Borrowings: Practice

1. First recorded usages. Many new words came into English during the Middle English period. Just before the definition of a word, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, gives the date or century when the word was first recorded in use. Find that date or century for each of these words. What language did each come from?

army	gentleman	Justice
royal	castle	Guide
master	servant	Chief
herb	roast	soldier

2. Word origins. In each group below, one word was used in Old English, one is a Middle English loan from French, and one is a Modern English loan from French. What origin do you think each word has?

a. chair, chaise lounge, stool 

b. table, tableau, tablet
c. (wheel) barrow, car, automobile 



3. Exercises on doublets and triplets:

a. You can take a “bit” (English word) of cheese but if you want to use a more elegant word you take a “__________” of cheese. (Find the French equivalent. Look for 3 more examples of doublets and write them.

b. Look up in a monolingual dictionary the meaning of the following doublets. Can you find semantic differences between both synonyms?
- Doom/Judgment

- House/mansion

- Wish/desire

c. Find the missing word. Triplets.

	Triplets
Old English	Latin	French
Fast	secure	_______________
_____________	Ascendant	Mount
Time	_____________	age

4. The term meat comes from Indo-European and distinguishes all solid food from all liquid food. The term was used throughout the Old English period; the OE term flœsc (flesh) was also used, though specifically implying the “muscular tissue, or the tissues generally, of animals, regarded as an article of food”. These two terms described the eaten part of animals, whose names are still used in Present Day English: cíecen (chicken), *picga (pig), scéap (sheep), cu (cow).  

But during the Middle English period, the French influence introduced words that describe the cooked form of meat: pulterie (poultry), motoun (mutton), boef (beef) amd veel (veal).

The result is that the words for the whole animals or parts of the animals that would eventually be used to produce the final, edible product were native words –Old English words-, and the end result, as well as the title of the recipe, was French loans.  This signifies the importance of the finished, edible product, with less importance placed on what specifically went into making the stew –as French had much more prestige than English. 

So, provide the English equivalents from the following French borrowings:

- Veal:  

- Mutton: 

- Poultry: 

- Venison: