Any case of language contact will almost certainly result in change to both languages. That’s more pressing in situations where an invading language takes a position of power. E.g., the Norman French invasion of England resulted in almost half of our 1000 most commonly used words being French in origin (though only 4 of our 100 most commonly used words).
Still that language influence can have remarkable and significant impact, including forcing me to use the word “y’all”.
I’ll start this with an example, which is actually an impactful one, the word joyous leading to joyful:
Joyous – c. 1300, from Anglo-French joyous, Old French joios “happy, cheerful, merry, glad” (12c., Modern French joyeux), from joie.
The first written record of this (That I can find) in the English language is from 1311 in the Demaundes Joyous, a title that would today be translated into something like “Joyous Questions”
The title, you see, was in a sort of pidgin French-English and part of the bleeding of a French eux into the English language. It’s also coincidentally the first appearance of the standardized joke format in which you ask a riddle and expect a humorous reply. Knock-knock?
Or, perhaps one of my favorites, what’s brown and sticky? A stick.
If you look at the literature, you’ll then quickly run into a plethora of references across primarily religious works. Joyous became significantly more popular as the advent of the printing press allowed for more printed works. Most of them were religious because that’s most of what was written down at the time. A concordance to the holy bible, the life and times of saints, etc.
However, what I want to discuss here is the almost exact synonym of joyous, joyful. We’ve dropped the French suffix and picked up an Old English prefix, and somehow abutted it to a French word. How?
The word joyful, stemming from the French root we’ve just discussed and the Old English/Middle English tendency to use the adjective “Full of X” or “XFul” to mean “physically full of X” (e.g,., cuppe ful (space required)(a cup full of wine) or the Old English tendency to put “fulle” in front of things to denote “contains the properties of” “Fulle-lasten” (property of being durable).
Joyful is first referenced in the English language in, again, a religious work, known as South English Legendary, from about 1270. This was a collection of poetry, stories, and essays discussing language, imagery, the saints, and the treatment of female saints. It was also as popular as Chaucer in its day and would have been as widely read and disseminated as rampant poverty and illiteracy allowed. However, rather than originating the term, South English Legendary probably records it as part of an ongoing phenomenon.
Joy-ful is generally considered to originate from a mistake, much like saying studiful instead of studious. Reasons could be that many writers and speakers of the time had still learned English as a second language or were more accustomed to speaking French than English. Or, perhaps it was just a byproduct of the happy way that languages have a tendency to merge when you put them together.
Yet, it worked its way into the English language including the next editions of the bible. The Tyndale Bible (1535), The Whole Booke Of Psalmes, and others each use joyous interchangeably with joyful.
Further references are Knight (1547), Chaucer (1542), Sir Thomas More (1551) – coincidentally the peak of the decline in French influence on the English language and the rise of a class more mindful of English. (Also, coincidentally the first recorded instances of prescriptivism and attempts to “purify” the English language. E.g., first John Cheke, who was a proponent of avoiding the neologisms of coining new words by smashing other languages into English and then the entire inkhorn incident (look it up, this blog will be long enough).)
Even more interestingly, the first recorded usage of the faux pas that is “joyful” occurs in 1270. Well before the peak in French loan words between 1250 and 1350 was brought to a sudden and abrupt halt. That declining trend in French borrowings was further hastened by the Black Death 1346-1353, which killed off a significant number of the French-educated clergy, monks, and nobility). After this period, English sees an immediate shift into mixed language errors showing that people speaking French were taught it as a second language – unlike the generation wiped out en-masse by the plague. Full of joy.
A fun little ngram showcasing the frequency of the suffix –ful found in popular printed words that have also had the luck to be scanned into Google Books.
All of these works are important, and all had influence, but it is the Tyndale bible to which I will turn my attention because while English is complicated and nuanced and I could go on all day about the various influences, I want to talk about these specific ones that prove rather than disprove my point. Bias. The work consists of two translations, the first by William Tyndale the second made up of supplementations by Myles Coverdale. Importantly, the Tyndale versions go back to the original Hebrew and Greek texts, making it the first English bible to do so.
In comparison, the Wycliffe Bible, which was translated from Latin, contains 0 instances of the word joyful. In fact, it hardly contains the word “joy” compared to Hebrew-based translations, and often uses the word in other contexts, e.g., Luke 6:23
“joye ye in that dai and be ye glad, for lo! Youre meede is myche in huene for aftir these thingis the fadris of hem diden to prophetis.
