English and its relationship with French

1 Introduction

English is part of the Germanic group of languages, and is descended from the language known as proto-Germanic which developed around the same time as Latin and whose speakers settled in North-West Europe after the dispersion of the Indo-Europeans between 4000 and 3000 BC. There are no records of this language, but it is known that it split into three forms:

• North Germanic, which is the parent language of such languages as Norwegian, Danish and Swedish;
• East Germanic, now completely disappeared but which gave rise to Burgundian (whose speakers settled in Southern France), Vandal (whose speakers invaded North Africa and Spain and gave their name to Andalucia) and Gothic;
• West Germanic, the parent language of such languages as German, Dutch and English.

English owes its existence to a number or languages including:

• Britannic, the language of the Celtic peoples living in Britain prior to the Roman invasions, and which survives today in Welsh and Breton. This is to be differentiated from Gaelic, the language of the Irish Celts which subsequently spread to Scotland (Scots Gaelic) and the Isle of Man (Manx);  
• Anglo-Saxon or Old English, the language of the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain after the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons;  
• Old Norse, the language of the Vikings;  
• French, the language of the Normans.

2 The Roman and Anglo-Saxon invasions

In the last few decades BC the Romans launched two invasions of the land they called Britannia, in 55 BC under Julius Caesar and in 43 BC under Aulus Plautius and the Emperor Claudius. After some considerable struggle, most notably with the forces of the British chieftain Caractacus, the territory was brought into the realms of the Roman Empire. Although there was a considerable Romanization of British culture, particulary in the South, for reasons of geography and numbers the Romans did not impose themselves linguistically to the same extent as they did in Gaul. As such when the Roman legions began to withdraw from Britain around AD 410 Latin had not taken a strong hold and the great majority of its inhabitants remained Celtic-speaking.

In AD 449 a group of Germanic invaders arrived in Kent. These were mainly Jutes from Northern Denmark (hence the name Jutland), Angles from the Danish-German border region (where the word England comes from), and Saxons from the German coastal region. Like the settlement of Franks into Northern France, the Germanic invasion was not a single focussed campaign but an ongoing and uncoordinated series of landings and campaigns in different parts of the country. The invaders met with stiff resistance, most notably from the Celtic King Artorius, probably the legendary King Arthur. After over a century of conflict the Germanic invaders, referred to as Anglo-Saxons, were in control of most of what is now England, plus large areas of Southern Scotland. The dispossessed Celts - called wealas by their conquerors meaning "foreigners", hence the word Welsh - were forced to the extremities of Britain, sometimes referred to as the "Celtic Fringe" : Wales, Cornwall and North-West England (the word Cumberland means "Land of the Cymry i.e. the Welsh). Some Celts even settled in the North-West coastal region of France creating another “Land of the Britains”, hence the modern-day day distinction between Britanny and Great Britain.

3 The influence of Celtic

Unlike in Gaul where the Franks gradually took on the language of the conquered Gallo-Romans, the language of the Celts had very little influence on the language of the Anglo-Saxons, commonly referred to as Old English. The difference was in part a question of numbers: in Britain the Germanic invaders settled in such great numbers that there was no question that they could be absorbed into the existent Celtic communities. But perhaps the most important difference was that of prestige. As has been mentioned, Gallo-Roman, the spoken Latin of Gaul, was greatly respected by the invading Franks on account of its association with Roman culture and the Christian Church. Indeed many of the Franks already spoke Latin on account of pre-exisiting political and commercial links with the Romans. By contrast the Anglo-Saxons had no knowledge of the language of the Britons, and Celtic culture had none of the cultural prestige of Latin. Indeed the Anglo-Saxon word wealh that originally meant "foreigner" soon took on another meaning "servant"or "slave", a testimony of the low status of those Celts that remained in Anglo-Saxon communities.

The primary influence of the Celtic language on Old English was in names of rivers in place-name elements. For example, Avon and Ouse are Celtic words for "river" and "stream" while Thames means "dark river". And London contains the Celtic word lond meaning "wild", while other Celtic place-name elements include ton meaning "farmstead", hamm meaning "meadow" and leah meaning "wood".

