John Gallagher at the LRB:
It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and derogatory terms owe much to the French example – bastard, brute, coward, rascal, idiot. French oozes from the language of food and drink: chowder echoes the old French chaudière, meaning a cooking pot, while crayfish started out as escrevise before the English chopped off its initial vowel (something they also did with scarf, stew, slice and a host of others) and decided that the last syllable sounding like ‘fish’ was just too good to pass up. From arson to evidence, jury to slander, French runs through the language of the English law (and the ‘Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!’ of the US Supreme Court), such that the philologist Mildred Pope could write that the only truly English legal institution, at least from a linguistic perspective, was the gallows. With contemporary English including more than eighty thousand terms of French origin, Georges Clemenceau might have had a point when he argued that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just badly pronounced French.’ In this engaging and sometimes infuriating essay, Bernard Cerquiglini – linguist, medievalist, member of Oulipo, advisor to successive French governments on linguistic affairs – pushes Clemenceau’s statement further, arguing that ‘the global success of English is a homage to Francophonie.’ Anyone speaking English today, Cerquiglini argues, is mostly speaking French.
more here.
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