Sailing

Les haubans are the wires that hold the mast from the sides, and the word is not French at heart. It comes from Old Norse hofudbenda, a compound of hofud, head, and benda, a binding: the rope that binds the head of the mast. Both halves are transparent to an English speaker, because « head » and « bind » are the same Germanic words arrived by a different road. What English put in that slot instead is « shroud », a native word whose older meaning was a garment, which is why a mast and a corpse end up covered by the same noun. The Norse layer in French is small but concentrated in exactly this trade, and it leaves a fingerprint you can hear. Hauban takes the aspirate h: the article never elides and the plural never links, so it is le hauban and les haubans with a small break before the word, where a Latin word would have given l’ and a liaison. That break is the standard mark of a word that came into French from Germanic, and the shrouds carry it.