Foreign Influences on the Language of Cookery in Middle English

The linguistic situation in the Middle English period was complex, with three languages (Latin, French and English) playing the crucial role depending on such factors as register, medium, context and language user. Latin was the written language of high status, French was the official language both written and spoken, and English was the language of low status used in informal, spoken contexts (see for instance Crespo 2000). Additionally, one should not forget that, apart from the three languages being present in various areas of language, it was in the Middle English period that a great number of Scandinavian loanwords, which had been borrowed after the Scandinavian invasions, surfaced in the written English sources (e.g., Miller 2012; Moskowich 1993). The aim of the proposed paper is to show how the multilingual situation of medieval England has been reflected in the culinary recipes of the 14th and 15th centuries. The recipe has already been analyzed by a number of scholars, for instance Görlach (1992, 2004) or Carroll (1999). They all agree that one of the distinctive features of the text type is the use of verbs (or verbal structures) – an issue already investigated by the present author (see Bator 2013, 2014). In the present paper our attention will be put on the following verbal triplets: ME nym ~ take ~ recipe (= ‘to take’), ME mess ~ serve ~ (a)dress (= ‘to serve’), ME boyle ~ seethe ~ parboile (= ‘to cook’). The analysis is to reveal the differences which arose among the synonyms, such as the semantic shades of meaning of the verbs, or their dialectal distribution. The study is also to reveal whether any of the languages mentioned above dominated the semantic area. The data used for the present research come from a corpus of over 1,500 recipes from the 14th- and 15th-century culinary collections