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Much more extensive and complex than you might think, even if you recognize “acquit” as derived from the Normans. Great podcast on the subject from Lingua Franca, a weekly Australian radio program on linguistics.

Categories: History    

    22 Comments

    1. Chris Travers says:

      Well, duh….

      French words ended up being fairly well represented in anything that was the domain of the landed class.

      Cow vs beef is a good example (in the pature, it’s a cow because that’s what the A-S called them. On the plate, it’s beef because that’s what the Normans called it). Pork/Pig, Poultry/Hen, sheep/mutton etc. are also good examples. Oddly vine/wine shows the reverse pattern, perhaps indicating that wine was better known to the Anglo-Saxons than were grape vines.

      So I would be very surprised if French wasn’t a major contributor, and given how conservative legalese tends to be, if it wasn’t better conserved than other areas of French influence on the English language.

      April 20, 2010, 1:14 am

    2. cirby says:

      It does have a certain I-don’t-know-what…

      April 20, 2010, 6:11 am

    3. Anon says:

      It’s a vast influence on English legal terminology – although bear in mind that it comes from Norman French rather than the modern language.

      Incidentally, Norman French is still used in some specific legal contexts in the UK. Any legislation passed by Parliament needs to be signed into law by the Queen. The royal assent is given with the words “la reine le veult”.

      April 20, 2010, 8:37 am

    4. stashy says:

      For a sprightly and amusing exposition of the law’s various linguistic contributors (including the French/Normans), I recommend THE LANGUAGE OF THE LAW, by David Mellinkoff (Brown-Little: 1963).

      April 20, 2010, 9:06 am

    5. scattergood says:

      Since the Normans didn’t speak English and the Anglo-Saxon’s didn’t speak French, my understanding was that much of the law written after 1066 used both French and English terms, until English became the lingua franca of the British Isles. Assault and Battery comes to mind as an example of a mixed French / English description in law.

      Thus it is no surprise that French words remained in British Common Law systems.

      April 20, 2010, 9:36 am

    6. QET says:

      There is also a good list in Maitland’s essay on Domesday Book.

      April 20, 2010, 10:03 am

    7. Joseph Slater says:

      I’m getting a distinct sense of having seen this before.

      April 20, 2010, 10:34 am

    8. Bob in Ohio says:

      This has been discussed before, in a case in which the Normans conquered Lorain County, Ohio.

      April 20, 2010, 10:56 am

    9. Charles says:

      The extent of French’s influence on the law is even more extensive than the recording suggests. Norman French continued to be used by lawyers for centuries after the Conquest in England, especially in oral pleading and in the moots of the Inns at Court. Many law ‘text books’ (think of Littleton’s ‘Tenures’), continued to be written in French well into the early modern period, and Sir Edward Coke considered French legal terms as ‘vocabula artis’ that had ‘so woven into the law themselves, as it is in a manner impossible to change them’. Law French continued to be used, albeit with decreasing importance until 1731, when it was abolished by 4 Geo. II, c. 26. The Law French is still a useful language for historians, especially those working with the Yearbooks. There’s a dictionary available, if anyone is interested: John H. Baker, ‘Manual of Law French’, 2nd. ed. (Scolar Press, 1990).

      April 20, 2010, 11:16 am

    10. Lingua Phranca? says:

      I’ve been having trouble with a related question for a while, which has to do with how we decide to spell words we adopt from other languages that have different alphabets: http://questionspresented.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/phonetically-speaking-dead-language-edition/

      Any clues?

      April 20, 2010, 11:48 am

    11. Martinned says:

      Isn’t the person who establishes a trust called the Quelqui que truste (“he who trusts”) or quelqui for short?

      April 20, 2010, 11:59 am

    12. Fub says:

      stashy: For a sprightly and amusing exposition of the law’s various linguistic contributors (including the French/Normans), I recommend THE LANGUAGE OF THE LAW, by David Mellinkoff (Brown-Little: 1963).

      Somewhat later, circa 1980, Charles Rembar’s The Law of the Land had some amusing chapters on legal language and its origins. Rembar was an excellent wordsmith, both as a popular author and a lawyer.

      One example from Rembar I recall at this early hour is the origin of the English term “Piepowder Courts“, from the French pies poudre or “dusty feet”. Of course, these days Wikipedia covers most legal terminolgy, and cites what likely were both Rembar’s and Mellinkoff’s sources.

      April 20, 2010, 12:07 pm

    13. Houston Lawyer says:

      I’m sure that this is why attorneys write transfer, convey and assign and otherwise use redundant language in their documents.

      April 20, 2010, 12:12 pm

    14. Bama 1L says:

      Martinned: Isn’t the person who establishes a trust called the Quelqui que truste (“he who trusts”) or quelqui for short?

      I think you mean “cestui que.”

      April 20, 2010, 12:56 pm

    15. Martinned says:

      Bama 1L: I think you mean “cestui que.”

      Indeed. (I was writing from memory. It’s not exactly something that I deal with every day.)

