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Many words in the English vocabulary are of French origin, most coming from the Anglo-Norman spoken by the upper classes in England for several hundred years after the Norman Conquest, before the language settled into what became Modern English. English words of French origin, such as art, competition, force, money, and table are pronounced ...
Since English is of Germanic origin, words that have entered English from French borrowings of Germanic words might not look especially French. Latin accounts for about 60% of English vocabulary either directly or via a Romance language. As both English and French have taken many words from Latin, determining whether a given Latin word came ...
However, there are exceptions: weep, groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry, brush and rock (from French). Words taken directly from Latin and Ancient Greek are generally perceived as colder, more technical, and more medical or scientific – compare life (Old English) with biology ( classical compound ...
There is a particular form of Franglish which consists of the adoption of English words with alternative meanings to their usage in English. These are words like forcing ('a scramble', 'a rush', 'a strong effort'), or bronzing ('a tan', 'the act of sunbathing'), made by adding the English ending -ing to a verb from French (e.g. forcer 'to force ...
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
The influence of French on English pertains mainly to its lexicon, including orthography, and to some extent pronunciation. Most of the French vocabulary in English entered the language after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Old French, specifically the Old Norman dialect, became the language of the new Anglo-Norman court, the government, and the ...
This list contains Germanic elements of the English language which have a close corresponding Latinate form. The correspondence is semantic—in most cases these words are not cognates, but in some cases they are doublets, i.e., ultimately derived from the same root, generally Proto-Indo-European, as in cow and beef, both ultimately from PIE *gʷōus.
As noted above, French (like English) is a non-pro-drop ("pronoun-dropping") language; therefore, pronouns feature prominently in the language. Impersonal verbs (e.g., pleuvoir 'to rain') use the impersonal pronoun il (analogous to English 'it'). French object pronouns are all clitics.