4 The influence of Anglo-Saxon

Modern English has its roots in the Germanic language called Anglo-Saxon or Old English, although it subsequently underwent considerable influence from Old Norse and French. This in part explains why it is so different from other Germanic languages such as German or Dutch in terms both of grammar and vocabulary. Words such as nouns , adjectives and articles all took inflections based on a system of four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative) and four declensions. As for verbs , there were two inflected tenses, present and past for both indicative and subjunctive , and the beginnings of compound tenses of the type I have helped. The structure of noun phrases was, as in Modern English, generally determiner - adjective - noun , but exceptions were all and both which began noun phrases. Because of the inflectional system, word order was much more flexible than in Modern English, and a subject could follow a verb , an object could precede a verb, an adjective could follow a noun and so on.

As far as vocabulary is concerned, words of Anglo-Saxon origin are the most commonly used words in English today. These include most grammatical words (the, a, I, you, he, this, here, there, up, down), the basic verbs and adjectives (have, be, is, go, big, small), words expressing family relationships (father, mother, brother, son, daughter), parts of the body (arm, ear, eye, tooth, heart, foot), farming terms (sheep, cow, goat, ox, plough, field), natural terms (storm, hail, sea, night, fire, snow, wind), natural resources (gold, silver, iron, lead, tin), the numbers one to ten and the points of the compass.

Old English also had many types of prefix and suffix for developing new words. These include forms leading to Modern English -y, -less and -ful for forming adjectives from nouns , e.g. earthy, endless and thankful; forms leading to Modern English -ness and -th for forming nouns from adjectives, e.g. greatness, strength. (The original adjective before -th suffixes is not always self-evident because of spelling changes; for example filth comes from foul, mirth from merry and sloth from slow).

Old English also had the capacity to form words by putting two together, something it generally did to express abstract concepts or new objects. For example, boccræft ("bookskill") meant literature, tungolcræft ("star-skill") meant astronomy and frumweorc ("beginning-work") meant creation. Many of these words would eventually be replaced by less cumbersome Latin words but some survive (for example godspell meaning "good news" was retained rather than the Latin evangelium). Furthermore when England became Christian many pre-existing Old English words were adapted to serve a new purpose. These include heaven (originally meaning "sky"), hell (whose root originally meant "covered place" and also formed the basis of hall, hole, hollow, and helmet), and Holy Ghost, (ghost originally meant guest or stranger).

The conversion of England to Christianity took place on two fronts. In AD 597 St Augustine landed in Kent with a view to converting the English to Christianity, whilst in AD 635 Aidan from the Celtic church in Ireland began a similar mission in North-West England. Over the next 100 years England was converted, and this that would have a number of important implications for the English language. First a large number of ecclesiastical words of Graeco-Roman origin were imported, such as candle, devil, priest, angel, disciple and psalm, as were exotic biblical words such as camel and lion. In addition the greater trade ties established with continental Europe as a result of their common Chrisitianity gave English new words such as crystal, lobster, mussel and asparagus. Few pagan words survived the arrival of Christianity, although those that did are significant: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are all named after pagan deities (Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frig) while Eastre, the pagan goddess of Spring has paradoxically given her name to the most important of all Christian festivals, Easter.

Another important introduction from Christianity was the Latin alphabet. Prior to this the English used a linear form of writing called runes which were used for inscriptions on stone, metal or wood (the word book originally meant "beech"). With the introduction of Latin forms of writing literature and culture began to flourish, especially in Northumbria where important monasteries at Jarrow and Lindisfarne were situated. Here monks wrote and taught not only about Christianity, but also about literature, poetry, astronomy, arithmetic, art, music and architecture.

5 The Viking invasions

The next great influence on the development of English was the Viking invasions that occurred between AD 750 and AD 1050. The term "Viking" is used to describe a disparate group of sea-faring people based in Sweden, Norway and Denmark during this time. There were various reasons why the Vikings sought to expand to other countries. One was overpopulation, and another was poor natural resources. A further reason also was the custom of leaving the inheritance to the oldest son, for this encouraged the other sons to search for wealth elsewhere. In addition the Emperor Charlemagne’s defeat of the Frisians, hitherto the strongest naval power of the time, had left the southern sea-routes (around what is now the German and Dutch coasts and the English channel) open for the Vikings. At around the same time the Vikings had developed ocean-faring vessels of a quality that had never been seen before.

The Vikings who invaded England were predominantly Danish, although some Norwegians took part. The first important attacks were the sacking of the monasteries of Jarrow and Lindisfarne in AD 793-4, and within 50 years of this the Vikings controlled half of England. They would probably have taken control of the whole country had they not been stopped by Alfred the Great, Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex, in AD 878. The subsequent Treaty of Wedmore divided England into two kingdoms, one English and one Danish. The dividing line between the two kingdoms was called the Danelaw.

