Sometimes French acquired words from English. However, it also acquired words from other Germanic languages because it was invaded by Germanic peoples, including the Franks who managed to give their name to the country. For example, the words for the four directions (nord, sud, est, ouest) all come from Germanic words: the Latin words for those are quite different.
Right. The Latin words were the ones used to make the adjectives related to the directions however: méridional, septentrional, occidental, oriental (southern, northern, western, eastern respectively)
[sidebar] which I’ve always found quite beautiful for their clear reference to their origins: oriens from oriri (to rise), meridies (noon), occidens from occidere (to set), septentrio from the seven stars of the Little Dipper.
Oooh thats interesting, thanks for introducing me to Proto-Indo-European.
Now tell me the etymology of “proto-” and “indo-” 
“Proto-” comes from the Greek “πρῶτος” (prōtos), meaning first or earliest.
“Indo-” comes from the same source as “India”, “Indies”, “Hindi” and “Hindu” – the Sanskrit name of the river Indus, “Sindh”, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word for river.
(In case you were being serious).
Two points:
First, while your overall post is true in general, in the case of “knife” the etymology doesn’t seem to be traceable past Old Norse.
Second, three other European languages that are not Indo-European are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. They are part of another language family, I think Finno-Ugric.
(Hamsters keep eating this post, so sorry if it posts thrice.)
And Saami (Lappish). And Turkish. And, if you stretch “Europe” to include “European Russian and the European former Soviet Republics” you get to add Georgian, Chuvash, and a whole bunch of others.
n/m
Well, if we could just resurrect the right people we’d be able to trace it back all the way to PIE. Sadly, the field of corpse linguistics is quite empty.
Indeed the case.
According to the OED this was a Germanic-to-Old French borrowing. There are a number of such words that were borrowed one way or the other, during the early contacts between various Germanic peoples on one side, and the early Romance speaking people in France and elsewhere.
Longtime members are going to kill me:
When come back bring PIE.
To elaborate, historical linguists traditionally have named the broad language “phyla” according to the extremities of the regions they cover, so, Indo-European, Finno-Ugric (Ugric referring to the Uighur people of Central Asia, and Uto-Aztecan to name a few examples. This is why some of the language group names sound so odd.
Refugees from Atlantis, of course.
More seriously, has Basque been shown to be unrelated to every other language known? Does it not even have words borrowed from other languages?
Yes I was being serious
So PIE was spoken by people all the way from Europe over to what we now call India?
No, not really. PIE was (perhaps) spoken in an area somewhere between Anatolia and area north of the Caspian Sea. From there it spread in several directions and ended up “fathering” several other proto-languages, like Proto Indo-Iranian. Try reading the main article on Wikipedia and a few of the related ones.
Note that PIE and other proto-languages are reconstructed from later languages. We have a pretty good idea about how they were constructed, but there is no direct evidence.
But the Uighurs speak a Turkic language, not a Uralic one. According to Wikipedia Ugric actually comes from Yugra, which is also in Central Asia although northwest of where the Uighurs live.
And I think the names of those vast language families developed naturally, as they were constructed by comparing geographically distant languages. We started talking about Indo-European languages, for example, when linguists discovered that Sanskrit and other Indian languages had similarities with most European languages. The name was an obvious one, and I don’t think there was any special effort to find the “extremities” of the region where Indo-European languages are spoken.
I was under the impression that Ugric was a referenceto Hungarian.
Why do you find that unlikely?
Quick lesson in British history, and etymology. In the year 1066 a load of Frenchmen invaded our country, and stayed for several hundred years as a ruling class. They brought with them a load of forreign words, which entered the language. A large proportion of modern English words have their root in 11th century French.
As others have said, “knife” doesn’t necessarily come from French. It is probably a cognate term among the Germanic language group. It exist in Scandinavian languages today - in Danish it is “kniv” - with the kn pronounced as in locknut (sorry. Couldn’t think of a proper English word, so I made one up). According to my etymological dictionary the origin of the word is a common Old Germanic word: *knīf- (n. knife - or a curved blade) <- *knīpan (vb. bend, press together).
The same sound/letter combination is found in “knot”, Danish “knude”, and many others.
Brythonic Celts and later Anglo-Saxons had all kinds of words for things that were later replaced by words from other languages. This is true of any language really. You can’t guess by the meaning of a word how long it has been in a language. Language is subject to change by fashion.