The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the world English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrasesâsuch as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and capriceâlend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world. Ãmigrés demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, âturnedâ English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelynâs complaint that English lacks âwords that do so fully expressâ the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bushâs purported claim that âthe French donât have a word for entrepreneur,â this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as âcreolizing keywordsâ that both connect English speakers toâand separate them fromâFrench. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete. At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Ãmigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.
Price history
Oct 25, 2021
€17.52