In the Tyndale bible, that had changed to: Reioyse ye then and be gladde: for beholde youre rewarde is greate in heven. After this manner their fathers entreated the Prophetes.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
This was, in short, someone abandoning all that had come before and starting over on translations. And that meant integrating the modern language of the day.
Now, you do not find words like joyful, plentiful, merciful, in old or middle English. Not ever. Instead, if you wanted to create an adjective, the ‘fix was attached to the front of the word. Full-comen (Attain a state/realize a truth), “Ful-lasten (Durability) “Ful-thriven” (Complete or perfect). It was likely that those early translations, in which the writer had a classical education and could speak French, were either a mistake or the author chose to Anglicize the French word on purpose. This then drove words like Joyful and Merciful and therefore the usage of the word “ful” as suffix instead of a prefix into the English language. (Merciful is also first recorded in 1340, in Ayenbite of Inwyt, which was translated into English from French by what Wikipedia quotes as being a “Very incompetent translator”.) No shade.
In short, many ‘ful’ words look something like:
(Foreign language root) + (English prefix used according to the grammar of a French suffix)
There are, of course, many “Ful” words that are rooted in old English. Bellyful, boatful, etc., and if you look at them, you’ll notice a significant difference in meaning.
Full/ful was used in Middle English to donate “full” as part of a noun and it was always used after the noun in this sense. E.g., belig- ful, cuppe ful). It’s largely those natural English uses, donating “this item is full of this thing” instead of the French “ous” of “this item has an internal state or quality of this thing” that are “actually English”. You also likely still make these combinations at will. “I have a mug full of hot cocoa”.
Quite often the original ‘English’ denotes physical fullness, and the foreign language addition denotes a more metaphorical fullness. Full of joy.
Leading to the old joke about luxury loanwords. Is there such a thing as a practical French loanword? (actually yes but shhhh it’s a joke) While the peasants raise the cows the (French speaking) elite eat the beef.
In some cases, of course, you get somewhat unique crossovers where you have an English root word with the French grammar application of ful, denoting that something is full of a (in this case hopefully) intangible something.
Feckful
But enough about that.
The Tyndale Bible is, of course, most noteworthy for being used as essentially the notes that the translators of the Great Bible cribbed off of. They translated the work (The Great Bible) that would be disseminated into print and used as the standard read in churches part of the foundation that ended up stabilizing the English language as a single language across the country. It was also used as source material for the King James Bible, which would eventually eclipse even the Great Bible in influence on the English Language.
The “ful” suffix was solidified in common usage as people grew up learning French words, complete with English modifications pitched as the norm.
That’s addition of French grammar to an English word is also not an isolated incident. In fact, many of the prescriptivist or seemingly arbitrary rules of English descend almost entirely from French and Latin grammar.
- Don’t start a sentence with And
- Don’t split infinitives
- Don’t end a sentence with a preposition
These rules are almost entirely “made up” primarily by grammar schools, because grammar schools that could publish a grammar book with (you guessed it, more rules) would get more students.
We’ve also known that for several hundred years. One of the most influential works on the topic, Gertrude Buck’s “make believe grammar” focuses on rules drawn from Latin, but it’s not just Latin that’s the culprit.
Those schools date back to the 6th and 14th century and originally focused on teaching Latin they needed to attend university. Grammar schools were entirely based around *teaching* Latin, French, and Ancient Greek – and eventually math and science.
That “grammar school” craze saw a phenomenon of grammar books, in which William Lily’s Latin “Rudimenta Grammaticaces” was published in 1534, Bullokar’s Pamphlet for Grammar was based on that Latin grammar in 1586, and Christopher Cooper’s Grammatica Llinguae Anglicanae was published in 1685. A total of 16 grammar books are recorded between Pamphlet and the year 1700. Between 1700 and 1800 a further 270 titles were added, and between 1800 and 1850, a further almost 900 titles were published. They also took pretty much the same approach that a modern news outlet does, of waiting till a competitor publishes a work, copy it wholesale, add a few new items or an introduction for a different audience, and call it a necessity. Please, your money, sir, I want it.
Of course, it’s often difficult to tell where Latin and French grammar have been imposed on English artificially and where Latin and French grammar influenced the English language.
And, of course, English has changed a lot over the years (as it should). We’ve lost most of our cases and gender. We use sentence structure instead of dative and generative cases to indicate direct versus indirect objects.
