Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[Jim Rader]

Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the
length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated.
The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good
working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its
use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court
records.  Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the
period after 1250 than from before.  Later Anglo-French tends to be
devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and
phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this
is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect
of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its
use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th
century.  For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William
Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: <faux amis> in
French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd.
109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-
French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991).

Jim Rader

> Compare English after the Norman Conquest.  The Normans were always
> a tiny minority in England, and most people in England never learned
> Norman French.  Moreover, Norman French survived as a spoken language
> in England only for a couple of centuries, after which it died out.

> Nevertheless, the Norman French impact on the English vocabulary was
> colossal.  Virtually the *entire* abstract, elevated and technical
> vocabulary of English was obliterated, and replaced by French words.
> The proportion of the attested Old English vocabulary which was lost
> is variously estimated at anything from 60% to 85%.  Even such everyday
> words as the native equivalents of 'river', 'mountain', 'face', 'picture',
> 'army' and 'language' were lost in favor of French words.

> Larry Trask

Jim Rader
Etymology Editor
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