How Does History Play A Part In A Language's Development?

It is said that a person only really dies once their lives have no effect on us any more. For that reason, William the Conqueror is very vigorously still moving around. His personality, strategy and actions played an immense part in how the English language is today, even more so than that other famous William and his plays over five centuries later.

1066 was known as the year of the three kings, and it changed the course of the English language forever. It was, until then, almost fully Germanic and resembled Icelandic or Old Norse. When Edward the Confessor died in January that year, the usual practice was a period of reflection before the next coronation. But such were the fears of the English nobles of an invasion of the Danes, that the next king, Harold Godwinson, was crowned that very afternoon, right after the funeral.

William of Normandy was furious because his distant cousin, the deceased king Edward, who died childless, had promised him the throne a few years earlier. But, as the French say, revenge is a dish served cold. He waited it out until he could strike. He didn't need to wait long, as in mid-September the Danes invaded again in the north and Harold took his army up to Stamford Bridge in present-day Lincolnshire to defeat them.

William of Normandy sensed it was time to strike. While Harold was fighting off the Danes, William was busy building a fleet of ships at St Valéry Sur Somme in neighbouring Picardy to cross the Channel and take what he considered was rightfully his. He set sail in late September and arrived at the beginning of October. With Harold away, he could have walked straight into London and taken over the place, but such was the code of honour back then, he waited on the south coast for his rival to return from the north. In mid-October the Battle of Hastings took place, and as we know, the rest is history.

But what has this got to do with the English language?

Well. Once William had made it to London (his path over the Thames was blocked by English loyalists at Southwark Bridge so he had to take a detour to the next crossing in Oxfordshire), he made Norman French the language of state. You needed to switch to it if you wanted anything from the king's government. He threw out all the Saxon nobility and installed his own. All those dukes, earls, barons and other hereditary lords can usually trace their heritage back to this period, which is why they often have French sounding surnames: Baron de Clifford, Baron Vaux, Baron de Ros, and so on.

With Norman French as the language of state, words from it parachuted into English with a great rapidity. The Saxons continued to use their language but increasingly they dropped more formal words from the French into their every-day use. The Saxons were still the peasants, the farmhands, and the labourers, and the few Normans were the bosses and consumers. This is why our farm animals have Germanic names - pig, swine, lamb, sheep, cow, chicken, but as food, the names become French - beef, veal, mutton, pork, as the Normans were the ones eating the produce of their workers. The old word for cooked chicken was pullet.

Similarly, a house is a standard building with four walls and a roof. But a manor, a castle, a mansion and a palace are from French, because that's where the new overlords chose to sequester themselves away from the hordes. A seat or a stool are functional pieces of furniture, but a chair and a throne are more comfortable.

All new words in English tend to come from Latinate, and any new coinages from the Germanic side are pre-existing words that are combined with others to form new expressions.

The proportion of Latinate words in English is high - 56%, in fact. Germanic words only make up 27%. The rest are foreign borrowings.

So why is English still classed as a Germanic language? Because of its basic words - numbers, prepositions, conjunctions, most-used verbs, nouns and adjectives. This also explains why the irregular verbs are almost all Germanic in origin - they were formed before the standardisation of grammar. This is more or less the same in all languages: the oldest verbs, therefore the most used, rarely follow standard grammar practices. Take the verbs be, go, find, write, get.

I will address the spelling in another post, but there is a reason for its seemingly incoherent form. Pronunciation too - many words from Latinate seem to be badly pronounced, but it is probably the consequence of Saxon resilience - if they were going to have French words, they were going to incorporate them into the every-day English accent. Some people even hyper-corrected others who were sounding too French.

Many words have changed meaning over time, but the Latinate ones still have a much more formal, educated, erudite ring to them, which means they can sound both charming or arrogant. The Saxon words are still more down-to-earth or vernacular, which is why we use them more in ordinary speech.

So you can ordinarily "want" or "need" something, but someone in authority might "request", "require", "desire" or "demand" something.

Germanic words can have three, four or more different meanings, whereas the Latinate ones generally mean only one thing - look at the various meanings of the words get and set, compared to acquire and install.

The words we use today to reflect our moods or our relationships with our interlocutors are a direct consequence of the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror. For this reason, this Norman warrior king from almost a millennium ago is most definitely still alive and kicking.

- Raymond Goslitski