5 - The Acquisition of French

Summary

AS THE SPECULUM Vitae reminds us, French was not a language restricted to ‘þei þat haue it of scole tane’; as a language which in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries occupied a liminal space between true vernacular and artificially learned prestige language, it was not limited to a specific educational sphere. The question of how English people acquired French in the decades and centuries following the Norman Conquest, and at what point, and for what social groups, it became an artificially learned second language, has been debated at length by scholars. This in turn raises the question of how those engaged in French > English translation during this period acquired their language skills.

In previous chapters we have seen how the shifting status of French in England is reflected in depictions of the language in prologues, from allusions to its associations with a particular social class in the thirteenth-century Of Arthour and of Merlin's ‘Freynsche vse þis gentil man | Ac euerich Inglische Inglische can’, through anxieties expressed about the cultural dominance of ‘Frankis rimes’ in the Cursor Mundi (c. 1300), to less defensive, more distancing characterisations of French in the late fourteenth century as a language of ‘queynt termes’ (The Testament of Love) from ‘þe lond of France’ (King and Four Daughters). The present chapter explores the educational context of the changing role of French, discussing the various methods by which French was learned in England during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and considering how this might have affected ways in which the language was understood and used by those wishing to translate it into English.

The study of translation foregrounds the issue that the ‘acquisition of French’ during the period in question was a complex issue taking many different forms. The issue of active versus passive competence is crucial; active competence can be defined as the ability to speak or compose in a language, with passive competence being the ability to read or understand it when one hears it.