Borrowing, Diachronic Sound Change, and “Gentil”.

allthingslinguistic:

justlingthings:

Hey everyone! I’m going to tell y’all something that totally blew my mind the other day. So we’re doing borrowing in my historical linguistics class, and here’s one of the examples my professor gave. So background info: English was conquered by the Normans at one point (not sure of the actual year), which is why our structure and sound systems are Germanic (English is a Germanic language) but have so many French and Romance loan words in our vocabulary. So the word gentil, French for nice, kind, etc. was borrowed into English four different times:

genteel
Gentile
jaunty
gentle

That’s not even the cool part. The cool part is we can actually tell the relative order in which the borrowing happened. So the general principle of linguistic borrowing is that when you’re looking at borrowed words, the longer they’ve been in the language, the more they’ll look and sound like words native to the language they were borrowed into, and vice-versa, the later they were borrowed, the less time they’ve been in the language, the more they look like the language they were borrowed from.

So take the modern French pronunciation of ‘gentil’, it’s something like /ʒã’ti/, with stress on the second syllable, and no pronounced /l/ at the end. But, we can tell by the spelling that there was once a pronounced /l/ at the end, which was lost. Well, out of all four words above, which of them doesn’t pronounce the /l/ at the end of the word? That’s right, jaunty is the latest borrowing of the word.

#4 jaunty (was imported into English around 1600)

Next we look at the vowels. One of the most major sound changes in the English language was the great vowel shift, which happened around the 16th or 17th century. I won’t explain all the changes here, that’s what Google is for, but it’s basically the reason English ‘five’ is pronounced /faiv/ and not /fiv/. The main difference between ‘genteel’ and ‘Gentile’ is the second vowel. We can tell that ‘Gentile’ was in the English language before the vowel shift, because the /i/ in it was shifted, making it older than the next oldest word, ‘genteel’. Notice that apart from ‘jaunty’, ‘genteel’ sounds the most like the modern French pronunciation.

#3 genteel (around 1600)

#4 Gentile (around 1400)

And finally, I don’t quite remember all the justifications my professor gave for knowing ‘gentle’ was number 1, but notice that the /l/ at the end is syllabic, and very strongly pronounced. Combine this with the fact that the first vowel is very different from the modern French pronunciation, and you can tell that ‘gentle’ is not only pronounced like very old French, but also that it is super “nativized” into the English language.

#1 gentle (imported as early as 1200)

This is why I think diachronic sound change and historical linguistics are so cool, if you learn the types of changes, you can use individual words like little time machines! 

A few links, if you’re interested in more: on borrowing and on historical sound change.