Title:  Society for Pure English, Tract 5 The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden’s Poems

Author:  Society for Pure English

Release Date:  June 5, 2004 [EBook #12524]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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S.P.E.

TRACT No.  V

THE ENGLISHING OF FRENCH WORDS

By Brander Matthews

THE DIALECTAL WORDS IN BLUNDEN’S POEMS

etc. by Robert Bridges

At the Clarendon Press MDCCCCXXI

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