I call you to arms against the strange ascendency of French in our land, in our education, in our upper classes. This tongue is itself an invader, brought in the villainous ships of the scoundrel Norman conqueror. It is the tongue of Napoleon, the tongue of bloody and anarchious revolutionaries against monarchy, the tongue of a people renowned for their loose morals. And yet, despite all this, despite that we are near the beginning of a new and enlightened century, despite the fact that technological innovation is skyrocketing, despite the fact that unprecedented quantities of pea soup are being dished up to Londoners, we persist in the absurd habit of making instruction in French, of all languages, an integral part of our children’s education. No longer must this be so, no longer must this invading tongue be taught to our children from infancy, no longer—
Oops. I’m off by about a century, a continent, and an ocean.
But I do have a problem: my characters keep speaking French.
All right, so I don’t mean that my heroine does this: “Clare, why are you taking me toward the thing? What am I supposed to do? Pourquoi cela doit-il être pour que mon chien sache plus sur ce qui se passe que moi? Je veux dire, je ne me dérange pas que d’autres personnes connaissent plus que moi sur ce qu’il faut faire dans une situation, mais ce serait bien que je puisse au moins avoir une meilleure idée de ce qu’il faut faire que le chein.”
(Translation credit Google Translate. So if it’s bad French, as it probably is, blame the algorithms, not me. All I know is that it used to be good English. My foreign language is Spanish.)
However, some frustrating elements of my vocabulary are French. The French words used in my book which spring fastest to mind: cliché and touché. And non-Anglicized foreign terms aren’t my only problem. English is a language of promiscuity, in origin and conduct, most irritating to the perfectionist writer of alternate-universe fantasy. Read: English is born of half the languages of Europe, and doesn’t see one reason why it shouldn’t take anybody else’s word it pleases.
English: you have these cool-sounding words philos and sophos? Nice! Let’s have some philosophy!
English: you call sauces salsa? That’s a cool word! And we love that sauce—we’ll just call it salsa!
English: eh, our word hackneyed is getting kinda, well, hackneyed. Let’s give clichéd a spin.
English: you have a word that goes miles, milites? Awesome! We could start calling our soldiers militia!
English: you guys have a word schadenfreude that means taking delight in the misfortunes of others? We’re, like, totally wowed. Let’s use that one!
Greek, Spanish, French, Latin, German: uh, okay.
In the fantasy world I’m working with, there are three languages: the “common tongue,” which is English, the “old tongue,” which is Anglo Saxon (a.k.a. Old English), and a language spoken by the yfel thyngs, of which I know not a word, and which is mainly described as sounding really evil.
That’s all very well. I don’t fancy writing in an self-invented language, nor do I fancy that anyone would fancy reading what I wrote in said self-invented language. But—technically—in this setup, all of the words used in the “common tongue” should either be derived from Old English or have evolved on their own. No French. No Latin. No Greek. No German.
And, after a glance through Chapter One of my book and a little checking in a dictionary app: no theoretically (Latin); no in (Latin again); no armed as in weapons (Latin via Old French); no definitely (you guessed it—Latin); no perfect (Latin via once more Old French), no protagonist (Greek, for a change); no contrary (Latin via Anglo-French, whatever that is); no logical (to liven things up, from Greek via both Latin and Old French); no—need I go on?
You can probably tell that out of French, Greek, Latin, and German, which are (I think) the main progenitors of English, I’ve had most experience with Latin. To me, these are the most obvious of our words-derived-from-other languages—but face it. We really don’t have many words that aren’t more or less from somebody else. There’s more of French in our language than just cliché, touché, and faux. English absorbed a lot of French after the Norman Conquest. And even the Anglo Saxon I mentioned? It’s the British (Anglo) version of Saxon, which was spoken by the approximately-proto-German invaders of the Britain from way-long-ago. That’s where most of the German comes in. And why we speak English, not British, which would be whatever language was spoken by whoever first happened on the British Isles back in BC something.
So I’m not really sure what the point of this post is. I could say that I want to be educational. But more likely I’m just griping about things that only a perfectionist would be worried about anyways, and pointing out other words English got from other languages to justify my cliché and touché, which I don’t want to get rid of. But if you’ve borne with me long enough to still be reading, I hope that it has at least been somewhat entertaining or educational griping.
And that proto? It’s from Greek.