, general, colonel, major, captain, lieutenant, sergeant, and corporal.

(Here I claim the privilege of a parenthesis to remark that in Great Britain lieutenant is generally pronounced leftenant, than which no anglicization could be more complete, whereas in the United States this officer is called the lootenant, which the privates of the American Expeditionary Force in France habitually shortened to 'loot'—except, of course, when they were actually addressing this superior. It may be useful to note, moreover, that while 'colonel' has chosen the spelling of one French form, it has acquired the pronunciation of another.)

Dr. Henry Bradley in the Making of English provides further evidence of the aforetime primacy of the French in the military art. 'War itself is a Norman-French word, and