Look, I don't have anything against the French personally. I visited once, the countryside was lovely and the people left me generally alone, which is ideal considering I'm an incurable introvert and I would, generally, like to be left alone. In fact, I've heard several people say that the French are basically the Americans of Europe, which I took to mean that stereotypically they brag about how great they are to everyone else in Europe and everyone else in Europe tolerates it because the food is good. So perhaps I should feel a sort of kinship with them; on a global perspective the only difference between that and the stereotypical American is that people only put up with us because our military is scary and, nationally, we're prone to violent mood swings.
Oof, feeling kinship with the French might actually be a trade up.
Anywho, the point is that I don't have anything against the French people. As a student of English and an amateur linguist, however, I do have several bones to pick with the French language.
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| Amongst them that spelling of "amateur". Also, thanks Google |
A quick history lesson for those of you who managed to make it through school without a clear picture of how this all went down. England, where a lot of American culture takes its roots along with the language, is no stranger to conquest. There was that whole British Empire thing, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about. If you've been reading my blog for a while (or if you go peruse the Language tag at the bottom of this post), you'll see plenty of references to the progenitor of the language we speak, called Old English, which itself comes from archaic versions of the Germanic languages, including things like Old Frisian, Dutch, and Old Norse. Old Norse is actually how we wound up speaking Old English on the British Isles; because of how all those Angles and Saxons invaded and settled in England, pushing out the predominantly Gaelic speaking Scots, Britons, and Welsh.
Grossly over-simplifying, this is where Anglo-Saxon comes from in reference to England.
So what does that have to do with the French? Well, you may be aware that much later France and England didn't get along with each other particularly well. They were both reasonably powerful nations during the rise of Medieval Europe, with natural resources and a lovely temperate climate, and they warred with each other a lot. If you know anything about Medieval Europe, you'll also know that conquerors of a place would also periodically intermarry a lot. This resulted in the upper class of England having to learn French (Norman French if we want to get into the weeds, which isn't a direct ancestor of modern French but rather a sibling to it) in order to, you know, talk to each other. Eventually we wound up with a situation where England itself was essentially a vassal state to several French Kings.
Among whom was Richard the Lionhearted. Yeah, the King Richard from all those quintessentially English Robin Hood stories... was French. Lived his whole adult life in France. Probably didn't speak a lick of English.
Again grossly over-simplifying, that's what's known as the Norman invasion. It was almost more a cultural invasion than a military one, resulting in a sudden influx of French upper-class. They were then responsible for a romanticizing of the then-primarily-Germanic Old English, resulting in Middle English and eventually the modern English we speak today. And it is due to that Norman influence that I have a bone to pick with the French language, because what had been a perfectly serviceable and largely intelligible linguistic tradition became an unholy mishmash of whatever nonsense people happened to be around. As such English is now filled with more exceptions to rules than actual rules and a methodology toward spelling so opaque that we have actual-pants spelling bees in school.
Do some Googling. Ours is the only language that makes sense for; everywhere else the pronunciation gives the spelling away basically 100% of the time.
And so we come to the subject of my ire today, so very near the end you may have been wondering whether there was a specific etymology in here anywhere; moist. It's a widely hated word in English, due to connotations and just the general sound of the thing. I sat thinking about it one day and became increasingly suspicious as to its origins, so I went and looked it up.
Moist, adj, late 14th century, "slightly wet". From Old French moiste, "damp", which may have come from the Latin slang for "moldy", muscides. One of the most universally hated words in English, and it comes from French.
Because of course it does. Next time we talk about ointment.
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