What's the French for. . ?

I love the French language as much as I do English. If I didn't I don't think it would be possible to live here. I've always preferred the sound of the lyrical languages such as French, Spanish and Italian. There's something uplifting, expressive about them and they make me smile. But gutteral languages such as German just have never appealed to my ear and I never enjoyed the feel of the language on my tongue. Which is perhaps why I gave it up at school as soon as the opportunity presented itself. 

I can't imagine what the effect would be if, one morning you woke up not only disliking the sound of your own language, but not having any interest in it. Luckily I've always been fascinated by words and they've shaped my life sometimes in the most unexpected ways. Now of course, out of choice, I've two lexicons to play with.

I hadn't appreciated until relatively recently, that at least 43% of English comes from French. Our neighbours here and our co-conversationalists found this quite intriguing. Given our countries shared histories, it's not surprising that language would be part of the cultural exchange. But it's only since I started studying French again and regularly using both languages that I've become aware of the cross-over. Many 'every day' words in English are the same in French. On occasion they are even spelt the same, or there might a one letter difference. Some words are of French origine, but over time have acquired different meanings in each country.

During the summer the grand-children of our neighbours Norbert and Jacqueline came round for an English lesson, to try and ease their worries about starting to learn it at school in Septembre. So I got about 100 words together just to start them off, which were either exactly the same in either language, or had a one letter difference. Of course pronunciation is clearly différente and important to get right. And each word in French comes with gender definition. However the look on their faces as the réalisation began to sink in, that they already knew some English words was just wonderful to see. 

Here are a some which are so obvious, but I'd just stopped thinking about the connection: chef, diction, blancmange, cuisine,orange, table, impossible, ballet, jungle, patron, discipline, adorable, judo, vampire. lion, panorama.

The link below gives an A-Z of English/French cognates.

French language