      Cestui que (also cestuy que) (English pronunciation: /ˈsɛstwi keɪ/) is a shortened version of cestui a que use le feoffment fuit fait, literally, “The person for whose use the feoffment was made.” It is a Law French phrase of medieval English invention, which appears in the legal phrases cestui que trust, cestui que use, or cestui que vie.

      Long story short: I didn’t just remember the name wrong, but also the role of this person in the trust. It is Law French, though.

      April 20, 2010, 1:06 pm

    16. Martinned says:

      The Wiki-page on Law French has a whole list:

      Survivals in modern legal terminology
      The inverted syntax of many legal noun phrases in English — attorney general, fee simple — is a heritage from Law French. It can be noted that native French-speakers may not understand certain words, not used in modern French or replaced by another word. The current French word for “mortgage” is for example hypothèque. Many of the terms of Law French have been converted into modern English in the 20th century to make the law more understandable in common law jurisdictions. However, some key terms remain from Law French, including the following:

      attorney, one appointed to act for another — now characterized as either:
      attorney-at-law — see lawyer, solicitor, barrister or civil law notary
      attorney-in-fact — see power of attorney.

      autrefois acquit, previously acquitted of a crime.

      bailiff, the marshal of the court, charged now chiefly with keeping order in the courtroom.

      cestui que trust, sometimes shortened to cestui; the beneficiary of a trust.

      culprit, now used to mean ‘guilty party’. Originally a blending of Latin culpabilis (‘guilty’) and Law French prist (‘ready’), a shortening of a conventional phrase prist del averer (‘[I am] ready to prove [that the accused] is guilty as stated’).

      cy-près doctrine, the power of a court to transfer the property of one charitable trust to another charitable trust when the first trust may no longer exist or be able to operate.

      defendant, the party against whom a civil proceeding is brought.

      escheat, reversion of unclaimed property to a feudal lord, or the state where the property is allodial.

      estoppel, prevention of a party from contradicting a position previously taken.

      feme covert and feme sole.

      Force majeure including acts of god.

      laches, loss of rights through failure to act.

      mortgage, literally a “dead pledge”; a pledge by which the landowner remained in possession of the property he staked as security.
      mortmain, a statute restricting the conveyance of land to the “dead hand” of a religious organization

      oyez, often calqued as hear ye!, a traditional cry used to open court proceedings, still used in the Supreme Court of the United States.
      plaintiff, the person who begins a lawsuit.

      prochein ami, now usually called next friend; someone who files a lawsuit on behalf of another who is not capable of acting on his or her own behalf.

      profit a prendre, also known as the right of common, where one has the right to take the “fruits” of the property of another, such as mining rights, growing rights, etc.

      recovery, [originally] a procedural device for clarifying the ownership of land, involving a stylised lawsuit between fictional litigants.

      remainder, [originally] a substitution-term in a will or conveyance, to be brought into play if the primary beneficiary were to die or fail to fulfil certain conditions.

      replevin, a suit to recover personal property unlawfully taken.
      torts, meaning wrongs.

      trove, as in treasure trove, is a verb, not a noun, and means found. Thus treasure trove means not a treasure chest or hoard, but a treasure found by chance, as opposed to one stolen, inherited, bought, etc. Trove should properly be a word of two syllables (Old French trové, modern French trouvé), but this is never observed today.

      voir dire, literally to say truth; the questions a prospective juror or witness must answer to determine his qualification to serve, in the law of England a mini-trial held after a plea of guilty has been entered to determine the facts of the offence where they are in dispute. In a modern context thought of often as a mini-trial within a full trial to determine the admissibility of contested evidence. In a jury trial a voir dire is held before the judge but without a jury present. Voir dires may also be held in a trial by judge alone, but done, of course, in the presence of the judge.

      April 20, 2010, 1:12 pm

    17. Crunchy Frog says:

      Voir dires may also be held in a trial by judge alone, but done, of course, in the presence of the judge.

      So glad we cleared that up.

      April 20, 2010, 2:09 pm

    18. Urso says:

      In Missippi they’re pronounced “voyer dires”

      April 20, 2010, 3:43 pm

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    20. Emily says:

      In Professor Feldman’s admin law class at NYU he would go on a tangent once a semester about legal french — the origins, how it is pronounced, etc. The year I took the class he asked if anyone knew why “oyez oyez” isn’t pronounced (as it apparently originally was) “o-yezz o-yezz”. One of the students responded “because it sounds too much like ‘oh yes! oh yes!’” Prof. Feldman turned a lovely shade of red. I have no memory of the actual answer to the question, but a great moment!

      April 20, 2010, 4:53 pm

    21. Glenn Bowen says:

      The language of the court, at the time, if you will.

      Surprised?

      Write about law and you will have a large, or larger, part of the vocabulary derived from French&Latin; write about farming, and the greater of your vocabulary will derive from OE.

      The first 100 most-used English words derive from OE.

      April 20, 2010, 6:25 pm

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