Semantic change of anglicisms

The most current form of language contact is borrowing. Most words are polysemous. When a language borrows polysemous words, it does not borrow all the senses of a given word, but only one or two senses. Only rarely do we encounter words like French flash, which has four main meanings: 1. ‘the method or apparatus for taking photographs in the dark’ 2. ‘a short news report’

3. ‘flash (in cinema)’ 4. ‘the immediate pleasurable feeling produced by a drug’.

In the rest of my paper, I attempt to shed some light on how anglicisms change their meanings when they enter French.

GIRL ‘chorus girl’

In English girl denotes ‘a female child’. In Old and Middle English the word was also used to refer to ‘a child or young person of either sex’, the current meaning is the result of semantic restriction. The word first occurs in French in 1889 in the sense ‘a young English woman, a mistress’. It referred to the fact that a girl was young and English. They were often employed as female teachers in private households. This meaning is obsolete today. In French the meaning ‘a young woman who sings or dances in the chorus of a musical comedy or revue’

is attested from 1913. The French word is the shortening of the English expression chorus girl (1905), a compound word formed from chorus ‘a group of dancers or singers’ and girl ‘female member of a chorus’. It is the omission of the first element that changed the meaning of the anglicism in French and not the specialization of the word girl. In English girl alone does not refer to a ‘chorus girl’.

The word girl occurs as part of a number of anglicisms: girl-friend, girl-scout as anterior constituents and call-girl, cover-girl, script-girl as posterior constituents of compounds. Call-girl and cover-girl clearly refer to adult activities.

From the angle of gender-specificism, the expression script-girl is worth examining. The English expression was formed after a long period of uncertainty. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earlier form was script-writer (1915), then script clerk (1927), the form script-girl only occurred

in 1940. The form denoting female performers must have spread because keeping the shooting diary precisely required feminine qualities. The asexualized form scripter was first used in 1940. Interestingly, the anglicism script-girl first occurs in French as early as 1923, earlier than in English. Since 1948 the mutilated form script has been used as a feminine word, which is the homonym of the masculine word script ‘written form of a film’. As a result of the official feminization of the names of trade, the recommended current form is scripte, which can be either masculine or feminine.

BOY ‘male dancer’

Similarly to the word girl, the English word boy ‘female child’ was borrowed into French several times in several meanings:

1. ‘young man (in Anglo-Saxon countries)’ (1836). Cultural borrowing.

2. ‘a native personal servant in the colonies’ (1888).

3. ‘male dancer’ (1947). It came to be used as the female equivalent of girl. In fact it is not what Deroy (1956: 138) calls an emprunt de necessité ‘loan of necessity’ as there is a well-established native word: danseur ‘male dancer’.

In compounds, the word is used in the original meaning: friend (1947), boy-scout (1910), cow-boy (1886), pin-up boy (1946). Boy-friend came to be used as a cultural borrowing. There exists a suitable French expression, petit ami ‘boy-friend’, so here we have another superfluous borrowing. Boy-scout (1910) refers to ‘a member of the organization first established in 1908 by Gen. Baden-Powell’. The name of the members of the organization changed over the years both in English and French. The element boy is usually omitted today except when the anglicism is used in the sense ‘naïve idealist’. Boy-scouts were supposed to perform a good deed at least once a day. The Trésor de la Langue Française illustrates this meaning with a quotation from Sartre dated 1948. The anglicism pin-up boy (1946) occurred in French almost immediately after it first appeared in English in 1943. The expression was modeled on pin-up girl ‘a sexually attractive woman whose photograph was designed to be hung up on the wall’. It was first recorded English in 1943 and entered French only two years later.

PULL ‘pullover’

The earliest example of the noun pull-over (1875) related to clothing refers to hat-making: ‘a silk or felt hat cover or nap drawn over the head body; also a hat so made’. The word is a compound of pull + over. Originally, the word was used as an epithet: pullover storm coat (1907), pullover sweater (1921). In 1925 the word occurs as a separate word in English. It is first attested in French the very

same year. The shortened, informal form occurs in French around 1947. The French formation sous-pull literally ‘under-pullover’ has been used since 1974.

This is a ‘thin polo neck jersey’ worn under other items of clothing and has no English equivalent. Both the shortening and the neologism formed from the shortening occur only in French.

SMOKING ‘man’s suit worn on festive occasions, dinner jacket’

The case of the word smoking is usually referred to as the classic example of semantic change. In English there is no item of clothing with this name. There existed a so-called smoking-jacket; the Oxford English Dictionary supplies the following example:

(1878) H. SMART Pay or Play i. Appearing in a radiant smoking-jacket that matched his cigar-case.

The word soon occurs in French texts: (BOURGET, Études et portraits, 1888, p.

350 and P. HERVIEU, Flirt, 1890, 55 in Höfler, 1982). After 1891 it is used in the same sense as present-day English ‘dinner jacket’. The word smoking only occurs in English in the sense of ‘dinner jacket’ as a gallicism, with reference to an a priori foreign cultural context.

(1922) M. ARLEN Piracy ii. ix. 127 He put on a dress suit. … It suited Argentines very well, le smoking. But Englishmen were made of sterner stuff.

The British English word dinner-jacket has been in use since 1891.

(1891) M. E. BRADDON Gerard III. vii. 208 Jermyn took up the loose pages, folded them carefully, put them in an inner pocket of his dinner-jacket.

The American English equivalent of dinner jacket is tuxedo. This item of clothing is first attested in 1889 as tuxedo coat and tuxedo, the collocation tuxedo jacket is first recorded in 1925. We can summarize the history of the word smoking by saying that the shortening of the compound smoking-jacket brought about a disturbing change of meaning. The word in question spread to other European languages and became an international word in the new meaning. The confusion was further compounded by the fact that in the donor language a completely new word came to be used immediately after the word had entered the borrowing languages.