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Eugene Green
Department of English, Boston University
Email: eugreen at bu dot edu

Now woordis, now sens, now either togidere shal tellen out" - Integrating twelve native and borrowed lexemes in Middle English

Many studies and dictionaries record the rich and varied lexemes in Middle English that have their sources principally in Latin, Old French (Anglo-Norman and Central), and Old Norse. Yet none explores fully their assimilation into English; what we have, instead, are discussions of semantic spheres, as, say, the different registers of the native heart and loanword cordial (of Latin provenance). The purpose of this proposed study is to address the question of when and how loanwords before 1476 became fully assimilated in English.

The term “assimilated” applies to pragmatic and semantic considerations. Pragmatically, the collocations of loanwords with one another or with native English words in various constructions concern adjustments in affixes, inflections, and syntax. Native affixes, such as “-ful”, appear at the end of a loanword such as “trust” (from Old Norse), while the Old French “able” turns the native “belief” into an adjective. Further the pattern of noun + determiner in “servants namo” accommodates a loanword of Old French provenance with a native English construction. Further we also have patterns of borrowed grammatical patterns as is evident in the noun + adjective sequence applied to the native lexemes “showres soote.” These examples point to a general pragmatic approach centered on how loanwords assimilated themselves to one another and to native lexemes in diverse constructions.

The example of “heart” and “cordial” implicitly reveals a semantic issue, namely how and when did this pair and others begin to occupy contrastive registers. Here, too, the analysis of collocations is methodologically valuable, for through a study of words groupings themselves together do we learn how they command particulars of meaning.

Finally, Chaucer’s phrases largely serve as examples in this abstract. But is he the first to make liberal uses of loanwords? The proposed talk aims to lay out a statistical graph of texts from various dialects throughout the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, directed at the assimilation of borrowings. Although the study of Middle English dialects is clearly thorough, none the less their receptivity to loanwords is still largely unexamined.

To make this talk coherent, I plan to trace the pragmatic and semantic history of twelve loanwords, three from each principal part of speech, that have analogous counterparts in native English. How these loanwords assimilate themselves to Middle English, how they enter registers akin or different to native words is a necessary question also to explore.

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