<<
To add a level of complexity, Romance vocabulary
has been adopted at different epochs, from
medieval latin to norman french to learned late
medieval borrowings to modern.
>>
Oh boy, yes indeed! To take one specific example I'm working with at the
moment (shedding tears of frustration and fury in equal measure). Thomas
Harman, author of arguably the earliest English work to provide a cant
glossary, entitles this (in 1566) _A Caveat for Common Cursitors_,
explaining that he has coined the term "cursitor" as an alternative to
"vagabond". (Quite why this should be necessary, Harman never quite makes
plain.)
Unfortunately for Harman, the term "cursitor" *already* exists (first cited
as an English word in the OED about thirty years before Harman publishes his
book), emerging out of a mush of Latin and Anglo-French law terms, and
denominating a second-level Chancery clerk who was (only) entitled to draw
up writs "de cursu" ("of course", straightforward).
So well and good -- you have two independent terms, each going their own
way, one for a Chancery Cursitor and the other for a Vagabond Cursitor, and
the only serious question is whether or not Harman (who was, or at least so
he says, I have my doubts, a JP, and fond of quoting the very legal statutes
in which the term [chancery] cursitor appears) was aware of the other sense
of the word he alleges he has coined.
Then it becomes positively baroque. Harman's Vagabond Cursitor develops a
ghost existence as an alleged cant term referring to the First (old) level
of the canting crew, via a literal-minded interpretation of a joke by Thomas
Dekker in _Lanthorne and Candlelight_, and then sometime about the middle of
the eighteenth century there appears a cursitor who may or may not be
related to either or both of the Vagabond or Chancery Cursitors, who is a
pettyfogging attorney.
... and let's not even start on what is made of this by Blackstone, Coke and
[of all people] (three times) Henry Fielding.
Then there's the Hundreds of Drury, and how yet another old-established
administrative term morphs into a phrase to denote London prostitutes.
Oh dear ...
<<
Most of the
borrowings have been processed over time, so that
tho they differ from anything protogermanic but
the forms by which they've been transformed might
be recognizable to a protogerman but not a
protolatin--the former might not know what the
root means but he would understand its syntactic
value, the reverse for the latter.
>>
Sure -- borrowings tend to be fitted into the inflectional system of the
language into which they are adopted. Exceptions to this phenomenon are
rare.
<<
So, going over
the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in my head,
I come to the first romance word (ignoring the
proper nouns April and March), the past
participle "perced," pierced, French root with
germanic ending, as opposed to the very recent
borrowing "décolleté." Has the older borrowing
become germanic while the second is available to
trot out whenever the germanic "low-cut" isn't impressive enough.
>>
Yo -- and it's most (all?) of the conjunctions, pronouns, etc. which go back
to proto-Germanic -- when that with his the of to ... It's easier to borrow
"simple" nouns, etc, and fit them into the language than it is more integral
parts of speech.
<<
I know this is pretty elementary, Robin. All
languages borrow and transform. As with cultures
in general, the differences that resist change
are the patterns by which information is
assimilated. Those patterns constitute a big part of their identity.
>>
Indeed, it's the language matrix in toto, but. In some ways English is
apparently all too open to change, in other ways remarkably resistant, as
the history of English strewn with failed attempts to shape it into more
acceptable patterns, shows.
Harman with his Vagabond Cursitors was basically on a hiding to nothing.
<<
Back to Chaucer. In the first 15 lines of the
preface there are 16 naturalized French words.
>>
But, I'd reiterate, which words?
Robin
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