An analysis of the history of French borrowings' pronunciation from Middle to Modern English on the basis of corpus data

The diploma thesis An analysis of the history of French borrowings' pronunciation from Middle to Modern English on the basis of corpus data attempts to account for the influence of Old French borrowings and their pronunciation on the Middle English phonological system with respect to Modern English. The theoretical part of the thesis explains extralinguistic and intralinguistic aspects of language contact and the related lexical and phonological borrowing, which is followed by an overview of the history of the English and French phonological systems and complemented by the corresponding scribal practices. The research is carried out on a list of French loans extracted from and further studied in Oxford English Dictionary. Selected samples are looked up in a Middle English corpus and their probable pronunciation is inferred on the basis of their orthography. The analysis is concerned with five French phonemes absent in the medieval English