Exotic Flavour and Distinction: Linguistic and Semantic Observations

The migration of words from French into English was not rare in the eighteenth century: ‘From the mid sixteenth century onwards the proportion fluctuates either side of 5%, reaching its highest point in the second half of the eighteenth century [9%].’ French was still

A detailed analysis of the early English uses of the Gallicism will provide a comparative and transnational perspective.

Esprit de corps is a particularly successful case: it rapidly and sustainably spread into several European languages. In most of these it was progressively domesticated and partly replaced in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries by local loanwords (for example kåranda in Swedish, anda meaning spirit and kår meaning corps; or Korpsgeist in German, on the same principle). In English, however, the signifier persisted talis qualis, an exact importation from the donor language, morpheme by morpheme. It is an extreme version of a loanword, what linguists call a ‘foreign idiom’ because of its untranslatability. Other examples of similar borrowings from modern French, more or less popular today in English, are entrepreneur, avant-garde, laissez-faire, enfant terrible, raison d‘être, joie de vivre and je-ne-sais-quoi. In the terminology of translation studies, a borrowed word can either be ‘domesticated’ or ‘foreignized’. While domestication implies that the word or expression is modified to suit the host language – for example ‘career’ for the French carrière, or ‘account’ for compte – foreignisation supposes a stricter fidelity to the donor language, perhaps ‘in order to keep a kind of exotic flavour’.

This linguistic exoticism is not only motivated by aesthetic preoccupations, but also by its capacity to convey a sense or effect of distinction: