17 March 2021

Reframing the interaction between native terms and loanwords: Some data from occupational domains in Middle English

Louise Sylvester (University of Westminster)

In this talk I will discuss work I’ve been involved with on the outcomes of the large-scale borrowing in the Middle English period. This period is well known as one of widespread lexical borrowing from French and Latin, and scholarly accounts traditionally assume that this influx of loanwords caused many native terms to shift in sense or to drop out of use entirely. The Technical language and semantic shift in Middle English project analysed an extensive data set drawn mainly from the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England in order to track patterns lexical retention, replacement and semantic change, and compare long-term outcomes for both native and non-native terms. Our findings suggest that rather than the usual understanding of the relationship between native lexis and loanwords as a competition (Rynell 1948; Timofeeva 2018), the relationship may be reframed as one of harmonious co-existence, the enlarged lexis providing the conditions for the early beginnings of standardisation of the vocabulary (Sylvester 2020).

References

Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England: https://thesaurus.ac.uk/bth/ (accessed 30 December 2020)

Rynell, Alarik. 1948. The rivalry of Scandinavian and native synonyms in Middle English especially taken and nimen. Lund Studies in English XIII. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.

Sylvester, Louise. 2020. The role of multilingualism in the emergence of a technical register in the Middle English period’. In Laura Wright (ed.), The multilingual origins of Standard English. 365–80. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Timofeva, Olga. 2018. Survival and loss of Old English religious vocabulary between 1150 and 1350. English Language and Linguistics 22, 225–47.