The Story of French (5 page)

se non sabir, / Tazir, Tazir.

Mi star Mufti / Ti qui star ti?

Non intendir, / Tazir, tazir.

If you know, / you must respond.

If you don’t know, / you must shut up.

I am the Mufti, / who are you?

I don’t understand; / shut up, shut up.
²

It was the Crusades, which were dominated by the French, that turned
lingua franca
into the dominant language in the Mediterranean. More than half a dozen Crusades were carried out over nearly three centuries. Many Germans and English also participated, but the Arabs uniformly referred to the Crusaders as
Franj,
caring little whether they said
oc, oïl, ja
or
yes.
Interestingly, Arabic, the language of the common enemy, gave French roughly a thousand terms, including
amiral
(admiral),
alcool
(alcohol),
coton
(cotton) and
sirop
(syrup). The great prevalence of Arabic words in French scientific language—terms such as
algèbre
(algebra),
alchimie
(alchemy) and
zéro
(zero)—underlines the fact that the Arabs were definitely at the cutting edge of knowledge at the time.

The greatest export of
langues d’oïl
was to England, and it happened almost accidentally. The English king Edward the Confessor had promised his crown to two men: William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold Godwinson, a duke who had become his right-hand man. When Edward died in 1066, William sailed to Hastings and quickly put an end to any confusion by defeating Harold in battle and seizing the English crown. He made his
langue d’oïl
dialect, Norman, the language of the English Crown and inaugurated a succession of French-speaking kings that lasted three and a half centuries. The first English king to speak English as a mother tongue was Henry IV (ruled 1399–1413), and his successor, Henry V, was the first to write official documents in English.

French might have foundered in England if William had not been such a competent ruler. He settled his people everywhere, established a new feudal system and instituted an efficient administration that made England the first centralized regime of Europe. The English nobility, civil servants, employees of the palace and Court, and merchant class quickly fell into line and started speaking the language of the king, even those who were born in England. St. Thomas Becket was known in his time as Thomas à Becket, and the ancestors of the poet Chaucer were
chaussiers
(shoemakers). The mixture of a solidly established Romance aristocracy with the Old English grassroots produced a new language, a “French of England,” which came to be known as Anglo-Norman. It was perfectly intelligible to the speakers of other
langues d’oïl
and also gave French its first anglicisms, words such as
bateau
(boat) and the four points of the compass,
nord, sud, est
and
ouest.
The most famous Romance
chanson de geste,
the
Song of Roland,
was written in Anglo-Norman. The first verse shows how “French” this language was:

Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes,

set anz tuz pleins ad estéd en Espaigne,

Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne…

King Charles, our great emperor,

stayed in Spain a full seven years:

and he conquered the high lands up to the sea…

Francophones are probably not aware of how much England contributed to the development of French. England’s court was an important production centre for Romance literature, and most of the early legends of King Arthur were written in Anglo-Norman. Robert Wace, who came from the Channel Island of Jersey, first evoked the mythical Round Table in his
Roman de Brut,
written in French in 1155. An Englishman, William Caxton, even produced the first “vocabulary” of French and English (a precursor of the dictionary) in 1480.

But for four centuries after William seized the English crown, the exchange between Old English and Romance was pretty much the other way around—from Romance to English. Linguists dispute whether a quarter or a half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Part of the argument has to do with the fact that some borrowings are referred to as Latinates, a term that tends to obscure the fact that they actually come from French (as we explain later, the English worked hard to push away or hide the influence of French). Words such as
charge, council, court, debt, judge, justice, merchant
and
parliament
are straight borrowings from eleventh-century Romance, often with no modification in spelling.

In her book
Honni soit qui mal y pense,
Henriette Walter points out that the historical developments of French and English are so closely related that anglophone students find it easier to read Old French than francophones do. The reason is simple: Words such as
acointance, chalenge, plege, estriver, remaindre
and
esquier
disappeared from the French vocabulary but remained in English as
acquaintance, challenge, pledge, strive, remain
and
squire
—with their original meanings. The word
bacon,
which francophones today decry as an English import, is an old Frankish term that took root in English. Words that people think are totally English, such as
foreign, pedigree, budget, proud
and
view,
are actually Romance terms pronounced with an English accent:
forain, pied-de-grue
(crane’s foot—a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession),
bougette
(purse),
prud
(valiant) and
vëue.

Like all other Romance vernaculars, Anglo-Norman evolved quickly. At first William’s companions were mostly imported from Normandy and Maine, but as the years passed, Picards and Franks (as they called Parisians back then) were also brought to the English court. The English language is an excellent laboratory for examining the different trends that were at work in the formation of French. For the word
château,
the Norman variant
castel
produced
castle,
whereas the Paris variant
chastel
produced
chastelain
and
châtelaine.
There are many other examples; for example,
chasser
(to hunt), which was pronounced
chacier
around Paris, but
cachier
in Normandy, produced
chase
and
catch. Real, royal
and
regal
meant the same thing in Norman, Françoys and Latin respectively, but English took them on and gave them each different meanings. The term
real estate
comes from two Anglo-Norman terms.
Leal, loyal
and
legal
followed the same pattern, although
leal
(meaning both “loyal” and “legal”) has fallen out of use.
Warranty
and
guarantee
are the same word, pronounced with a Norman and a Françoys accent respectively; this difference in pronunciation also explains how Guillaume became William,
guerre
became
war,
and Gaul became Walloon.

