I'm by no means the first to question the truth of this story. If you want to learn more then I have posted some of my sources in the description of this video.
You are wrong and Scott is right (why insulting a dead person, by the way?). There is no way in which French "veau" could become English "veal" in the 19th century, that's 2 plus 2 equals 5. Unless you are trying to say that menu writers in Victorian restaurants deliberetly pursued a recostructionist, philologically accurate policy in naming their offers. Yea they certainly thought a lot about these linguistical nuisances. Truth is that there was a lot of confusion after the Norman invasion, French and English words were frequently used interchanchably, then the French ones became the stabilized, prestigious ones for the upper classes. Meat instead of cattle. Exactly as in Shakespeare's plays usually commoners have English names and nobles French ones, but that's not a rule.
@@lucacremonini5731 All that doesn't mean he's wrong. Yes words of two different origins coexist to mean the same thing, that happens in any language, but I think that with menus in French the word from French origin eventually prevailed when meaning the food. Being French I'm always amused that English native speakers refer to snails as escargots, as if it was some sophisticated delicacy (when originally it was a poor man's dish, rather obviously). For me, escargot just means snail.
In the US, at least, a further distancing from slaughtered animals has entered the mainstream. Instead of even mentioning the animal name, meats are frequently vaguely called "proteins."
You said the reason why we STILL have different names for animals and the meat that comes from the animal is because we don't want to be reminded of the fact that it is a dead animal. So what about other languages that don't have different names for the animal and the meat. Are all non-English speakers just depressed?
@@Finity_twenty_ten He also says that doesn't apply to other animals in english, like duck or goat, which seems to confirm his theory about using the english words of french origin only when french cuisine became fashionable in the 18th century. Moreover, for a language to use a different word for the food and not the animal, it would need another word to exist. It does in english in some cases (beef, pork etc.) so they used them. In french, we have two main words for pig: cochon and porc, and we do prefer to use the former for the animal and the latter for the meat. Pork chop is côte de porc, not côte de cochon.
In New York, we have a part of Brooklyn called Coney Island. The Dutch, who were the first Europeans to colonize the area, named it for the large number of wild rabbits found there. Their word for rabbit is konijn. When the English took over, they Anglicized the name to Coney. At least that's the story I learned in school. I never realized that coney was Middle English for rabbit.
And here in Detroit, we have a hot dog named for your island. The restaurant chains are called "Coney Islands," and the hot dog is called either a ""Coney Dog" or, more often, just a "Coney." I don't think I've ever had one, & now that I've been vegetarian for 25+ years, that ship has sailed. The restaurants tend to be a mix of Greek & American foods (hot dogs, fries, spinach pie, sometimes gyros, e.g.).
But, Sam clearly tells Gollum that "there's only one way to eat a brace of _coneys."_ So, clearly, even in Tolkien's time, coney was understood to mean rabbit meat in English.
@@sluggo206Objection. In Appendix F, Tolkien says he found the Red Book and translated it from its native Hobbitish tongue into English. The words on the page truly are penned by Tolkien in the canon of LotR.
I believe it used to be the same for the English word deer, before being replaced by the French word. How it came to represent one single species of animal I have no idea but a humble guess; in some of these other germanic languages, the word which sounds similar to "deer" but means animal, has always been used as hunter slang for that particular animal, and is still common today in some if not all these germanic languages. In fact I know that in nordic languages, the more specific names for each type of deer often has this cognate word as an ending to the name of the particular species of deer: rådyr, dådyr, elgsdyr, rensdyr. Another sample of hunter slang I can think of comes from danish, (mind you the word dyr still means animal) in words like dyrejagt, meaning deer hunting. My guess is that as "animal" replaced the word "deer" it continued to be used by hunters
The Anglo-Norman (French) word that has replaced the older Anglo-Saxon ‘deer’, meaning any animal (particularly edible quadrupeds) is ‘beast’. The Anglo-Saxon ‘game’ naturally specifically refers to the profit from (stylised or ritualised) hunting, and more closely corresponds to the Anglo-Norman ‘venison’.
