Ministry of higher and secondary

CONCLUSION ON CHAPTER II

Considering this first Latin influence upon the Germanic group as a whole, it is possible to distinguish two periods of Latin influence on Old English, as the tripartite division has proved to be quite problematic. The first period would include those years in which the continental situation of contact between Proto- Germanic and Latin, specifically the vulgar variety, led to a cultural exchange between the two languages, as well as the first centuries of the Anglo-Saxon settlement on the British Isles, with Vulgar Latin of the Romano-Britons as the source of linguistic influence. In a second period, beginning in 650 A.D., the English people conversion to Christianity marked a new wave of Latin borrowing into English, whose origin was the Classical Latin of the Church and scholarship. Many different semantic fields received Latin influence in this period. Thus, we can highlight the adoption of commercial and military terms due to the continental influence; other official terms introduced through the Latin spoken by the Romano Britons; and religious and learned terms entering the language as a consequence of the process of Christianisation. The category of nouns was the predominant category Latin borrowings belonged to in this period, with semantic borrowings as the main kind of borrowing operating in OE.
While French became the language of the administration and commerce, Latin continued to be the official language of the Church. Thus, many borrowings from the two privileged languages managed to enter the English vocabulary. Since many Latin words were being introduced through French into English, differentiating between direct and indirect Latin borrowings became a difficult task, as they had many cognate words in common. In any case, those words that were not attested in French at the moment of its introduction on ME are likely to be ultimately Latin borrowings. Since Latin was the language of the Church and scholarship, the semantic fields that were affected by Latin borrowings in this period are those concerned with religion, scholarship and even with the practice of the law.