It was on this day in 1066 that William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy,
landed 600 ships and a 7,000 man army on the beach at Pevensey Bay in Sussex.
Convinced that he was the rightful king of England, and with the full support of
Pope Alexander II, he prepared to attack King Harald's forces, which he routed
at Hastings a couple of weeks later. Thus England gained new laws, an overlay of Latinate vocabulary on her language, feudalism, and forks.
The quotes were on invasion, which, while a fascinating subject, is not why I brought this to your attention. Freinds, today marks a turning point in the history of the English language (and this might be on my Linguistics test next week, so I might as well re-hash what I know for practice.)
Besides bringing Latin into the language, William the Conquerer also brought French, the language of his court and thus, the language of his barons. They became the ruling class, and French, along with Latin, became the language of power. English was the third langauge in its own country, spoken only by the peasants who were working in the fields while important buisness was conducted in the language of the castles and the whole buisness was recorded in the language of the church.
After William's invasion, English got a whole new set of words from French, some of which I've already used in this blog post -- army, baron, castle. If you look at these words they're primarily about ruling and rulers. (They didn't just bring the words, either -- they also brought concepts. You'll find that prior to the Norman invasion, Britain didn't have many castles, and certainly nothing like the stone buildings that William put up.) As time wore on, though, different words emerged.
Melvyn Bragg in his "Adventure of English" (which I recommend to anyone interested in this subject -- purchase it at Amazon or Better World Books) notes that in some cases, words from French did not take the place of English words, but rather complemented them, taking on a fraction of the meaning. Here's an example.
When a black Angus is out in the field eating, it's a cow. Cow is Old English. But when we butcher the cow, cook it and serve it for dinner, we don't say we're eating cow, we say we're eating beef. Beef comes from the French boeuf. In almost all cases, when the peasents deal with something (like taking care of the live animal) it retained the Old English word, and when the French dealt with something (like the dead animal on thier dinner plates) it took on the French.
So. Today everyone should have a party and raise a glass to William the Conqueror, who, despite ushering the three-hundred year period where the Kings of England didn't speak English, was actually a good thing for the language in the long run. À Votre Santé and Wes Hail!
(That's French and Old English for basically "Good Health and just drink your mead already.")
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