Your disassociation theory makes sense. I can remember my mom getting mildly upset when I was a kid and said something like "Can I have another piece of cow?", like I'd said something inappropriate.
In romance languages the same names are used for the animal and the food for the most part. If you grew up using the same words you are automatically dissociated.
As Walter Scott once stated, that this theory was once told by one of his friends as an interesting remark on the history of English language, he believed this hypothesis and used it in his novel, so it happened before 1819, somewhere in the beginning of the 19th century. I think it should have taken more time for such a semantic change, that means, that this change could have probably happened in the 18th century and might have been pretty regular thing, that happened in many languages, when every word takes its place and avoids unnecessary disambiguation. It's only a hypothesis, but I hope, somebody may try to make a more detailed survey to prove the reason, why this thing happened in the English language
@@LetThemTalkTV, he still can be technically correct, given that Norman nobility and their close servants spoke in Norman French and not in Anglo-Saxon, it's only natural for English "ox" and "calf" to become French "beef" and "veau", even if the English words themselves will only change centuries later.
It shows it shows a slower and more nuanced version of the story, but i'm not sure it conradicts it. The Norman conquest set the idea that French-Derived words were posher.
the timeline suggests it was not the Norman conquest but rather the Napoleonic conquests and post-Napoleonic/imperial French influence that drove the poshness
@@JustinLe hardly. well maybe indirectly, The English were not exactly enamored of Napoleon. The influence might be earlier - for example French nobility fleeing the guillotine.
I suspect that a lot of this is fanciful imagination. Contrary to something else the video said, the Normans were Anglicised in less than two centuries following the conquest. We like to imagine history and division (and for many of the people writing the histories in the 18th and 19th centuries, wishing to differentiate themselves with the lower classes).
Smoked salmon is sold as "lox" all over America. So the Anglo Saxon name "leax" did not die out. Of course, the original name of the fish was restored to us by German Jews who brought the word from Yiddish, which is a Germanic language.
You must be from the Midwest, where the majority of people are of German or Scandinavian ancestry. I have lived in New England for 13 years and have never seen the word lox to refer to smoked salmon.
taureau, porcelet, ... interestingly the English "steer" designates a castrated bull whereas "Stier" in German is a bull that hasn't been deprived of his reproductive capacity.
Well, porc is for the animal as well. We say “éleveur de porcs” or “fièvre porcine”. Cochon is more used as a cute name for the animal by children or as a mild insult for either a child being dirty or a man who is a bit perverted.
La vâche ne se mange pas mais produit le lait, le beurre et le fromage ; le bœuf se mange ; le taureau féconde. Ce ne sont pas des mots--l'un pour l'animal, l'autre pour la table.
In Spanish too: Vaca - bife / carne de vaca ....... Actually not really in Spanish Chancho/Cerdo/Puerco - Carne de Chancho/Cerdo/Puerco Pollo - Carne de Pollo Conejo - Carne de conejo Etc. Etc.
Fun fact : the French technical term for a rabbit breeder is "cuniculiculteur". BTW, "conin" isn't used anymore in French for similar reasons than in English.
Raisin originally referred to grapes of the vine as well as dried grapes in English, but after around the 18th century, it became a term exclusively for the latter. Raisin is a Middle English borrowing from French, and the modern French word for grape is also raisin. But interestingly, grape is also a Middle English borrowing from French corresponding to modern grappe, which means a bunch (as in grappe de raisin). It displaced Middle English winberie (i.e. wineberry). This is only tangentially related, of course, but I thought it was another nice example of different words originally referring to the same thing acquiring more specialized meanings. And we can speculate whether their use in cooking favoured the more obviously French form raisin as the exclusive term for the dried version around the eighteenth century.
Oh dried fruits have tons of this dysmorphism, not linked to French speaking nobility, raisins are izium in Ukrainian (yes, like the city) but grapes are vynograd, winegrapes. Dried apricots? Kuraga. Always. Many grains have similar stuff, i.e. corn vs maize vs kukurudza. We'd call the crop latter but products from it often use the word for mais.
