Founding America

English heavily borrows from other languages.

Have you ever wondered why we say cows and pigs roam the pastures, but they’re beef and pork on the plate? How about why we treat various animals differently when it comes to plurals – three birds, two fish, and five geese, for example? Or maybe you’ve noticed that to, too, and two sound the same, as do night and knight, despite diverse spellings. Surely English is a unique language with a history more mixed than most, right? Well, in some ways yes, but in many ways no (not to be confused with know). To understand why English sometimes seems so strange, let’s dive into the history of the world’s most prominent “lingua franca.”

Mixed and Hybrid Languages

English does borrow a lot of words from other languages – but that’s not unique. Most languages do. It does borrow more of its vocabulary from other languages than most. You might be surprised that English is not a Romance language derived from Latin spoken in the Roman Empire, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Even though many words sound the same – especially in English and French – English is a Germanic language, having more in common grammatically with modern German than other languages. That said, the history of the English language is long, well-traveled, and often violent. In each of its major historical interactions with other languages, English picked up some words.

Why do English and French seem so similar? The Norman conquest of AD 1066 brought French linguistic influence into English, overlaying a Romantic vocabulary over a Germanic grammatical base. In fact, from that point until about 1815, England and France spent about 700 years in off-and-on war. And as one side conquered territory from the other, each imposed its cultures and languages on the defeated. For hundreds of years, French was the primary language of aristocracy, law, and culture in the area, while English was deemed a peasant language.

In fact, French was so dominant in Europe from the 11th through 16th centuries that a blend of French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Arabic known as Lingua Franca became common for international dealings and trade between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Eventually, Lingua Franca became a general term for a prevalent language for international relations around the world, and the original mixed-up language died out. Today, English is the most common.

But that long history with French meant changing vocabulary and rules.

English was the language of peasants in those early days, so the English words for animals remained when dealing with livestock. But the rich and powerful all preferred French, so those who could afford their own chefs ate beef and pork rather than cows and pigs, and the French culinary terms stuck. As well, many of the common, informal words are of Germanic origin, while the Latin or French remains used for formal situations. For example, you might “ask” your friend a question, but you would probably “inquire” about a job opening.

In fact, an estimated 40% of English is made up of loanwords from French, with another 30% or so from Latin. Still, it’s far from the most mixed language. Nearly half of Maltese, a Semitic language, comes from Italian. Japanese has borrowed extensively from Chinese, and roughly 40% of its modern vocabulary comes from English. Romanian is a Romance language that adopted many Slavic words, and Persian is often cited as being up to 50% Arabic loanwords.

Those Pesky Plurals

Beyond the loanwords and the dual-layer vocabulary between casual and more formal situations, French also contributed some structural rules. Most commonly, when we want to make a word plural in English, we add “s” or “es.” But that’s French, not original English. In Old English, one might find a mūs rummaging through the food stores, and where there’s one mūs, there are likely to be many mȳs. Today we use the words mouse and mice. Similarly, the words for goose and geese were gōs and gēs. These modern versions – which might seem like irregular cases – are the normal Germanic (English) way of making words plural. Adding an “s” to the end of the word is a French influence. In America, you might have a car or maybe you have two cars. In French, you’d have une voiture or deux voitures.

So what about a moose? We borrowed that word from Algonquian (a Native American language that uses the same word for singular and plural), so the plural of moose is moose. The plural of fish is generally considered fish, though fishes is common enough to be considered acceptable.

The Great English Vowel Shift

Now, what about all those words that don’t sound the way they’re spelled? That is a result of the Great Vowel Shift – a massive change in how English speakers pronounced long vowels between 1400 and 1700 , moving them higher up in the mouth. For example, “meet” used to sound more like “mate,” “mate” was more like “maht.” “Bite” sounded more like “beet,” and “mouse” sounded more like “moose.”

Knight (and any other word with the now-silent k out front) sounded more like “kuh-nicht.” The silent g in front of other words also was pronounced. “Two” – now pronounced “too or tu” – was “twa,” which rhymes with “spa” or “two,” which rhymed with “show.”

There was yet another split between American and British English during the colonial times, as leaders in the new land wanted to differentiate from the language of the empire. That’s why we dropped the “u” in words such as color (UK: colour) and honor (honour). And if Benjamin Franklin, influential in this movement, had his way, things would be even more different. He and Noah Webster (yep, the guy from the dictionary) wanted to eliminate the letters C, J, Q, W, X, and Y and add a few others to account for different sounds. In a test letter to Polly  Stevenson in 1768, he wrote: “ɥi am, mɥi diir frind, iurs afeksɥnetli.” What in the world did that mean? “I am, my dear friend, yours affectionately.”

Perhaps we’re lucky today that the more extreme of his suggestions didn’t catch on!

1. English is a mixed, or hybrid, language – but that’s not unusual.
2. Over the course of a couple centuries, English speakers shifted how they pronounced vowels, leading to many words not sounding how they’re spelled.
3. English is a Germanic language, but because of centuries of war, it was heavily influenced by the Romance language French.