The Enrichment of the Language

The Enrichment of the Language:

There are those who deplore the addition of French words to the English language. Writing manuals encourage students to use simple, “Anglo-Saxon words” rather than French or Latinate forms (though such “simple” words as face, cruel, grain, carry, tempt, strife, spirit, pure, real, and stout are French borrowings. But French did in fact enormously enrich the English language. France was the leading culture of Europe at this time, and the words that come in from French give English a greater semantic range and more poetic power. Yes, there is a spare beauty about Old English, and it deserves to be more widely read and enjoyed. But Middle English became a beautiful language in its own right, and in the hands of a genuine master like Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the three greatest poets in the history of English, Middle English becomes both beautiful and poignant. Here are just Chaucer’s most famous lines, but he wrote thousands of others that are also works of beauty, drawing as they do both on the English tradition and the techniques and vocabulary of the continent. Chaucer spoke French well and in fact could not have created his art without the contribution of French. Yet he was proudly English, as he demonstrates when he describes “all God’s plenty” in his “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, using a mix of French and English words in a new, simplified Middle English grammar, that in later centuries would go on to take over the linguistic globe:

Whan that April with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licuor,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the night with open ye