THE CHRONOLOGY OF FRENCH AND LATIN LOAN WORDS IN ENGLISH

A comparison is made between earlier studies of French loan words, whose slightly varying methodologies reveal some interesting trends. Most of the earlier studies have restricted them selves to consideration of unaffixed loans taken directly from French with no alteration in sense, but this study compares borrowing from French and Latin as well as considering semantic and morphological development. Borrowing from each language is considered in relation to losses and in relation to the size of the lexis as a whole.