Not the Spanish, Portuguese and the Catalans, as they call them "conejo", "coehlo" and "conill". Similarly, the word "coño" is world famous and is used as an surprise exclamation, even by women. Spanish, Catalans and Portuguese don't have any problem with any association. In Spanish poetry, any word is useful for a metaphor. This is why Spanish poetry is one of the most advanced and difficult in all languages, way more difficult to rhyme than English, German or French.
I was under the impression that coney was still a common word in English. It’s still used by some people in America and I remember it in the Lord of the Rings movies
Coño is world famous and use as an exclamation because it's a word for vagina (it comes from Latin cunnus, meaning vulva). It has nothing to do with conejo/rabbits. What do you mean by "even by women"?? "In Spanish poetry, any word is useful for a metaphor" "Spanish poetry is the most difficult and advanced in all languages" what? I am a native in Spanish, French and English and I've never heard of seen any evidence of that.
Im confused about the logic here. Did anyone ever claim that no body used "porc" or "beef" for the living animals? The "myth" is a story about how the words came about and why you have multiple names. But in french a cow is called "vache" and a swine is called a "cochon", while "porc" and "boef" designate the meet (a bit) more than the animals, so the question is why english did not import "vache", but "boef", and not "cochon", but "porc". The choices made here do suggest that when these words came into english with the normans, it was via the table, not the stable.
Cow. Beef Critter (actually used in the movie Sargent York), Heifer. Cow or Cows is used generically yet a Cow is a female bovine while a bull is male.
Un bœuf is indeed not a cow, it is the French for steer. Cochon is a barrow or stag, that is, a castrated pig. A boar is for breeding. I think yer man is mostly right: the names are a mish-mash: they don’t divide neatly into field or food at all.
Yeah the logic doesn’t add up. Following the Norman invasion the entire judicial system of the time was conducted in French. If an Anglo Saxon was brought in front of a lord for hunting deer in their estate, they would have been charged for the slaughtering of venison, not deer. Therefore the Anglo Saxons had to learn and integrate the French into the dialect to understand the laws that now governed them. French was used in the court system from 1066 to the mid 1300s, which is also why all the documentation to prove the point of Anglo-Saxon is post 1300. Any works written in Anglo-Saxon prior to 1300 would have been frowned upon by the French aristocracy. It’s this very reason why the amount of Anglo Saxon literature that exists pre 1300 is so minimal. I’m calling this out as survivorship bias.
Note: The discussed theory of Sir Walter Scot has not influenced *only* RUclips posts. I read it many a year ago in a serious academic book about the history of English book (I don't remember its name offhand).
Indeed so have I but not all academics said that. Robert Burchfield (one of the sources of the video) called out this half-truth in his book about the history of English.
I think this is your best video yet. As a side note I quite like how Spanish differentiates between the live fish and the one served on your plate - pez vs pescado. I think you’re right that having a different word for the meat allows us to eat it without feeling so guilty. I like fish so I wish English had that alternative. Maybe then I could order a fillet-o-poisson and be guilt free.
As someone who grew up on the farm in Australia I can confirm that the word beef is still used for the animal. To be precise, a farmer who has a dairy, and produces milk calls his animals cows and cattle, but a farmer who produces meat refers to the animals as beef. And of course, there are some farmers who run both beef and cattle. The distinction is real because the breeds are very different. The beef might be Hereford, while the cow may be a Friesian. They look very different. The beef is thick and brown, while the Friesian cow is lanky and black and white, so while they are the same species they look different, there is good reason to refer to them by different words. Also, I suspect that the cute story about meat names being different to animal names due to squeamishness is shot down by beef. But also, we call chicken meat chicken and have zero issues about associating it with the living, walking egg laying bird. Another thing. Only city dwellers equate veal and calf. Veal, as used by the farmer means young, not newborn. When the animal is newborn, and for its first days and weeks when it is small it is called a calf. These very young calves are not usually used for veal. It takes time for them to get enough meat on the bones to worth killing for meat. Once the calf reaches a certain size and for the rest of its first year it is usually no longer called a calf by the farmer and is called a vealer. These animals are sold as veal meat. Unless being raised for meat, most males are killed at this stage. The females are referred to as heifers up until their first calving, and sometimes beyond, because heifer just means a young female older than a calf, although for convenience even a female calf might be referred to as a heifer. there is no special word referring to young bulls other than bull. I suspect, however that there may be differences in farm word usage between different countries, but I also suspect that in most countries there will be differences between words used on the farm, and words for the same things by people in town. This would tend to lend credence to old stories about different words used by producers and consumers. I doubt it came down to differences between classes, but differences between farmers and those who don't raise animals. I am suggesting by that, that even Anglo-Saxon consumers in addition to the Anglo-Norman consumers may well have been using the French words. Farmers tend to hang on to old ways because a lot of farming knowledge gets passed from old farmers to young farmers, generation to generation, and as a result older words are likely to persist, whereas sellers of produce directly to consumers are more likely then, as now, to use 'updated' marketing terms to make the product sound more appealing to the buyer.
