principal,’ naturales ‘natural’ Verbs: strive, please, waste, join, cover Prepositions: French contributed to the constructions of according to and during Interjections: gramercy ‘thank you’ Nouns: ancestor, cellar, dinner, garment, kennel, music, noun, plague, statute The French gave the English language many specialized words, such as those used in culinary or legal situations. Because the Normans had taken over judicial and aristocratic roles, their high-prestige vocabulary was passed on to the lower-class English who acted as their clerks and servants. Thus, many cooking terms such as broil, goblet, and beverage were passed on by masters to their servants. The French influence on the lexicon was nearly nonexistent in areas where the French masters would have had little or no contact with their servants, for example, in the field. Orthography The Present-Day English writing system is notorious for being a poor representation of the sounds it is supposed to denote. Much of this confusion has roots in the time of Norman rule. The onslaught of French loanwords and a few new French phonemes caused English orthography to worsen as an accurate portrayal of English phonology. While Old English had used the grapheme *c* to spell the phonemes /k/ and /c/, French loans introduced that grapheme to represent the phonemes /k/ and /s/, and the digraph *ch* to spell /c/. In fact, the French influence was so strong in these respects, the French *ch* replaced the English *c* even in native words, and the *c* spelling of /s/ was adapted into such indigenous English words as mice and since. When the French phonemes /j/ and /v/ became prevalent in English, there was no standard method for transcribing these sounds. Most English speakers wrote them simply as allographs of the existing /i/ and /u/. Throughout the Middle English period, both the graphemes *i* and *j* could be used to represent /i/ and /j/, and the graphemes *u...
