File under “Knights, K-Nasty, Run Away!”: The English do not speak better English than the French.
Well, at least better than one Frenchman, who happens to be English. I’ll explain:
In a classic scene (among so many classic scenes) in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, John Cleese portrays an obnoxious French castle guard taunting King Arthur and his knights. Among his many derisions, the French guard refers to the lot of them as “silly English k-nig-its.” On the surface, the joke is that this rude guard (and likely part-time waiter) doesn’t know that the English word knight features silent consonants, or is mocking Arthur with mispronunciation. But if we consider it a bit more deeply, we see that the joke that Messrs. Cleese and his fellow Pythons may or may
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not have considered is that some French consonants can themselves be silent, so it would seem unlikely that the guard would go out of his way to pronounce every single English letter (yes, it’s a joke for word geeks like me, and you can berate me for it—on the other hand, you are still reading this book).
The better word-geek joke, though—again, one that Cleese and company may or may not have realized—is that the Frenchman was pretty close to being right (or rig-git).
Arthur is said to have lived in the fifth century, when Old English was spoken. The Old English word that eventually became knight in modern English was cniht (synonymous with lad), in which the hard-C was pronounced. This word was synonymous with other West Germanic language words, such as knecht in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, and German. And when Chaucer was writing, in Middle English, knight was pronounced ka-nick-te (though unlikely spoken by the French guard, who would have been very old by Chaucer’s time). Knight, along with other silent- K words like knee and knock and knot and know and knuckle, retained the hard-C pronunciation even after Shakespeare’s time, and started going silent in the sixteenth century even though related words in other Germanic languages retain the K-N dual sound.
I’m not sure of the verisimilitude of the other Frenchman’s taunts in Holy Grail, including “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!,” but given the delightful erudition of the French guard’s understanding of Old English elocution, I now believe this movie to be a study in meticulous adherence to historical veracity—especially the catapulting of cows from within the walls of French castles.