@@birchlover3377 Interesting question, and it would not refer to singular, but I don't remember how a single beef stock animal would be called. We were dairy farmers, and all our stock was numbered with a yellow tag on the ear. So my father would simply say 'Number 214 is sick, or Number 347 is having problems. I better call the vet.' He would get upset at my mother, because she would give names to stock and my father was insistent that the animals be referred to by number as it reduced emotional attachments. It is true, because I remember my mother crying quite a few times when an animal she knew by name was being loaded onto a truck to go to market. I left the farm to go to the city as a teenager, and that was over 60 years ago, so some memories are sketchy.
Interesting reply. I do wonder though if you ever used the term bobby calf? Growing up in New Zealand, I heard many terms for sheep, and there was also a distinction between lamb, hogget, and mutton meats. Of course, the animals are sheep, rams, ewes, and lambs. I've never worked on an animal farm, but have worked in the countryside (on vineyards, herb farms, orchards, etc.) and spent time speaking with various kinds of farmers, so I picked up a few terms there ('tupping' for example). There were also farming TV shows and even comic books (Footrot Flats) where I picked up even more. And, after some searching online, I found a few terms new to me, too. So, if you (whoever might read this) want to know, you'd better rattle your dags and search for yourself. 😄
@@mabrurhrivu4998 It is just satire. A joke about ignorance. In Afrikaans "beef" is referred to as "beesvleis", cow as "koei", "bull" as "bul" and "cattle" as "beeste" - there is a definite distinction in the language.
I think the issue lies more in that the norman influence is a bit overstated and the general french influence is understated since that was the language of rulers, diplomats, most nobility and merchants nearly everywhere in europe. Dutch and German use similar or identical french root words for all supposedly unique norman or french words. For dutch its Biefstuk, lam and konijn (coney/rabbit) and the connection is not the norman conquest but rather dutch coming from the old lower Franconian language and close proximity. I think a better way to rephrase it is saying English has a strong french influence that got more intensified after the norman conquests in 1066.
Exactly. Much of the same 1500s to 1700s French influence happened in other germanic countries and languages as well. (Not least in my native Sweden, btw, where it peaked under our francophile king, Gustav III.)
Um... French "bifteck" is a back-borrowing from English "beefsteak." It's likely that Dutch borrowed "biefstuk" from English. The word for "beef" in French is "boeuf," yet French borrowed "beefsteak" and changed it to "bifteck" and the other languages then borrowed this from French.
To be fair, it’s the character of Wamba the jester who started this myth. To my knowledge, Scott never claimed Wamba was correct. And it’s a good way to introduce a modern audience to the Saxon-Norman conflict.
I got excited by this video and was going to tell my American wife all about it later (she's currently not taken the Life in the UK test). I might have to delay telling her the geeky news...
The different words for the animal and the meat is much more widespread in European languages than the RUclipsrs seem to think. Take Bulgarian for example: cow is крава while beef is телешко/телешки/телешка(the ending changes based on grammatical gender), chicken(female) is кокошка, chicken(male) is петел, but chicken(meat) is пилешко/пилешки/пилешка. To the best of my knowledge, Bulgarian words for meat and the animal aren't influenced by outside languages(Bulgarian has some borrowed words from Greek and Turkish, but to a much lesser extent than English has from other languages. Unless we're talking about modern inventions, which typically get transliterated in Bulgarian).
