Middle English borrowed extensively from French. One of the semantic fields highly influenced was the culinary vocabulary. The majority of words used in Middle English recipes are of French origin. This includes names of various food products used for the preparation of particular dishes, but also a wide range of verbs. These can be categorised into three major groups: verbs used to describe the process of preparing, cutting and cooking food.
In many cases the borrowed verbs were used next to native terms of similar denotation and their introduction contributed not only to a greater variety of meanings available in the culinary language, which led to a certain specialization of the vocabulary within the semantic field, but also to a certain degree of rivalry between the native and the borrowed elements, which led to semantic shift as well as obsolescence of some of the verbs.
The aim of the present paper is to show the growing dominance of the foreign element in the recipes at various stages of the Middle English period, as well as the rivalry between the verbs of different origin.
The research has been based on a selection of almost a thousand recipes from the 14th-and 15th-century culinary collections.
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