Sonnet Loan Words -- Wyatt

[Robin Hamilton]

> By "*Old* French," do you intend "(old) French"? The French borrowings
> cited are centuries younger than Old French.
>
> -Wilson

I was flattening the various OED designations of Old French / French /
Anglo-Norman into one, because I was most concerned with the period when the
words entered English.  I would tend to assume that the words were taken
from a form of French/Anglo-Norman coincident with the point at which they
enter the English language.

Similarly Common Germanic, Germanic, cognate Germanic forms, and Old English
all get tipped into OE in the tables I give.

(Actually, there's an interesting perspective if you consider cases where a
French borrowing replaces a word which goes back to a common [Indo-European]
root.  I ran this through with "warranty/guarantee" once, with strange
results.  But I don't have them to hand anymore.)

Sorry, should have made that clearer.  (It was tucked away obscurely in my
first post on this topic.)

Robin

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