Like Celtic, Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, gave English a number of place-name elements, such as -by (meaning "village" as in Whitby), -thorp (meaning "secondary settlement" as in Grimsthorpe) and -thwaite (meaning "woodland clearing" as in Micklethwaite). More significantly a large number of everyday, core-vocabulary words in modern English stem directly from Old Norse, including the nouns leg, neck, sky, bag, cake, dirt, fellow, fog, knife and skin; the adjectives low, same, flat, loose, ugly, wrong; the verbs get, hit, want, give, take and smile; the conjunctions though and until, and the pronouns they and them. The number is probably larger still, although the similarity between Old English and Old Norse is such that it is impossible to be certain. This similarity, however, did have the effect of giving to modern English pairs of words of similar origin (although not always of identical meaning), for example:  

By contrast Modern English also has many pairs of words of Old English and Old Norse origin with a similar meaning, e.g. craft (OE) / skill (ON), sick (OE) / ill (ON).

But perhaps the most significant influence that Old Norse had on the development of English was in the area of word endings. With most language changes developments first occur in spoken language, before later being codified in written language. In the case of inflection changes, developments began to occur in the later Old English period (around 1000-1150) but were only established in writing during the Middle English period (1150 - 1500). The English and the Vikings spoke languages that were similar in terms of their vocabulary, but different in terms of their grammar, especially in their word endings. In order to aid communication between the two peoples, the natural tendency was for word endings to be simplified and for their function to be replaced with word order and prepositions . This phenomenon was reinforced by the tendency, for phonetic reasons, for an unstressed syllable at the end of a word to be weakened or to disappear altogether, serving to simplify the inflectional system still further.

In separate parts of England one single declension was applied to all nouns . In the North the declension having its nominative plural ending in -as and its genitive singular in -es became prevalent. Eventually the -as changed to -es, giving us the modern practice of adding -s in the plural and when expressing possession. A similar process happened in the South, although instead of -as / es in the plural, -en was added. Eventually this tendency was replaced by the northern -es plural, but some old southern plurals remain, as with oxen, children and brethren. Other irregular plurals such as feet, mice, men and geese and non-inflected plurals such as sheep and deer also owe their existence to declensions that became disused during the simplification process that took place during the Viking era.

A similar process happened with adjectives and articles , which in Old English were declined for case , number and gender . By the time of Chaucer adjective endings had been simplified to a base form and a form with the ending -e (for the plural and for the weak form as in modern German). In the later Middle English period (around 1400 - 1500) this ending was dropped for the same phonetic reasons as with nouns , making English adjectives invariable. The definite article had three forms, masculine (se), feminine (seo) and neuter (thaet), all of which declined for case, number and gender. By the end of the 1400s time masculine and feminine had become simplified to the, and the redundant neuter form that became used as a demonstrative .

The tendency towards simplification of the inflectional system also affected verbs . Old English only had two tenses, past and present, which had many types of inflection . In the Middle English period these tenses were greatly simplified and new tenses were created using auxiliary verbs. For the example the Old English practice of using shall or will before an infinitive , which was originally restricted to indicating obligation and wish, gradually came to express the future. Also continuous tenses came into being: the present participle began life as a noun preceded by the preposition on, (He was on reading); the on developed into the prefix -a (He was areading) before being dropped entirely to form the continuous form we have today (He was reading).

These simplifications in the system of inflection had two significant effects on English. First it signalled the end of grammatical gender (such as one finds in modern French or German where the noun house is respectively feminine or neuter ), as all ways of marking gender had disappeared. As a result grammatical gender was replaced by natural gender, whereby animate nouns were referred to by their biological gender he or she, whilst inanimate nouns were referred to by the neutral pronoun it. The second major effect on English was, as has been already mentioned, on sentence structure. Where there had been a strong inflection system to show case , word order could be flexible, with either of Subject - Verb - Object , Subject - Object - Verb, and Verb - Subject - Object being acceptable. With the disappearance of the case system Subject - Verb - Object became the established pattern for affirmative sentences. Furthermore, the problem of lack of clarity caused by the disappearance of the case system was solved by the increasing use of prepositions such as in, by and with as a means of making case explicit.

