French Contributions
I recently read a post that J. Stapley responded to where he misspelled the word “bureaucracy”. I had to laugh. J. served a mission in France and yet even he had a problem spelling the English word derived from the French bureaucratie.
My children have both been their class representatives in their school/district spelling bees. When they have problems spelling a word, inevitably they murmer “must be French”. The fact is, French contributions to English are hard to spell. There are all these extra letters that are never pronounced. Whats the use?
Now I want it understood that while I am not a francophile, neither am I a French basher. They have made some important contributions…like the French Fries. No wait, that was the Belgians. Then there is the French Toast. Wait, actually there are those that dispute France as the country of origin. OK, there IS the guillotine. But do you want to claim that? Kidding aside, the United States would probably not have been victorious in its revolutionary war without the French. Neither would we have the monument to freedom that is Lady Liberty.
However, couldn’t we have been gratious and said “no thank you” to their additions to our vocabulary?
Well, let’s take a quick stab at the words used in your post that have Latin roots and come to us from French (I’m sort of making educated guesses on this — half an hour with the dictionary might prove me wrong on one or two): responded, mission, derived, representative, inevitably, contribution, pronounced, francophile, important, dispute, origin, probably, victorious, revolutionary, liberty, gracious (spelling corrected, pass it along to the kids), additions, and vocabulary. English spelling bees would be pretty dull without all these pretty French and Latin imports.
Comment by Dave — 3/15/2006 @ 8:33 pm
Alas, my spelling can be attributed to nothing more than incompetance. And you can’t really denigrate the franch contribution…would you prefer the ugly teutonic step child as an alternative?
I mean would you really prefer to eat pig instead of porc or cow instead of beef? It was also nice on the mission as you can throw a french accent on a big word and there you go! This works in many cases, with a few notable exceptions (e.g, preservatives).
Comment by J. Stapley — 3/15/2006 @ 9:43 pm
No worries J,
The only reason I can spell it is because I am a political scientist (read geek).
Besides, a French speaker once taught me that if you take any English word that ends in ate (eliminate, masticate, bifurcate), you will find a French word.
Comment by Craig S. — 3/15/2006 @ 10:32 pm
Yes, because of the Norman invasion, a great deal of the English language is derived from the French. I can’t tell you the percentage, but there are some patterns. When the Normans came in they became the rulers. So in some ways, the base of high English is French. The Alnglo-Saxon folks spoke a germanic language. The result as the rulers picked up the language of their new peasants and lesser local leaders was English. Thus words associated with wealth often kept the french, while those used for communicating with the lower folk were of germanic origin. The most obvious place we see this is in the words for animals and food. The peasants raised cows, but the nobles ate beef. The peasants raised pigs. The nobles ate pork. etc.The words that are hard to spell are those that haven’t been Anglicized. I imagne, though I don’t know, that these were either late additions or words that were so associate with power that the lower classes had no use for them. Bureaucracy seems like an obvious candidate for this. It strikes me that it might even be better for a bureaucracy if people can’t spell bureaucracy.
Comment by Steve H — 3/16/2006 @ 11:19 am
P.S.–Jonathan, here, shows himself the willing tool of the elitism (a very french word) of he French invaders. 🙂
Comment by Steve H — 3/16/2006 @ 11:21 am
🙂 Digs aside, that really is an interesting analysis of power dynamics and using spelling as a means of control. Thank heaven for spell-check, it has liberated me from plebeian squalor!
Comment by J. Stapley — 3/16/2006 @ 12:31 pm