Interestingly, корова is cow in both Ukrainian and the 404 country language BUT meat is яловичина & говядина, so with Bulgarian, all three have similar words for the animal but three completely separate words for meat. Теля is the cow's calf, related root to your телешко, and we do have телятина as calf meat specifically. There's also a very similar idea with some dry fruit, i.e. grapes and raisins or apricots and kuraga.
I've had to learn a so many nuances working with cows in Normandy. Is reference being made to: 1) dairy or beef cattle, 2) male or female, 3) castrated or not (usually correlated with age), 4) having calved yet or not, 5) if she has calved, is she dried off yet (une "tarie", "tarissement" being the drying-off). A "boeuf" is actually a castrated bull (ox), so young castrated bull is a "bouvillon". Bull (uncastrated) is "taureau", so a young uncastrated bull is a "taurillon". (Supposedly these nuances must exist in English, but I never worked in agriculture in English!)
The funny thing is that in French there are also different words for the animal and the meat: - "boeuf" comes from "la vache" - "porc" comes from "le cochon" - all hunted animals become "gibier" on the table ("venaison" is not used anymore, exept in canadian French) The French do understand this as it being intentionally done to dissociate the animals you interact with from the slaughter and butchery system which people generally prefer not to think about. PS: both "mouton" and "agneau" are used for the meat and animal, "agneau" describing a young less than a year old. Pigs and cows live at the farm and need daily handling and care, so people develop more bonds with them than sheeps that are mostly left to wander in mountains
Boeuf is also just a castrated male bovine. Porc and cochon are synonyms (and are both used for the animal as well as the meat). It's a similar situation in most Romance languages. The distinction can exist, but it's not as clear cut as in English. And the idea that it's done to not have to think about slaughter and butchery is yet another myth. The real reason is simply that Romance languages in general but French even more so love synonyms (and in fact it's even considered incorrect to make repetitions in speech).
@@Ezullof I partly agree with you except that noone will ever say "manger de la vache" nor a "côte/fillet mignon/rôti de cochon". As a general term "cochon" can be used when talking about food but in specific cases: for the general public, I can only think of the feet and head, otherwise it is "porc". Furthermore, using "cochon" for food is limited to some socioeconomic backgrounds and geographic areas (town vs countryside for example). Also, people who aspired to elevate their circumstances preferred to distance themselves from terms associated with food production: a snobbism that claims ignorance of farm work.
@@lauraleeogan7523 Yes it is. According to various online sources that I looked at "gibier" would have derived from a line of old french and germanic words that meant "falcon hunting" and "game bird stew". There are other suggestions but this explanation sounds sensible to me.
I've just come to this channel, and it's brilliant! It's wise, civilised, learned and good-humoured on the subject of our language - and language generally. Thank you.
I'll be damned. French here. 38 years of teaching English (retired) and now I must tell all my former students that story isn't true. But thank you. I always felt something was off about it. Like you said, why not duck and goat. This myth reminds me of the one about gladiators, also created in the 19th century (the thumb up or down for life or death). The 19th century is responsible for a lot of those myths. In reaction to the Industrial Revolution there was a renewed passion for old history, so that could be the reason, the general public ate it all up. The old French word for coney/rabbit was conil, by the way. Very close to coney if you ask me. The dirty French word spelled c.o.n for a bad or stupid person actually meant the female genitalia (and still does in some cases, but rarely). When I looked up the etymology of that French word, they said it comes from the latin and greek words for rabbit AND "vulva". So apparently the word had both meanings even in ancient times!! In greek it could also mean the rabbit hole, hence the confusion. Well a furry animal at the entrance of a hole, that's all the ancient male mind needed to use the word in that other sense. And it was passed down the generations and through languages... my take.
Re: the conclusion you reached in your second paragraph. I was beginning to draw that same conclusion as I was reading your earlier explanation. It makes sense to me, too.
