The French Phonetic Impact on English
Wisam Shaher Badawi
College of Education for Humanities - University of Tikrit
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.6.3.2.2
Keywords: Middle English, orthography, adaptation, French, grapheme, phoneme
Abstract
The Normandy conquest to England represented a shift in power from the Anglo-Saxon into French or Norman possession. It sheds great effects on people’s life. This shift undoubtedly made a great influence or impact on English in considering that languages are channels for the interaction of cultures and habits. Hence, English was influenced by Latin descendants which reflected by Old French, Old Norse and later the Anglo-Norman variety. This paper tackles French phonetic impact on English which made crucial changes in each spelling and pronunciation by which English shifted from old to middle era. Moreover, by French conventions, some consonants and their literary representations were added to English by loanwords. Vowels were reduced, lengthened or diphthongized by certain processes or phonetic environments. The modifications and merges appeared in the Middle English phonemes were nearly the main inputs for Present- Day English.