So, about that, right, anyway, when I started writing this, I was going to give a brief introduction into the influence of religion on the English language and then move on to my point. It was not my fault that I had 27 tabs on the Tynsdale bible open.
You see, English used to have a case system, including a plural for you (thou is for one person, you is for multiple).
| Nominative | Oblique | Genitive | Possessive | ||
| 2nd person | singular informal | thou | thee | thy/thine | thine |
| singular formal | ye, you | you | your | yours | |
| plural | |||||
You is the singular and plural second person pronoun. Historically it was used only for the dative case (indirect object). By the time of Chaucer, that was no longer strict. You was already used as a second person pronoun (singular) instead of thou, though (thou) would have been more common. This is largely chalked up to French influence and mixing with “Vous”.
For example, Chaucer uses “you” roughly 377 times in the singular nominative sense. Of course, Chaucer definitely spoke a lot of French. And he used “you” a lot where he would have meant “Vous”. Oops. Accidentally changing a language like it’s not a flex.
At the same time, the pattern isn’t as straightforward as swapping you for vous. French is consistent. English used “you” formally. The singular “you” was used to refer to things that got respect but not intimacy. Lords and ladies, parents, foreign deities, etc. Parents would refer to their children as “thou”, children would refer to parents as you. The maid would refer to the master as you but the master would refer to the maid as thou. Leading to the concept that “thou” indicates the speaker is superior.
However, most speakers are relatively equal and by 1600, thou was becoming something of an exception in common speech. So, “you” was very rapidly becoming the dominant form of address between equals.
There’s also a very handy chart drawn up for this study.
There’s a similar bit of research here based entirely on Shakespeare’s Shylock instead of a smattering of different figures in plays.
When protestantism began to rear its head, it resulted in first the English rupture from the Catholic church and the formation of the Church of England. Quakers were a separationist group from this separationist group – with some fairly radical ideas including belief in militant faith, equality, and community. The Quakers chose to refer to everyone as thou, denoting everyone was equal (and no one was more privileged than the quaker).
(side-note: you today also takes the place of the pronoun one, as in “one might agree that” but in this period, that phrase was just beginning to appear, probably prompted by the French on (the subject) – and coincides with the loss of indefinite “man” “man may agree” – instead, we get the “generic you”)
Ye used to be the nominative (second person, plural or formal) to address either a group or a person of rank. By the 1611, not very coincidentally the publication date of the King James Bible, it had become a bit of a fad in London to use you for the nominative (instead of ye) “You have a point” instead of “Ye have a point.” The King James Bible used “you” instead of “ye” and was then also used to teach English to children.
So, Thou was blending with You and Ye was blending with You. One was blending with you, so was man. Confusion abounds.
You could somewhat say that this is an indication of a leveling of class, marked by the loss of class markers in language. Rather, it was a part of a shift in norms, where class markers become more apparent in the form of greater distinction and differentiation between the language used by the classes. (Formal writing and scientific writing would continue to use thou and ye for several centuries after the working poor abandoned them.
Of course, English lost cases for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that our cases and inflections were, to put it politely, not well organized. The same forms e.g, an, es, e as word endings often had overlaps and multiple forms had multiple meanings. As words were influenced further by Norman French and Latin, further sound changes meant that many words had too much overlap between forms for inflection to be meaningful, such as the shift from using “En” and “e” endings separately to no longer pronouncing the N and then dropping it. “if it ain’t broke(n), don’t fix it”.
Just so you can see what I’m talking about here, here are the cases for the Old English word Mouth with inflections. Now imagine saying all of these in a heavy Scouse and try to keep them apart.
mūð (Nominiative/singular)
mūð-as (Nominative/plural)
mūð-es (Genitive / Possessive)
mūð-e (Dative)
mūð-um (Dative)
mūð (accusative/Direct object)
mūðe (instrumental/ with)
mūð-um (instrumental / with )
Of course, no more case, no more plural you – until of course, non-standard Englishes come into play, with y’all, you’s, you’ses, you guys, and yins. I try not to be prescriptive, but I may physically die if you use that last option in my direction, please do not.
Of course, you can always use “you” in its original form as a plural, but sometimes you’ll ask a group “what do you want for dinner” and you’ll get questions like “which one of us”, no dammit the plural you “y’all”. I’ll blame the French.