Religious words, not surprisingly, make up a goodly proportion of the list. Although a trinity of key words that attest to the very heart of belief—God, heaven, sin—are actually of Germanic origin, Latin-originated words first recorded either in the eleventh century or some while later—many coming into Middle English through French—and dealing with churchly mechanicals, are there in abundance: abbot, alb, anchorite, angel, antichrist, canticle, chalice, cloister, font, idol, martyr, pope, priest, prophet, psalm, relic. But God was not alclass="underline" visitors from the Continent over several centuries brought with them the names of plants, fruits, and trees hitherto entirely unfamiliar to the islands: cedar, cucumber, fig, ginger, laurel, lentil, lovage, radish; and they told of exotic animals quite unknown to the Teutonically-influenced Britons—elephant, leopard, scorpion, tiger. The fact that dirge, marshmallow, periwinkle, and sock also quite probably entered the islands at around this time and probably from the same ultimate source might seem at first blush slightly more perplexing, except that the visitors probably sang in a dull monotone, knew more than a little of the local botany, and wore soft foot-coverings to protect them against the raw English winters—and moreover had names for them all.
New Norse words were introduced in a far less congenial fashion. The Vikings began raiding and pillaging England in the eighth century; the Danes did much the same a century later, first ruling all of north-east England under terms of a treaty to which they submitted the weakling English, then in 991 going further and seizing the English throne, running all England's affairs for the next 25 years. Along with making mayhem in, or a fiefdom out of, England, both sets of northern adventurers introduced into English hundreds of their own words—many that turned out to be of the most profound importance and yet, in terms of their exoticism and interest, among the most prosaic in the tongue.
Both, same, seem, get, give, they, them, and their all stem from these northern, ice-bound people too. Skirt, sky, scathe, skill, and skin employ a well-known two-letter Scandinavian beginning. And we can somehow understand that the gloomy antecedents of Ibsen would have given to English the likes of awkward, birth, dirt, fog (perhaps), gap, ill, mire, muggy, ransack, reindeer, root, rotten, rugged, scant, scowl, and wrong. There is rather less obvious connection with cake, sprint, steak, and wand—though these jollier words did indeed come from the Norsemen too. As did Thursday—or rather, it was modified by them, since an earlier version of the day that honoured Thor did in fact appear in Old English itself.
But for all this, Old English was first and foremost a homegrown language—by far its greatest component being the Teutonic stock of words gifted by the Jutlanders and Frisians and Angles who began to drift into the population in the wake of Hengist and Horsa. The total accumulation of Latin and Norse loanwords (and a triflingly small number of probable French lendings, too—among them words like prisen, castel, and prud, which equate to today's prison, castle, and proud ) amount to no more than three per cent of Old English's word stock; Germanic words account for almost all the rest. And though we glibly say that the language as written and spoken 1,000 years ago is recognizable to the modern ear—it is certainly more so than the Celtic of the very early British—the numbers suggest otherwise: something like nine out of every ten of the Old English words have since fallen into disuse. It was really not until Old English began to transmute itself into Middle English that we start to see and hear and read something that is a simulacrum of what we see and hear and read today.
It was the invasion of the Norman French that changed everything. The defeat of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 resulted in the installation of a dynasty of French kings on the throne in London (the first, the Hastings victor William I, actually spending very little time in England), and for the next 300 years the French held sway over almost all areas of English power, governance, and culture. Norman French became the language of England's administration and of the country's politer forms of intercourse. Old English came briefly to be despised, regarded haughtily as the language of the peasant and the pleb.
And yet, though much changed, Old English did in fact survive. It survived in a way that the British of the Celts did not manage to survive the Germanic invasion six centuries before. After a century-and-a-half of linguistic mystery when no one is certain quite what happened to the language, Old English lived on, transmuted itself into what is now called Middle English, adopted thousands of new loanwords from the French and became stronger by doing so (doubling its word stock in no time at all, to the 100,000 or so words of the twelfth-century lexicon), and finally emerged, fully established, to be displayed to greatest advantage for all time in the writings of that most impressive of the early figures of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer.
Since this chapter aimed principally to explain (or remind those who know) about the origins of the English vocabulary, and about the means that have been sought to catalogue and enumerate its complicated immensity, it is unhappily (because it is so fascinating) of little relevance to write much about Chaucer's literary achievement, or about the sheer beauty and staggering accomplishment of his poetry and prose. He tells us how the English men and women of the fourteenth century spoke to one another; he tells us how they cursed and complained and questioned and told each other jokes; he ranges in his interests from the highest-flown kind of rhetoric to the most banal of domestic chit-chat. It is the quantity, the breadth, and the assortment of his writings that elevate him above all others of his time; and more's the pity that we cannot linger here to revel in his legacy.
Chaucer's vocabulary, reflective of all that was said and written around him, shows clearly the great measure of change that by his time had come upon the language. In the 858 lines in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, for example, there are almost 500 French (or rather, Norman French) loanwords. Historical studies suggest that by 1365, some 300 new French words were being incorporated into English every year. But it must be stressed that it was not that French was being spoken; the English language, reviving itself from its mysterious dark age, was including and assimilating new French-originated words, speakers and writers using them as replacements for words that had vanished during the time when spoken and written French did dominate the nation's language.
And so we find, for instance, words (from the Norman French—and in many cases, of course, ultimately from the Latin or the Greek) of administration and law—accuse, adultery, chamberlain, crime, decree, duke (though not lord, lady, knight, or earl, which are all home-grown Old English, displaying Orwell's favoured Anglicity), inheritance, larceny, libel, messenger, pardon, parliament, reign, revenue, sue, treasurer, trespass, verdict, warrant, and warden. There are religious words, inevitably—cardinal, choir, saint, virgin; there are French words for foodstuffs—beef, pork, sausage, sugar, tart; for fashion—broidery, brooch, chemise, petticoat, satin, taffeta; for science— gender, geometry, medicine, plague, pulse, stomach, surgery; and for the home—blanket, closet, pantry, porch, scullery, wardrobe. There are, besides, a slew of phrases still familiar in Modern English: have mercy on, take leave, learn by heart, and on the point of, for example, 2 all have their origins in this wonderfully energetic period in English linguistic history.