On a broader level, however, these simplifications arising from the fusion of Old English and Old Norse had what is arguably an even more significant effect, namely to institute a long-term and powerful momentum within English away from inflection and towards the use of word-order and grammatical words such as prepositions as a means of expressing grammatical function.

6 The Norman invasion

The final great influence on the development of English was the Norman invasion of 1066. The same Vikings who had invaded Northern England from AD 800 carried out a series of raids in Northern France from AD 843, twice reaching Paris before in AD 911 being given the territory now known as Normandy. For the same reasons of cultural prestige and demography the Normans rapidly took on French culture and speech, so that by the mid-1050s they were completely French. At the Battle of Hastings in 1066 the English King Harold and virtually the entire English ruling aristocracy were wiped out. The new king, William the Conqueror, distributed their lands to his Norman followers, and replaced senior clerics with Normans. As a consequence French replaced English as the language of adminstration and culture in the English realm, and this would remain the case for well over 200 years.

For the first century or so after the Norman conquest the separation between French and English was almost total. Some Norman French words such as garden, hour, market, and people filtered through into English, probably from Normans of lower social standing who integrated immediately with the English after the Conquest. Gradually, however, the aristocratic Normans - who now spoke the more fashionable dialect of Francien or Central French, the language of the French court - became bilingual and a significant result of this was the appearance of a large number of new words in English. This is because when speaking English, Normans tended to resort to their own words to express more complicated or elevated concepts, even though in many cases an English word already existed. These loan words related to the spheres of activity in which the Normans were dominant. Government: court, crown, council, govern, parliament, authority etc.; the Law: justice, judge, jury, accuse, crime, prison, punish etc.; the Church: preach, pray, parish, baptism, saviour, paradise, virgin etc.; and the Arts: costume, dress, art, beauty, colour, ornament, paint, music, poem etc. Although many words of Anglo-Saxon origin were replaced by these loan words, many remained, the result being that modern English now contains a large number of pairs words of French and Anglo-Saxon origin with a similar meaning. In these cases the Anglo-Saxon word tends to be more down-to-earth and popular, the French word more elevated or specialist:

Furthermore, many French loan words relate to the experience of the aristocracy, while English words relating to the same domain relate to the experience of ordinary people. Thus home and house are of English origin while manor and palace are French loan words; and man, woman, son and daughter are English while heir, nurse, butler and servant are French. An interesting and oft-quoted example of this disparity lies in names for many common animals and the meat for which they were killed. To describe the living animal the names are of English origin, as it was English peasants who had the job of rearing them: cow, calf, sheep, pig / swine, deer. To describe the dead animal the names are of French origin, as the French aristocracy's experience was restricted to eating them: beef, veal, mutton, pork / bacon, venison. Other words borrowed from French around this time were a large number of words describing abstract concepts such courtesy, complacency, mercy and obedience.

Although the difference in connotation between words of French and of English origin to a large extent come into being with the situation of English society at the time, it would be wrong to suggest that it was entirely because of this. Since Roman times Latin-speakers had a tendency to emphasize mental activity, their Germanic neighbours focussing on physical activity. The sheer cultural power of the Roman Empire, with its highly developed administrative, educational and artistic cultures, was probably the reason for this. This can be illustrated by the etymology of the types of suffix used to create adverbs in French and English. As has been mentioned in Unit 1, the modern French -ment form derives from the practice of adding the suffix -mente (meaning "mind") to an adjective , e.g. viva + mente = "with a lively mind". By contrast, the modern English -ly form derives from the practice of adding -lik meaning "body" to an adjective.

7 The re-emergence of English

As time went on fewer and fewer aristocrats spoke French as a mother tongue. By 1400 virtually every adminstrative document in England was being written in English, and with the accession (in 1399) of Henry IV to the English throne the country had its first king for well over three centuries whose mother tongue was English. There are various reasons why French ultimately failed to replace English as the national language. First was the obvious demographical factor: the Normans, for all their numbers and their political power, were heavily outnumbered by the English. Second, unlike Celtic at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, English was a highly developed language (thanks to its merger with Old Norse), and a language with a considerable cultural prestige stemming from its literary heritage and tradition of scholarship. A third reason was the loss of Normandy to the French crown in 1204. As a result English noblemen who had estates in Normandy were forced by their new French overlord to declare allegiance to France or England. This often meant that estates were divided up between sons along national lines, with one son inheriting estates in England and another those in Normandy. With ties with Normandy severed, anglicisation of the nobility gained much greater momentum.

