(b) To the Norsemen we also owe the words are, which pushed out the pure English syndon; talk; tarn; busk (dress); sky; hustings; fellow; odd; blunt; kid; and many more.
[27.] THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT (iii).—One result of this mixture of Danes with Englishmen was that both, in trying to speak the language or to use the words of each other, would naturally take firm hold of the root of the word, and allow the inflections to take care of themselves. Hence English words would lose their inflections; and this process, after it had once begun, would go on at an increased speed, the greater became the communication at church and at market between the English and the Danes. The same process is now going on in the United States. Thousands upon thousands of Germans have settled there among an English-speaking people. These Germans are rapidly falling into the habit of using their German words without inflections at all.
[28.] LATIN ELEMENT OF THE THIRD PERIOD (i).—This element is really Norman-French. French is Latin, with many of the inflections lost or changed, and with the pronunciation of the vowel-sounds enormously altered. But it did not come from the written Latin of books; but from the spoken Latin of soldiers and country-people (the lingua Romana rustica). Norman-French is the French spoken by the Normans, who lost their own Norsk or Danish speech, and learned French from their French wives and children. In the year 912, the Normans, under Duke Rolf or Rollo, wrested from King Charles the Simple the beautiful valley of the Seine, which was afterwards called by the name of Normandy. Norman-French was a dialect of French, and it differed in many respects from the French spoken in the other parts of France. This Norman-French was introduced into England as a court language by Edward the Confessor, in the year 1042; but it was brought into this country as a folk-speech by bands of Norman-French under the leadership of Duke William, the seventh Duke of Normandy, in the famous year 1066. This Norman-French, which they brought with them, became in England the language of the ruling classes, of the court, of the lawyers, and of all priests high in the ranks of the church. Books ceased to be written in English; boys translated their Latin into French; an English churl had to employ a lawyer who used only French in his law-papers and his pleadings; and even ‘uplandish’ or country people tried ‘to speak Frensch, for to be more ytold of.’ The saturation of English with French words probably reached its highest point at the end of the fourteenth century; and about that time a reaction set in. As has been before pointed out, in 1349, boys were allowed to translate their Latin into English; in 1362, Edward III. passed an act of parliament to authorise the use of English in courts of law; and even the Normans who lived in London had begun to use English in their families. But, by the time French had ceased to be the language of the upper classes, several thousand French words had found their way into our vocabulary, which had become to a large extent bilingual.[8]
[29.] NORMAN-FRENCH (ii).—The words which have been introduced into our pure English speech from the Normans fall easily into classes.
(a) Feudalism[9] and War.—Armour, chivalry, captain, battle, duke, fealty, realm.
The English word for armour was harness; and Macaulay uses harness in this sense in one of his Lays:
Now while the three were tightening
Their harness on their backs.
—Chivalry comes from the Fr. cheval, which is a broken-down form of the Low Latin word caballus, a horse.—Captain comes from the Lat. caput, a head.—Battle comes from the Fr. battre, to beat.—Duke comes from the Fr. duc—which comes from the Lat. dux (accusative ducem, most French nouns being borrowed from the accusative, not the nominative form of the Latin noun), a leader.—Fealty is the Norman-French form of the word fidelity, from the Lat. fidelitas, faithfulness.—Real-m is the noun from the adjective real, which comes from Lat. regal-is; it is the land ruled over by a rex or ré (a king).
30. (b) Hunting.—Forest, leveret, quarry, couple, venison.
Forest comes from the Low Lat.[10] foresta; from Lat. foris, out-of-doors. A forest does not necessarily contain trees; it is merely the name for the open hunting-ground as contrasted with the inclosed space called a park.—Leveret, a young hare, from the Fr. lièvre; from the Lat. lepus (-oris).—Quarry comes from the Lat. cor, the heart, and at first meant the heart and intestines, which were thrown to the dogs who hunted down the wild beast. Milton has the phrase, ‘scents his quarry from afar.’—Couple comes from the Lat. copula, a band.—Venison means hunted flesh, and comes from the Fr. venaison, which comes from the Lat. verb venari, to hunt.