Origins of the French Lexical Borrowings in Late Middle English Weaponry
Origins of the French Lexical Borrowings in Late Middle English Weaponry

Summary/Abstract: According to Philip Durkin (2014) French borrowings constitute a great part of the formation of new words in late Middle English, varying between 39% in the first half of the 14th century to 17% in the second half of the 15th century (45% and 23% respectively if we include those whose origin is unclear, whether Latin or French). Among the number of French lexical borrowings incorporated during the 14th and 15th centuries, we may find native Romance terms as well as some others from different sources thanks to the previous contact of French with other languages. Most of the borrowings in the military terminology of the period have a French origin. Funk (1998: 221) mentions that most of the English words that concern the science of war are of French or French-Italian origin. Likewise, the military terminology in French contains a great amount of lexical borrowings from other languages that will be later incorporated in English. Duval (2009: 19) makes reference to the importance of the Frankish influence in the French lexical domains and activities related to war. The data base of this research is made up of 175 terms, which are limited to nouns referring to offensive and defensive weapons, from 67% to 74% of those items are borrowings from French. Most of them have a native Romance origin, but there are also terms from Celtic, Germanic and other languages. This paper focuses on the analysis and quantification of the French lexical borrowings in the late Middle English terminology of weapons, including borrowings first incorporated from Norman French and later from Central French. The main goal is to trace back the origins of those lexical borrowings and their acceptance into English and to analyse its quantitative impact on the late Middle English lexicon, a period during which many new terms were introduced from other languages that substituted and changed notably the native traditional vocabulary the English language previously had.

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