@@lauraleeogan7523 Ah, thank you. Funny that in both English and French the more modern word used in that sense has to do with cats, not rabbits anymore.
@@JustinCase99999 But in French, we never had "beaver". We had "tablier de sapeur" which means "combattant engineer apron" in reference to the Foreign legion's sappers traditionaly bearing a long beard.
My native language is Czech and we also have different words for the animal the meat. Therefore, I've never found it to be strange in English. (In Czech, the names for meet come from some archaic words for the animals, different from the present day usage). So, your theory about separation the perception of the meet from the animal seem plausible to me. Also, lot of things about meal are ritualized. The usage of some fancy words meet squares well with this.
In a flash of dementia to check off a bucket list item, I committed to learn modern Icelandic. Fourteen declensions for "cat"! What could go wrong? With only a century-old semester of German to my credit, I was beginning to think that I'd never find cognates to help retain such old vocabulary. What a coincidence that, in this video at 7:31, you mention 'deor' meaning any animal in the forest. It turns out that in the modern Icelandic dictionary, "dýr", (pronounced "deer"), as a noun means animal; but as an adjective it means expensive, a usage that's more common in your neck of the woods, I believe, but certainly with French as cher for dear or expensive or as a term of endearment, (pun not intended). Time travel at its finest. Thank you for this video.
Something similar that has recently played out in South Florida (and possibly other heavily Spanish speaking places in the USA) is how food is described when Spanish is translated from native Spanish speakers into English. Let me give you the best example I can think of. If you go to a bakery/cafe that is run by primarily Spanish speaking propirietors & they offer empanadas, you will almost always see the beef ones offered as meat empanadas. It's understood locally that it means beef.
The reason why the Spanish name for beef is often translated into meat in English is because the Spanish for beef is carne de res. Frequently it is shortened to carne (which means meat), so when translated into English, it is translated correctly as meat. That's why places with large populations of bilingual English and Spanish speakers tend to refer to beef as meat. It's a translation of a shortening of the Spanish.
@@nvdawahyaify pero por que no pasa con otras carnes? puerco/cochino, pollo... todo seria "carne de ...".. :) in Spain we don't call beef "carne", it's usually "ternera" which is actually the word for "veal", but it's understood as beef in most cases.. you might hear "carne de vaca" sometimes, as in "cow's meat"
@@nvdawahyaify Yeah my Spanish mum did the same her entire life, up until just a couple of years ago, not sure why; might have been to do with family members complaining of ambiguity or us just eating less beef (which is true, it's too expensive these days)
@@Fadogar911 I apologize that I didn't make this clear, when I referred to Spanish, I meant the language, not Spain. Most of my experience with the Spanish language is with people from Mexico. I do understand that not everywhere that uses the Spanish language will necessarily use the same terms for things. The majority of people I know who speak Spanish, call beef carne. And most of them are either from Mexico, or are of Mexican decent.
The thing about etymology is that when etymology became a field of study, about the only thing academics in the field had to go on was how words looked in English and other languages, and then if they saw a pattern that made sense to their own imagination, that's what they put down as the etymology for a particular word, and their reasoning, especially when it makes a good story that captivates other people's imagination too, is then later taken as gospel fact. When it comes to the original English word for rabbit, the only reason it's a rude word is that the word for rabbit was used as a euphemism. It is quite common for small furry rodents to be used as euphemisms for this anatomical feature in many languages, though English - uniquely perhaps - and in a surprising and probably rather unique move, actually removed the non-euphemistic meaning of the word to make it completely dirty. If all languages did that, we'd struggle to talk about small rodents of any kind after a while... I don't know the wider context of the Ivanhoe story, but is it clear this is what Scott thought himself, or just what the character relating the story in the book thought? If the latter is the case, that's just bull, and it's not Scott you should have a beef with, but all those who came after him - yourself included - who made a pig's ear of the whole thing not being able to tell fact from fiction.
That was not only informative, but a lot of fun. Loved the puns throughout. Brilliant! "Sir Walter Scott, you complete and utter bastard" was the funniest line I've ever heard on RUclips.
