How do French words like “cul-de-sac” and “hors d’oeuvres“ end up part of the English language without being translated to English words?
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They’re called loan words. They exist in every language. Many of the words you use today and think of as English words are actually loan words that found their way into English centuries ago, so they “officially” became a part of it.
There’s a relationship between Normandy French and Anglo Saxon English, two languages from a few hundred years ago (a lot of *fews*). They coexisted at one point with rich people using the French one and poor people using the English one. As people hung out with each other more and people who had different amounts of money interacted (think of stuff like rich people entertaining by pretending to be poor people, poor people working for and hearing rich people), the two languages melded over time. So, you get linguistic artifacts! This is why a living chicken is a chicken and a dead chicken is poultry (same with cow/beef or pork/pig). One is the Anglo Saxon word and the other is the Normandy word (boeuf in French and cow in English!). But because people used them together, the two melted into one and we use bits of each still.
(Far more complicated than this, but this is explain like I’m five!)
Cul-de-sac means “bag bottom” in French. As you can see, it looks and sounds much better untranslated. Especially when you are trying to sell houses.
“Hors d’oeuvres” similarly sounds more posh than “appetizers” or “starters”, and translates as something like “outside the main course”, which would be clumsy.
That said, there are such things as calques, which are words and expressions loaned from other languages and translated literally. Often you wouldn’t recognize them as such. English calques from French include “that goes without saying”, “point of view”, “flea market”, “by heart” and many other things.
Edit: Also Tolkien translated “cul-de-sac” as “Bag End” for his book, as a kind of an inside joke for philologists.
When the upper classes in England were very likely to know French, but the lower classes were not, there was a period especislly in the 19th century when it was very fashionable to use French words for fancy things, to imply you were fancy enough to know French. Especially around cuisine, as fine French cuisine was so highly regarded. Other people who spoke French would understand, and many words trickled into regular use. English and French have of course been in contact and trading words in different historical contexts for a thousand years.
In addition to what everyone else has said: English actually includes a _lot_ of French words because at one point France had conquered and ruled England. So words like: Beef, Ambulance, Debris, Mutton, Pork, Dentist are all actually just untranslated French words.
English also adopted a lot of French words with slight spelling differences or turned a phrase into a single word, like Vinegar being from “vin aigre” meaning “sour wine” or Dandelion from “dent de lion” meaning “Lion’s Teeth”.
Hors D’oeuvres is just so French and has survived mostly unchanged so it’s more recognizable.
Sometimes French words or phrases just have a certain je ne sais quoi that would be hard to capture in a similarly succinct English phrase.
The correct answer is that when cultures and languages mix, they share words and phrases.
That seems incredibly simple, but it really is that simple. You hang out with a new group of people, over time you start using some expressions they use and they start using some of yours. Then you go back to your family or workplace or other social circles and take those new expressions or words with you, and then they spread from you to other people, and phrases or words from those other people spread back through you to that first group.
That just is how people be. We like novel expressions and funs turns of phrase. Language is first and foremost functional, and anything that works, gets picked up.
Every language is littered with hundreds of loan words from other languages. The only languages that don’t are those that developed in relative cultural isolation, either imposed by nature or by choice.
Same as how the word “Robot” did.
It’s not an English word, it’s a Czech word.
Same how most of the world uses the world “Internet” for internet even though it means nothing in their languages.
Loan words exist in every language and they are quite plentiful.
The same way the French pickup English words like *”le businessman”* without translating them into French.
In the encounters between languages, let’s say French and English (an encounter that has been going on some thousand years), when a word exists for a concept in one language but not the other, borrowings are likely to occur. So for example, with “hors d’oeuvres”, this word existed in French but not in English, and it was easier for English to just adopt the term rather than make their own name for it. This happened with a good many culinary and gastronomic terms, because at the time when these concepts were being developed in English, French was a cultural powerhouse in the domain of gastronomy and so English ended up borrowing things like sauté, soufflé, meringue, etc. This was also the case in the domain of the military, which is why we have so many French words in our English military lexicon (same can be said for fashion). The reverse is true in terms of technological developments, which is why French has borrowed so many tech terms from English.
Borrowing doesn’t have to happen…the uninitiated language COULD reject the other language’s term and make up their own. It doesn’t always “take” though. For example, English had this handy term “brainstorming” , which began to seep into French, as they had no such term. The Académie françaiss tried to come up with a French version, “remue-méninges”…but typically, you still just hear French speakers say “le brainstorming”.
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