Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 May 23

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May 23

The letter J

What is the best word or words to use to describe the hook at the bottom of the letter j ? The specific portion which makes it look different from the letter i — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.104.30.112 (talk) 09:19, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

According to my reading of Typeface anatomy it would be the open curve. Mitch Ames (talk) 09:30, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Descender is used for any portion of a letter that dips below the base line, so this would be the word for the "tail" of a y or a j and so on. Matt Deres (talk) 12:30, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

"Tail" is often used too, though not for the descenders of pq. —Tamfang (talk) 07:19, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Late Old English words derived from Old French or Anglo-Norman/Old Norman?

I know that there was only a short time in which this could have happened, but I was just wondering if there are any late Old English words borrowed from Old French or Anglo-Norman/Old Norman. Tharthan (talk) 16:24, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

This webpage says "The greatest influence set in the mid 13th century. The number of borrowings runs into thousands." and gives examples, but I guess that's really Early Middle English, although it also says "Some few words pre-date the Norman conquest such as prud ‘proud’ and tur ‘tower’". Mikenorton (talk) 16:41, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Further to what Mikenorton said, French loanwords can be seen trickling into the language in the very few post-conquest English texts that are transitional between Old and Middle English, especially the 12th-century continuations of the Peterborough Chronicle. The so-called first continuation has only a few of them (e.g. canonie, clerk, canceler), the second continuation from the 1130s considerably more (pais, tresor, prisun…). But then again, some people might say that the presence of these loans is really one of the things that make these texts more Middle English than Old English anyway. I couldn't say anything about loans in genuine pre-conquest OE and where they would be attested. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:45, 23 May 2015 (UTC)