The experience of taking on loan words from Norman French was to make English more tolerant towards foreign words and less prone to try and replace them with native words. This made it easier for English to take on yet more loan words later on from Central French, which it did in much greater abundance than it did with Norman French. Furthermore words were still being imported directly from Latin by scholars and clerics where no satisfactory word existed in English, as with client, conviction, dissolve, recipe, conflict and dissent.

This tendency would gain momentum during the 1500s. The advent of printing in 1476 was making the spread of learning and scholarship much easier, and with the explosion of interest in science and knowledge that occured during the Renaissance the way was paved for the most concentrated influx of Latin words in the history of English. A vast number of scholarly books appeared during this period, drawing heavily on writings in Latin, and as a result writers tended to invent new technical terms based on the Latin originals. Terms dating from this period include radius, apparatus, focus, lens, desperate, complex, immaturity and relevancy. Although the great majority of imported words came from Latin, some came from other languages such as French (entrance, invite), Greek (anathema, pathos), Italian (opera, artichoke), Spanish (armada, sherry) and Dutch (dock, yacht).

But if English was importing a lot of words during this period, many more were being coined through native English methods of word formation. For example, many of the words taken from French or Latin were combined with English affixes (a prefix and or a suffix ) to create yet more words, such as beautiful or gentleness or else English words were used with Latin affixes, as with fulfilment. Furthermore, words could be created through compounding, that is joining two words together, as in shipwreck and ferryboat. Also new words could be created by changing their grammatical roles of existing ones so that, for example nouns could be used as verbs (a smile) and vice versa (to market). This type of conversion is much easier in English than in more inflected languages such as French because the lack of inflection characteristic of English words serves to disguise a word's grammatical class, thereby making it easier to give words different functions. The ease with which English could both take on and create new words - a characteristic it has retained today - has meant that English has an extremely large vocabulary compared with comparable languages such as French and German.

Furthermore, with all these channels for words from Latin, there are a large number of instances in English where words have the same Latin root but differ in form and meaning because of their different route to English. For example, frail and fragile; blame and blaspheme; sure and secure; chief and chieftain; esteem and estimate; camera and chamber. Some of these instances are due to differences between Norman and Central French. For example, in Central French the Latin hard c sound [k] was softened to ch but this did not happen in Norman French. As such English has words such as catch, cattle, carry and cancel from Norman French but chase, chattel, chariot and chancellor from Central French. Similar factors explain the difference between jail and gaol, launch and lance, market and merchant, and ward and guard. Also Latin-based words in English words sometimes derive from languages other than French or Latin, leading to the doublets stanza (Italian) and stance (Old French) and cargo (Spanish) and charge (French).

It has been mentioned that after the fusion of Old English and Old Norse in the century before the Norman Conquest English became a language that tended to use word-order or grammatical words rather than inflection to express grammatical function. In the period from about 1550 to 1700 (termed Early Modern English) this tendency is manifested in a range of grammatical changes. One of the most significant of these is the progressive disappearance of the subjunctive. Similarities between the indicative and subjunctive forms of verbs made it easy to confuse the two, and the weakening of unstressed vowels caused a further blurring between them. A concurrent rise in the use of auxiliary verbs meant that the subjunctive was increasingly expressed by words such as may or should rather than by word endings. This led to the situation we have in in English today where the subjunctive is rarely used except in conditional clauses such as Were he to come earlier or fixed expressions such as Long live the King. It is worth mentioning that during the Early Modern English period there was nothing particularly educated about the use of the subjunctive – drama of the time puts the subjunctive in the mouths of characters of all social backgrounds. However, during the 18th century, when English became increasingly codified, grammarians attempted to restore the use of the subjunctive, and this led to the tendency for the subjunctive – when it was used - to have a formal or academic connotation. This connotation, present in the English subjunctive today, contrasts with the status of the subjunctive in French and other European languages, which is in most cases neutral.

Another grammatical change arising from the movement away from inflection was the progressive disappearance of the distinction between the familiar and polite forms for expressing the second person singular - thou, thee, thy and you, you, your. This distinction, which was imported from French a considerable time after the Norman Conquest, was never consistently adopted in English and the forms were often used indiscriminately. With English possessing two forms expressing identical meaning, the thou form gradually disappeared, although it was kept alive in poetry perhaps because its verbal inflection -(e)st (as in thou helpest) provided an extra syllable to the metre. A further change arising from the movement away from inflection was an increased use of phrasal verbs (to call somebody up) and prepositional verbs (to call on somebody). This latter tendency provided yet another source of new words - this time Germanic ones - to add to those already derived in various ways from Latin.

