Influence Of French And English Language

Many people around the world do not know how much other languages have influenced what has now become their modern language. For example, many people know that French has influenced both American and English culture, but not through studying the subject or learning French. Old English was a combination of both Scandinavian and Germanic languages before the Norman Conquest. During the Norman Conquest, the French from Normandy was expanding and most of England’s upper class spoke only Norman French while the peasants spoke English. Most people today do not realize how much of their language is actually made up of French. People use French in some form or another every day without realizing it. It would be important for an English speaker

When a language is not written phonetically, that means that not all of the letters are pronounced in a word. For example, with most French verbs, whether they are conjugated or not, the ending is almost never pronounced. The same goes for English too such as in the words such as “one” and “knight.” The “w” sound in “one” even though there is not a “w,” and the “k” or “g” not being pronounced even though they are in there. Jennifer Wagner, author of the article History of English, stated, “Vowels can be represented by several different letter combinations and many letters are actually not pronounced [in both the English and French languages]”

We have many tenses in common such as the present, past, and future. Both languages use an infinitive form when conjugating verbs. Between the French and English languages, all of the tenses mean the same. The present tense would talk about now, the past tense would talk about something over and done with, and the future would talk about something to come. The French and English languages also have to use an infinitive form when verbs are conjugated. The infinitive form is the “stem” of the word, for example, the word “end.” Since the word “end” is already in its infinitive, one could then add different suffixes to change the meaning and direction of the