Classics 22: Etymology

• Filter languages:
• A "filter language" is a "middle-person" language: it borrows a word from another language, changes it a bit, and then passes it on to English
  
• The Romance languages are French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a few others.
• They are called "Romance" because they come from the Roman language Latin. Latin became the Romance languages.
• Because the Romance languages are the "filter" through which a great deal of Latin had to pass to reach English, we can call the Romance languages "Filter languages" for Latin.
• French is an especially  important case, because of the massive number of Latinate words that filtered through it into English after 1066.
  
• French as a filter language
  
• As a first stab, to illustrate some typical French changes, here are some examples:

• Latin word	English words straight from Latin look like	English words from Latin via French looks like
  contineo, continere	continent	contain
  recipio, recipere	reception, recipe	receipt, receive
  status	status	state, estate, coup d'état

• Note that the vowels can change a lot, but not just the vowels.
  
• One factor that made it easy to adopt French words into English is that English already had cognates to many of the words it adopted. Compare the following Old English and Old French words. The Old English words were already in English before William the Conqueror's 1066 takeover of England. The Old French entered English soon after.
• OE rice (meaning "rich," not the food), OF-derived rich
• OE munt, OF-derived mount
• OE nefa, OF-derived nephew
• ...
  
• When French words were adopted, they often were used differently in English than in French, or they pushed aside the English word and its use changed. At other times, synonyms were created and retained.
  
• F-derived chair pushed E stool out (stool became a diminutive)
  
• (BTW, "stool" meaning "poop" comes from the idea that a toilet is a sort of chair: it's a euphemism)
  
• E provided hare, and F provided leveret (and rabbit is from a French word of unknown etymology)
  
• E provided axe, F hatchet
• E provided swan, F cygnet
• E answer, F-derived respond
• ... (thousands more)
  
• Fossilized French: when French entered English, English retained spellings that have been lost as OF changed into Modern French:
• E bastard, Modern F batard
• E beast, Modern F bête (as in the English phrase 'bête-noire' or 'bête-noir')
  
• E connoisseur, Modern F connaisseur
  
• TYPICAL FRENCH PHONETIC CHANGES:
• N.B. these are NOT sound change laws, like the famous Grimm's Law: i.e. there are exceptions (English adopted French words at many stages of French and many stages of English, and so English adopts different versions of French and anglicizes them irregularly as well: i.e. they may only be apparent exceptions).
• The sounds did change regularly in French, but then their English versions may or may not have preserved the changes.
• And because English borrowed French for hundreds of years, a word borrowed at one time might exhibit very different reflexes of a previous Latin root than the same word borrowed again a hundred years later.
  
• One good way to look at it is that the sound changes of historical linguistics happen within a language, whereas changes that happen between languages because of borrowings are a different situation.
• The practical upshot is that we cannot use these typical changes to accurately predict a word's form before or after borrowing either in French or English.
  
• Latin c (especially initial c) > French ch
• catena > chain (cf. non-Frenchified catenation)
  
• cambire > change (cf. non-Frenchified cambium)
  
• caballus > chivalry, chevalier, à cheval (cheval > joual) (cf. Spanish-derived caballo, or cavalcade which went from Latin to Italian to French, or capercaillie which went from Latin to Scottish-Gaelic to English)
  
• duc(ere) > duchess (cf. duke from French duc, and ducal)
  
• Latin a > French e or ie or i
  
• caballus > chevalier, chivalry
• gravis > grievous
• Latin e or o > French u
• motum > mutiny
• prosequi > pursue (note that the switching of the place of the vowel and the r is called a metathesis: think pretty v. purty: there are many examples of this in language)
  
• Latin u or o > French ou
• confundere > confound
• abundare > abound
• florere > flourish
• pondus > pound (weight)
• Vowels added to change pronunciation
• repetere > repeat
• appellare > appeal
• exclamare > exclaim
• desperare > despair
• memorare > memoir
• credere > creed
• procedere > proceed
• The roots of a spelling trap:
  
• Latin cedere "go"  entered English in some words via French:
•  exceed, proceed, succeed
  
• Latin cedere "go"  entered English by coming straight from Latin:
  
• abscede (rare), accede, antecede, decede, discede (rare), incede (rare), intercede, recede (go back), retrocede (go back), and secede
  
• And just to complicate things. From a different meaning of Latin cedere "yield": cede, concede, recede (yield back), retrocede (yield back)
  
• epicede, "funeral ode" is from Greek "upon care"