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The church and the manor: Assessing and comparing the effects of language contact on two Middle English lexical domains

Summary

The paper asks whether the impact of French and Latin borrowing on Middle English vocabulary depended on the lexical domain and on how specific a meaning was. It compares two multilingual institutions of post-Conquest England: the church, where Latin was used for liturgy and French by the elite, and the manor, where a small bilingual group of lords and officials managed a large English-speaking workforce. The authors take nouns for locations and objects from existing historical thesauri. Each item is coded for source language, its level in a normalised semantic hierarchy, and whether it survived to 1500. Romance-origin words dominate the church vocabulary and native English words dominate the manorial vocabulary, and this holds at every level of specificity, with some differences between the location and object subsets. Religious words survive at higher rates. In neither domain do native words and loans differ much in how often they were lost. The study challenges two common assumptions: that loans cluster at general levels everywhere, and that borrowing is what drove native words out.

Key points

  • The context comes from Durkin's study of the OED and MED: 44–48% of headwords first recorded in Middle English come from French and/or Latin.
  • The data sources are the BTh thesaurus, whose attestation dates cover only 1150–1450, together with HTE and MED. MED separates Classical Latin from insular Latin varieties.
  • Specificity is measured with levels labelled CL0–CL3 rather than raw hierarchy levels (HL). In every source language, most items sit at the general levels CL0/CL1.
  • The paper reports one tally of obsolete loans: 16 French, 5 ambiguous French/Latin and 6 Latin items.
  • The underlying resource grew out of Gloria Mambelli's PhD project (2024).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors measure specificity on normalised conceptual levels rather than raw taxonomy depth, because richly lexicalised branches add extra levels and push comparable concepts deeper. — For Mova (world): Depth comparisons over the WordNet ontology could use a similar normalised "basic-level" scale, so that a densely split branch does not appear more specific than it is.
  • I2. Instead of building a new hierarchy, they project an existing level scheme onto one thesaurus by aligning it with a reference thesaurus (BTh against HTE). — For Mova (world): FrameNet or Wikidata categories could inherit specificity levels by alignment with WordNet, avoiding a separate hand-built taxonomy.
  • I3. They treat two plausible links as separate hypotheses and test them on data: borrowing versus loss, and loans versus general levels. Both turn out weaker than the received view. — For Mova (learn): Assumed correlations, such as frequency versus parse error, should get their own check with a contrast set before they are used as training heuristics.
  • I4. They compare two domains with different contact situations side by side, so each domain acts as a control for the other. — For Mova (learn): Evaluation could be reported per domain, for example fables versus maths problems, so that a gain that only holds in one register is not mistaken for a general one.
  • I5. Items whose source is uncertain stay in an explicit ambiguous French/Latin class instead of being forced into one label. — For Mova (tokens): Lemma and morphology annotations could keep an explicit "ambiguous" value, so later stages can see real uncertainty rather than a guessed tag.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Latin · Historical linguistics & language change

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4000/12izb

@article{mambelli2024church,
  title = {{The church and the manor: Assessing and comparing the effects of language contact on two Middle English lexical domains}},
  author = {Mambelli, Gloria and Vogelsanger, Johanna},
  journal = {Lexis: Journal in English Lexicology 3},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.4000/12izb},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4000/12izb}
}

References

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