Fun fact: in the north germanic Swedish, we use different words for pigs and pig meat, but the culinary word has nothing to do with French (it is, however, a cognate with the English word "flesh"). We also use the same words as the animal for calf, sheep, lamb, any game, reindeer, fish and fowl meat, but call cow meat with our word for "bovine" (except for ox, which sometimes keeps its name, and sometimes gets the name "biff", which is a loan from _English_ and not French!). So there seems to be an argument for the tendency to use separate words for what you put on your plate at least for the most popular meats. Incidentally, "rabbit" in Swedish is "kanin" :)
Nothing I can argue with in the video, however I don't think this constitutes busting a myth really, it's more describing the complex process which is simplified into the story we all know - but the story itself isn't exactly a myth, it's a massive oversimplification, but the core idea there and the association with class through the millennium is still broadly true. Appreciate that's hard to get into a title and I may not have clicked on it otherwise!
Agreed. Some of the points don’t even contradict the “myth” at all. But still learned a lot and now know it’s not nearly as hard and fast as the “myth” makes it out
It most definitely constitutes a myth. It is an oversimplified inaccurate story that people peddle around as if it were fact. If you've come to appreciate the more complex nature of reality, then that myth as been busted
It very much is a myth and not just an oversimplification. The myth is that after the Norman conquest of England, because the aristocracy who ate the meat were French and the peasants who kept the animals were English, a distinction emerged between the word for the animal (Anglo-Saxon) and the meat (French loanword) emerged. This is not merely an oversimplification, it is entirely false. The distinction between the word for an animal vs. its meat wasn’t a thing until centuries later, and there did not exist a broad pattern of French loanword for meat vs. English word for animal that was caused by the French aristocracy eating the meat while the English peasants kept the animals.
@@luckyblockyoshiI’m not sure oversimplification is the right word but I don’t think myth is either. The part of the “myth” that the Anglo-Saxon peasantry in the early years after the invasion would have called pig “pig” and the Anglo-Norman nobility would have called the pig on their plate “pork” is true. The problem is the “that’s why we call it that way today”, given that both terms were ultimately adopted and used interchangeably for meat and animal from what we can tell until the influence of French cuisine on English in the 18th and 19th centuries. If I heard someone repeat the story, I wouldn’t be saying “that’s a myth!”, I’d be saying “that’s true that the nobility spoke French for centuries after the Norman invasion, but there’s actually evidence people used both terms interchangeably for meat and animal until the 18th and 19th centuries.” And frankly, the “words for meat are French because it’s fancier or more upper class” idea is likely still true, given that French cuisine would have been more known to the upper classes in those later centuries.
My father told me this story--he was in France for a few years in the late 1930s, though who knows where he learned the story. Like most things, the truth is more complicated. Still, the story may be a useful half-truth for conveying the multi-sourced and often two-tiered nature of the English lexicon. At least, I sometimes try to encourage Romance-language speakers who find English hard by telling them that, after they get the structure and the "little" vocabulary (of childhood, daily life, etc), both of which will seem foreign to them, they will get to an academic/governmental/scientific/business vocabulary that will be familiar... that they can even (more or less) improvise based on their native Romance language. Though I frame this encouragement with reference to 1066 etc, not to the animals-and-meats story. Your rant makes me wonder: while the vocabulary of the fancier or more privileged register of English certainly came from French, how much of the social and status separation of the registers of English was already there by, say, the early 1600s? Your revision suggests an alternate hypothesis, that some or many of the words of those registers may have co-existed for centuries _without status differences_, and that their sorting into different registers happened only in more recent times? I suspect a mix-probably a minority with any such long period of equality-but I never thought to ask the question! Thank you! P.S., The KJV was commissioned 1604, published 1611. (Actual date of translation of any passage in it therefore between these two, but 1611 would be the way to say it. Aka, the Authorized Version of 1611.)
The KJV was largely based on earlier translations, especially the Bishops Bible, which was itself influenced by still earlier translations. The result was that the language of the King James Bible was already a bit on the archaic side at the time that it was published.
