Anglo-French Etymologies

Abstract

ROFESSOR Charles H. Livingston has reminded us' of a remark by Sir James Murray to the effect that English words whose history is obscure may eventually be explained by an examination of modern French patois; Mr. Livingston has given an excellent illustration of the truth of this statement by tracing the origin of Eng. funk 'to flinch or shrink from fear' to an O.Fr. fernicle, funicle 'wild, mad' (= Lat. *phrenicus) that has been preserved in modern patois. I should like to go even further than Murray and state that English etymologists should pay more attention to the achievements in general of French lexicography during the last thirty years. After all, the major part of the NED could rely, for the Romance portion of the English vocabulary, only on Diez, LittrY, the Dictionnaire general, Godefroy, and Korting; nor has the Supplement of 1933 brought up to date the information available in such works as Meyer-Liibke's Romanisches etymologisches Wdrterbuch (REW), von Wartburg's Franzosisches etymologisches Worterbuch (FEW), Gamillscheg's Etymologisches Wdrterbuch der franz6sischeni Sprache, Tobler-Lommatzsch's Altfranzosisches Wirterbuch, Gillieron-Edmont's Atlas linguistique de la France, Saindan's Le Langage parisien, and Huguet's Dictionnaire de la langue franraise du XVIe siecle. The comparison which has been made between French dialectology and the data of O.Fr. dictionaries has given us a broader insight into the riches of the Thesaurus linguae franco-gallicae (cf. precisely the case of fernicle): the hapaxes in Godefroy can often serve as precious links between Latin and the patois;2 the popularity of an O.Fr. word can be proved by its survival in the patois; new semantic and phonetic developments in patois are seen to be latent in O.Fr. word usages-in short, our knowledge of the ramifications of the Latin wordfamilies in French has been expanded and deepened. The Romance philologians themselves have paid only scant attention to the survival of O.Fr. words in English: since 1886, when Dietrich Behrens published his work on the phonetics of French loan-words in English, there has been practically no major contribution to this field;3