English became the expression of a profound brand of nationalism long before French did. As early as the thirteenth century, the English were struggling to define their nation in opposition to the French, a phenomenon that is no doubt the root of the peculiar mixture of attraction and repulsion most anglophones feel towards the French today, whether they admit it or not. When Norman kings tried to add their French territory to England and unify their kingdom under the English Crown, the French of course resisted. The situation led to the first, lesser-known Hundred Years War (1159–1299). This long quarrel forced the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to take sides. Those who chose England got closer to the local grassroots, setting the Anglo-Norman aristocracy on the road to assimilation into English. In 1362 the English king went further, with the Statute of Pleadings, which forbade Anglo-Norman and declared English the only legal language in the kingdom—this was a century before the French made any such proclamation about their own language. Curiously, the Anglo-Norman judicial jargon known as Law French persisted until the eighteenth century. As well, the motto of the British Crown (
Dieu et mon droit
) and of the Order of the Garter (
Honi soit qui mal y pense
) are two heraldic vestiges of the period when the English Crown was French.

In spite of this estrangement, French remained the language of intellectuals and gentlemen for a long time, even in the English colonies. Some words are a testimony to that;
gentil
was borrowed three times as
gentle
(thirteenth century),
genteel
(sixteenth century) and
jaunty
(seventeenth century). Chaucer chose to tell his
Canterbury Tales
in English, but 150 years later Thomas More published his
Utopia
in Latin with a French translation; the English version appeared only after his death. The link between French and English remains strong to this day: Fourteen million British people visit France every year (only three million French travel to Great Britain). Statistics on second-language teaching show that French is doing consistently well in English-language countries (see table 4 and 6 in Appendix). And the number of borrowings from French into English remains considerable;
entrée, faux
and
garage
are recent acquisitions that nobody blinks at.

For anglophones, French remains the language of chic, taste and superiority to this day; as a mark of the love/hate relationship English-speakers tend to have with French, French can represent these qualities in a positive or a negative sense. The best-known example is the Harry Potter series. Author J. K. Rowling, who studied French at Exeter University, gave her nasty aristocratic characters names that are clearly inspired by Old French or that have a French etymology: Malfoy (bad faith), Voldemort (flight of death), Lestrange (stranger). William the Conqueror would probably never have believed that his victory would influence the semantics of English for ten centuries.

Back in France, the
langues d’oïl
were about to win a centuries-old Darwinian struggle with the
langues d’oc.
The victory owed much to the rising power of Paris and the Franks, but it was far from predictable. The Frankish ruler Charlemagne’s vast empire of a century earlier had not survived his sons’ rivalries and the Norsemen’s invasion. By the tenth century, French territory was a broken patchwork of principalities. The king of the Franks, who was established in Paris, was theoretically the greatest lord among many others and the ultimate arbiter of justice, but, in fact, his “inferiors”—the lords who ran Flanders, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Toulouse, Brittany and Anjou—were more powerful, and fiercely independent. They had their own armies, currencies and justice systems, and they answered to no one. Things were so bad that by 987 the Kingdom of the Franks had run out of successors. So they crowned one Hugues Capet, a Frank, though he did not speak German; in doing so, they broke with a tradition that dated back to Clovis.

Capet and his successors, the Capetians, played the game of alliances, marriages and war so well that over the next four centuries they enlarged their domain and re-established the precedence of royal justice over that of other lords and the Church. The Franks’ power grew, and no one raised an eyebrow when Philippe Augustus (ruled 1180–1223) opened his reign by declaring himself King of France rather than merely King of the Franks—though the significance of his declaration was not yet clear.

It was Philippe Augustus who delivered the death blow to the
langues d’oc,
bringing about their swift decline. The
langues d’oc
had still been surfing on the popularity of the troubadours, but the wind shifted in 1209, when Pope Innocent III preached a crusade against the Albigensians, a heretic sect based around Carcassonne, whose influence was spreading in southwestern France. It was the first crusade outside the Holy Land. Philippe saw the attack on the Albigensians as a great opportunity to flex his muscles and subdue his vassals, so he offered to help the Pope wipe them out. Much of Toulouse’s wealth was destroyed in the process, and the troubadours moved to Spain. The
langue d’oc
lost its lustre almost overnight and became frozen into a set of dialects, which it remains to this day.

Philippe Augustus grabbed half the territory of present-day France during his reign and appointed civil servants from Paris to impose his authority everywhere. These literate bourgeois spoke the language that came to be associated with true power: Françoys. What makes this period confusing in the history of French is that labels such as
France, Frank
and
Françoys
did not then have clear meanings, and were often used interchangeably with other terms. Before the first millennium, Françoys was associated strictly with the Franks who held power in Paris. Since these Franks spoke a northern dialect of Romance, all
langues d’oïl
dialects came to be called Françoys. By the twelfth century the term
françoys
also referred to a manner of writing and speaking that was unique to the Paris region. By the fourteenth century Françoys referred to a defined language, distinct from all the other
langues d’oïl;
it took another three centuries for
Françoys
to be spelled
Français.

By the fourteenth century Françoys was so well-established that neither the Black Death, which killed a good third of the population of France, nor the second Hundred Years War, which almost annihilated the French Crown, could make a dent in its influence. It was during this century that Marco Polo dictated the first account of his voyages,
Devisement du monde—
in French rather than Italian.