Some French words that are similar to Welsh

[Jon Head]

Bonjour a tous!

As I am learning more French, I am starting to notice a lot of French words that are similar to their Welsh equivalents but different from English. Just in case anyone is interested, here ere are a few examples: -

Francais	Cymraeg	English
pont	pont	bridge
église	eglwys	church
mer	môr	sea
triste	trist	sad
fenêtre	ffenestr	window
terre	tir	land

What I am staring to realise is that Welsh is much more different from French and English than French and English are to each other. Welsh has words in common with English, but these tend to be much more modern, such as computer terms. I therefore find the commonality between these much more traditional words in Welsh and French quite interesting.

I tried to make some sense of it by looking at this diagram, which is quite interesting too, but it has put my head in a bit of a spin!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree...

A bientôt

Jon

[Neil Coffey]

Rather than being "borrowed from French", these words were actually borrowed from the ancestor of French, Latin, during the Roman Conquest of Britain. Notice how they relate to things that the Roman conquerors either brought with them or were conquering: technology, religion, territory/administration...

The language that is now English actually descends from a language that arrived later on the island, so that is why English 'missed the boat' as it were for borrowing these basic words from Latin.

In English, we do have words based on the same roots as various of these: "fenestrate", "ecclesiastical", "maritime", "terrestrial". But notice how these are more 'learned' words, borrowed at a later date from French and/or Latin at a later stage. (While French, Spanish etc are the modern forms of Latin, Latin was also preserved until a few centuries ago in an artificial, classical form as a common language for use by the church, administration and science, and that is the source of a lot of these learned forms; others came from or under influence of French, which was for a period the language of the ruling classes in England.)

P.S. The word "trist" was apparently used in English at one time meaning 'sad', but has fallen out of usage.

[Jon Head]

Thanks Neil

That's very interesting. Would a very simplistic historical account be something like this?

Before the Roman conquest, the language of Britain was something like modern day Welsh, which then became influenced by Latin after the conquest, such as those words in my original post.

Centuries later, Germanic invaders brought what was the precursor of modern day English. Successive invasions pushed the speakers of the native language out to the extremities of the land - Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and over to Ireland.

The Norman conquest then brought a lot of French influence into the English language. The Celtic languages were less influenced by this as they were more isolated in the extremes of the country.

Although very simplistic, does that seem reasonable? It's fascinating stuff.

Jon

[Neil Coffey]

Yes, that's more or less the situation as I understand. I would check with a history specialist but I think that actually it was mainly the Germanic invaders of the 5th century that pushed the Celtic speakers towards the extremities.

As you say, the Norman conquest then brought French influence to English.

And THEN, in addition to that, there were later "re-borrowings" from classical Latin (sometimes via French and other Romance languages) into English: essentially many of the 'learned' words for concepts in religion, science, music, law/administration etc. For example, many many words ending in -atio, -ate, -ion in English actually came from French/Latin. (There were even re-borrowings from Latin back into French-- a Latin word essentially 'went out of use' for a millennium or so, then was artificially re-introduced.)

As a rough rule of thumb, the French words surviving from the Norman conquest tend to be the 'basic' words that have been 'mangled' a bit more, because by the time they entered English they had gone through a millennium of development in Latin>Old French, and since then have been through a few more centuries of development. Whereas related words that are more 'learned' and also more 'recognisable' compared to the Latin and to French today tend to have come later. So, for example, "beef" and "peace" are Old French borrowings from the time of the Conquest (see how compared to "boeuf" and "paix" they look a bit 'mangled'), whereas "bovine" and "pacific" (cf "bovin" / "pacifique") are more recent artificial 'borrowings' (or really, 'coinings under the influence of') Latin/French.

But you can also appreciate that "beef"/"bovine" and "peace"/"pacific" ultimately share a common root in Latin, just they entered English by different roots at different times.

[Neil Coffey]

P.S. Example of the 're-borrowing' phenomenon. The Latin word for "childish" was 'puerilis'. And the word 'puéril' exists in French. So you might think that this word has simply survived for the last 2,000 years from Latin.

But in fact, 'puerilis' probably fell out of use in the language as it was 'naturally' spoken by around 500 AD and then 'puéril' was artificially re-introduced into French in the 1400s.

[Jon Head]

Many thanks for your very interesting replies Neil, and apologies for hijacking a forum on French Grammar to talk about British History!