Magic Man
Reaper of Conversation
That's true of the people we call French today, but not of the people they called French back then. The word French is derived from the OE word frencisc ('Frankish'), which referred just to the Franks. And the Franks began to appear under that name in Roman histories back when they were still on the east side of the Rhine.
English of course refers to the Angles, and the Angles were called that by Tacitus way back when they were still just in Angeln.
Of course the current pronunciations were not in use, but their earlier forms were. But back then, they referred only to their specific Germanic tribes. Over time, they have come to refer to more people than they originally referred to, but back in the 11th century, I think they generally referred just to the Germanic tribes.
I don't think we disagree on the idea that Angli and Franci referred, at one time, to just the Angles and the Franks, and that these folks were still in lands that today are in Germany. I also don't think we disagree that, today, English and French refer to lots of people who aren't necessarily descendants of the Angles and the Franks. And I don't think we disagree that the two sets of words are essentially the same words at different stage of progression. Tell me if I'm wrong about any of that.
I think our disagreement is on when the words shifted from referring to just the two Germanic tribes to referring to a wider group of culturally related people.
I think that shift might have happened for the word English fairly early before the Conquest. But I don't think it happened with the word French until closer to the Hundred Years' War.
I'd say it's more that, even at the time of the conquest, that area was called, basically, Land of the Franks. The Normans weren't, of course, Franks, but they were in the Land of the Franks, and spoke the language of the Franks. They could have been distinguished as Normans, yes, but, frankly D), they were still part of the Frankish kingdom.
Anyway, the point of my comment was just that I don't think it's truthful to call the Normans "not French". As we use the term "French", I would say that they are exactly that.
And I don't think that use of the word came about until closer to Louis XIV's time, and maybe not even then.
That's fine, but, as we use the word, they were French.
It had some impressive effects on the lexicon, including giving us very common terms in semantic fields like kinship, food, and so forth. But most of our Latinate vocabulary didn't come from the Normans, but from a longstanding tradition of borrowing Latin words for technical terminology (and, later, general purpose technology to sound more educated), and that tradition goes back to before the Conquest. And outside the lexicon, it had no effect at all.
I don't question that the Conquest had a pretty big impact on English, but I think most of the impact we tend to attribute to the Normans is actually a continuation of trends that were in English before the Conquest.
Well, on this we disagree, then. It wasn't just words that came into English through French, but styles and grammar points. Obviously Latin had a big impact on English, too, but so did French. I think French did more than you give it credit for.