240 The Loom of Language be understood unless we indicated our wishes in writing Sometimes our own pronunciation of a French loan-word (e g damage) is nearer to the original than that of a Frenchman to-day Modern French has discarded many words which survive in English,, c g able, bacon, chattel^ mischief^ mce, noise, nunance> pledge, plenty, random, remember, level. English is thus a museum in which relics of Old and Middle French are exhibited, but English words of Latin origin derived from bor- rowed French words are far less numerous than English words coined directly from Latin roots, and these are the woids which lighten our IATIN FRFNCH (a) Older (b) Newer causa cnosr (Thing) cause (cause) calculo CATtlOU (pebble) calcul (calculus) calce criAUX (lime) caique (tracing) carta CHAKIE (charter) carte (curd) captivo ctnfinp (jpwty> weak) captif , (captive) factione FACQN (tfyle) faction (faction) fabnca i ORGF (smithy) f abnque ( factory) fragih IRpLB (ftatl) iragilc (ft agile) hospitale H6llL (hotel, hopital (hospital) mansion) parabola PAROLL (speech) paiabole (parable) pietate PITl£ (frtv) pi&6 (pwty) praedicatore PRtattiUR (preacher) pr<5dicateui (prcachci) questionc QUBTE (quest) question (question} rigido RAIDE (stiff} ngide (rigid) redemptione RAN9ON (ransom) redemption (redemption} task in learning a Romance language such as Spanish, To take full advantage of our Latin legacy we therefore need to know a little about how the pronunciation of Latin changed when it split up into the daughter dialects which are now spoken, and how the sound-changes are reflected in the spelling of each There are several signposts by which English words of Latin or French origin can be recognized, We have already come across one of them (C for the k sound) in Chapter II. Another important one is the combination -TI~ for the sound represented by sh in words of Teutonic parentage. The following is a list of some of the most reliable dues: (i) The combinations CT, TI (pronounced sh) and SC, e,g, action an