8 The mutual influence of English and French

If the Early Modern English period signalled a new stability in the English language, then the growing political and cultural influence of Britain during this period meant that the linguistic traffic between English and French became increasingly two-way. There were of course a significant number of French imports into English, and these include anatomy, muscle, entrance, invite, promenade, liaison, repartee, double entendre and faux pas in the 17th century and bouquet, connoisseur, liqueur, envelope, nuance and souvenir in the 18th century. English imports into French during the 17th century include pacquebot, rhum and flanelle, whilst 18th-century imports include humour, club, comité and redingote (from "riding coat"). Some of the words from this period came into English directly from Latin before being imported into French, as with importation and sentimental. Conversely some English words imported into French are in fact re-importations with a totally changed meaning, as with le budget, which comes from the French word bougette meaning "small bag", and le fioul (meaning "fuel") which comes from fouaille meaning "wood for a fire". This tendency of reimportation would continue in the 19th century: le tunnel comes from tonnelle meaning "arbour"; le rail comes from reille meaning "iron bar"; le ticket comes from estiquet meaning “note” or “label”; le sport comes from Old French desport meaning “pleasure”; le tennis derives from the Anglo-Norman tenetz meaning "receive" as called by the server to their opponent; and le jean comes from Jannes, the Old French word for Genoa where a denim-style fustian cloth called jean was developed. (The English word denim itself probably derives from serge de Nîmes, meaning a serge fabric from Nîmes, but did not make its way back into French, which uses the anglicism jean.)

Whilst the 19th and 20th centuries saw a steady flow of French loan words into English, this period saw an increasing influx of English words into French. 19th-century French imports into English include cliché, chef, menu, restaurant, gourmet and blasé but these are outweighed by the number of English imports into French due to Britain's increasing influence in the areas of industry, textiles, sport and fashion. These words include ballast, wagon, jersey, mackintosh, smoking, handicap, match, record, dandy and snob. This imbalance would become even greater in the 20th-century. French imports into English such as garage, crêpe and dressage are greatly outweighed by the number of English loan words into French. This is of course to a large extent due to the dominance of the United States in domains such as business, technology and media, giving rise to such borrowings as gadget, management, fast-food, hamburger, know-how and CD. But the success of the integration of English words into French also owes a lot to the fact that many English new words such as clip or look are short and easy to pronounce and memorize compared to their French rivals. But if some English words adopted into French simply replace existing French words, many take on a much narrower meaning than their English original or their French rival, and in this way can be said to be genuine additions to French. Thus the French word meeting does not mean "meeting" in the broad business or administrative sense (réunion in French) but has the narrower meanings of "political meeting" or "sporting meeting". Also, as mentioned in Unit 1 many words from English undergo a significant change in form or meaning, such as the many words ending -ing or -man e.g. pressing (dry cleaners), shampooing (shampoo) footing (jogging) and lifting (face lift), rugbyman (rugby player) and tennisman (tennis player).

However great the recent influx of English loan words into French, though, the fact remains that their number pales into insignificance when compared to the overall number of words of French origin in modern English. In the case of a very small number of these, the original French word has fallen out of use. For example, caterpillar comes from the Old French chatepelouse meaning "hairy cat"; match comes from meiche meaning "wick"; mushroom comes from mousseron; and toast comes from toster meaning "to roast". But the great majority of French loan words in English do still exist in French, and this has created a strong and visible lexical link between the two languages. In many cases loan words are broadly speaking synonymous with their French equivalents (for example question, culture, natural, exception and general) although it is rare to find word pairs that have an identical meaning in every context except with more specialist terminology (for example psychology / psychologie, agriculture / agriculture, electricity / électricité). However, very often French loan words in English have over the years been subject to different influences than have their French equivalents, and consequently have a very different meaning. This has given rise to the phenomenon of faux amis or "false friends", such as éventuel meaning possible and not eventual.

9 Differences between English and French

The two languages have similar word order for affirmative sentences, but not for negatives, questions, reported speech and relative clauses or when using personal pronouns. More specific differences include: