Question: Targe (from Old Franconian *"targa " "shield", Proto-Germanic *"targo " "border") was a general word for shield in late Old English, its diminutive, "target", came to mean an object to be aimed at in the 18th century, Frankish,  Old Franconian or Old Frankish was the West Germanic language spoken by the Franks between which type span?

Bourgault (] ); is a surname derived from Old French but ultimately of Germanic French origin .  "Bourg" is from the Frankish *burg meaning town, fortress, or castle and "ault" (-aud) from the Frankish *wald meaning power, mastery, or rule.  Philologically, a plurality of Frankish (Franconian) words with the phoneme "w" were changed to gu/ga/gau while developing into nascent old French (e.g. Frankish *werra "war"= "guerre" in Old French, *want "gauntlet"= "gant", and *walha "foreigner/Celt"= "gaulois").  See: Gauthier.  Thus, the name means roughly "master of fortification," indicating a position along the lines of a castellan or burgrave.  The toponymic "gau" may be significant by dint of the historiographical connotations of the name's meaning.  Archaic variants and cognates of the name, used then as an occupational given name, are attested to as early as the 6th century and are found in Fredegar's chronicle although the validity of this source, notwithstanding its primary nature, is often called into question.  Therein, one Burgoald was a strongman under King Guntram in the area of Chalon. <SEP> Targe (from Old Franconian *"targa " "shield", Proto-Germanic *"targo " "border") was a general word for shield in late Old English.  Its diminutive, "target", came to mean an object to be aimed at in the 18th century. <SEP>  The language itself is poorly attested, but it gave rise to numerous loanwords in Old French. Frankish (reconstructed Frankish: "*Frenkisk"), Old Franconian or Old Frankish was the West Germanic language spoken by the Franks between the 4th and 8th century.  Old Dutch is the term for the Old Franconian dialects spoken in the Low Countries, ie.  in present-day Belgium, in the present Netherlands and Western parts of today's Germany until about the 12th century when it evolved into Middle Dutch. <SEP> A thing was the governing assembly of a northern Germanic society, made up of the free people of the community presided over by lawspeakers.  The word appears in Old Norse, Old English, and modern Icelandic as "þing" (where "þ" is pronounced like unvoiced "th" /θ/), in Middle English (as in modern English), Old Saxon, Old Dutch, and Old Frisian as "thing", in Old High German, Middle High German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Middle Dutch, modern Dutch, and Afrikaans as "ding" and modern German as "Ding", and in modern Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Faroese, Gutnish, and Norn as "ting", all from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic neuter "*þingą"; the word is the same as the more common English word "thing", both having at their heart the basic meaning of "an assemblage, a coming together of parts"—in the one case, an "assembly" or "meeting", in the other, an "entity", "object", or "thing".  The meeting-place of a thing was called a "thingstead" (Old English "þingstede") or "thingstow" (Old English "þingstōw").