--- title: Borrowed words: French, Norse and Latin — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Borrowed words: French, Norse and Latin», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: At dinner Mum says "We're having beef tonight", not "cow tonight"; after 1066 French-speaking lords ate the meat while English-sp --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Borrowed words: French, Norse and Latin # Borrowed words: French, Norse and Latin Lesson 23 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/). - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/1/) — At dinner Mum says "We're having beef tonight", not "cow tonight"; after 1066 French-speaking lords ate the meat while English-speaking farmers looked after the animals, so the animal kept its English name and the meat got a French one. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/2/) — Before that the Vikings, who spoke Old Norse, had already given English everyday words like "sky", "egg", "window" and even "they". - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/3/) — Latin, the old language of Rome and of European learning, keeps giving words too: "video", "audio", "a.m." and "bus" all come from it. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/4/) — The most common little words, like "the", "and", "you" and "water", are still mostly Old English; many of the long, fancy ones are borrowed. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/5/) — After 1066 English kept its animal words (cow, pig, sheep) but took French meat words: beef from "bœuf", pork from "porc", mutton from "mouton". - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/6/) — "Sky", "skin", "skull" and "egg" came from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, who settled in England from about 800 AD; a word starting with sk- is often Norse. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/7/) — "Shirt" and "skirt" began as the same old word: "shirt" is the English form and "skirt" the Norse form. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/8/) — "They", "them" and "their" came from Old Norse; borrowing such small everyday words is unusual and shows how closely the two peoples lived. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/9/) — The printer William Caxton told a story from the 1400s: a woman in the south did not understand a man asking for "eggys", but understood "eyren", the southern English word; in the end "eggs" won. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/10/) — "Window" comes from Old Norse "vindauga", meaning "wind eye", a hole in the wall for air and light. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/11/) — In Latin "video" means "I see", "audio" means "I hear" and "exit" means "he or she goes out". - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/12/) — "Bus" is short for "omnibus", Latin for "for everyone", the name of big horse-drawn carriages for all passengers in the 1800s; cutting a long word short like this is called clipping. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/13/) — "a.m." is Latin "ante meridiem", before midday, and "p.m." is "post meridiem", after midday. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/14/) — "Mayday", the radio call for help, comes from French "m'aider", from "venez m'aider", "come and help me"; it was chosen in the 1920s. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/15/) — English took many food words from French, like menu, restaurant, café, croissant, baguette and chef; "chef" means "chief" or "head" in French. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/16/) — Studies of big dictionaries suggest that more than half of English words came from Latin and French, but the everyday core (the, and, is, you, house, water) is mostly Old English. - ← previous: [Where English came from](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/) - next →: [Borrowed words from far away: Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Ukrainian and more](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/24-borrowed-words-from-far-away/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)