“The owl and the nightingale” and “The parliament of fowls” : a comparison and contrast of old english words and borrowings in two mediaeval poems

Abstract

Borrowing is basically a process whereby a word from one language enters a different language. Various reasons try to give an account of the motivation behind the loan of words, such as completing missing information or making the language richer in vocabulary. But the most significant aspect is that borrowing has been present for centuries and centuries. In this project, the focal point is on Middle English, a period which involved a considerable number of linguistic, historical and social changes. Authors such as Jespersen (1982), Millward and Hayes (1996), or Baugh and Cable (2002), among others, agree on the influence of three major languages that maintained contact with English, namely Latin, Old Norse and French. Hence, the purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, it makes an attempt at ascertaining the impact that these languages had on the English language and compare and contrast them; and secondly, it tries to determine whether French decisively entered English during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In order to accomplish that goal, two poems such as “The Owl and the Nightingale” and The Parliament of Fowls have been analysed so as to observe the presence of the three aforementioned languages. The results obtained throughout this study will confirm that French is generally the most frequent of the three, and that it effectively introduced words into English during the Late Middle Ages.