@@RolandHutchinson That's right, there was already a L-O-N-G history of English-language translations, not only early modern English, but old and middle English as well. Plus, the AV of 1611 (KJV) was meant to replace the so-called Geneva Bible, an English-language translation considered subversive!
I think English is one of the few languages that differentiates between the species and the consumable flesh of the species using completely different words. In Vietnamese, for example, cow is bò, and beef is either bò or thịt bò, literally cow flesh/meat. Compounds make things so much easier, though perhaps not elegant. Lol
In Welsh we have lamb = oen and lamb meat = cig oen (oen is obviously related, though distantly, to the French agneau) and cig eidion (bullock meat), cig moch (pig meat) etc.
It's actually quite common in Romance languages, but relatively rare in Germanic languages (they will just add a bit meaning "flesh" instead of having a different word). Spanish for example has cerdo (pig) vs puerco (pork) or vaca (cow) vs carne de res (beef). While this video it's true, it's also true that the Normans imported the "habit" of Romance meals to England, and with that the need to make a difference between the animal and the meat of the animal. More generally, it's quite common in a lot of languages to call the animal "cow" and the meat "beef", because the first one is the female animal that gives birth and milk, while the beef is the male animal that is eaten. See Turkish inek vs sığır eti, Russian korova vs govyadina etc. Other animals like chicken or fish very rarely get the same treatment.
@@Ezullof If never seen that "beef" indicates a male (bull). When the word is applied to the animal, it indicates one raised for meat, so beeves can be male or female. Among breeds raised primarily for milk, it is more common for the males to become beef.
I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to simply take this as a complete myth, and call it debunked, when the overarching statements are all evident. The Normans invaded. The locals and the invaders had differing terms for animals and meats. Many (but not all) of the modern English words for the meats are cognates with the French words. There were evidently mixings of the terms that were more common than that of today. Just because it didn't immediately take over all of the island the day of the invasion doesn't mean that there is a still a great amount of individual truths to this. Unrelated, this is the first time I have heard Ivanhoe in English and my god that is some absolutely gorgeous prose.
The myth here is that the distinction between the word for an animal and the word for its meat arose because French aristocrats were using a different word for the meat that they were eating vs. English peasants who kept the animals. This is what is completely false, with the distinction only arising centuries later.
I really don’t see how any of this “refutes” anything about this supposed “myth”. So… instances exist of the French words being used in English to mean the animals rather than the meat, for multiple centuries after the conquest, and also there are exceptions to the general food-French/animal-English pattern. Neither of those are remotely surprising. French had an enormous influence on English, and no subject matter or sector of society was entirely immune to that influence. But none of that changes the fact that the terminology eventually settled down and became stable, and when it did so it conformed, for the most part, to a clear pattern that matched the class demarcations in British society.
I’ve regurgitated the same thing for many years. I commend you for your willingness to accept being incorrect (if, indeed, you were incorrect). It’s a rare, and admirable trait.
Hi Gideon, Castle is even closer to the french Castel which gave château in the singular form, the plural is châteaux and not chateaus in english to name a "grand cru" of wine for instance. Note the circumflex accent on château, it replaced the "s" from castle. Chatel can be seen with a circumflex accent but the owner of château called the châtelain (lord) or the châtealaine (lady) can also be written without the cicumflex accent in modern french. So you are right for Chatel, I just wanted to add my contirution. Thank you, always a pleasure to watch you videos. I was laughing with the texan lady speaking the cockney about ball, she got it! 🙂
The Anglo Saxon farmers planted potatoes, but once they ate it, they called them french fries. They didn't want to be remembered that these living potatoes ended up as boiled and cut to death.
As late as the 1730s Cattle was a synonym for Livestock not Bovine Animals. I could give you some very long examples of legal cases where freeholders were asked to list the cattle they put on some common land and the lists produced included mainly sheep and horses as well as milk cows.
It's not surprising that something like ChatGPT would pass on wrong information, it's just a language model that's built off of what everyone's saying. If what everyone's saying is wrong, then that'll happen
Summary: While the impression is that Norman words sound aristocratic and Germanic words sound peasantly, “beef”, “pork”, and “mutton” vs. “cow”, “pig”, and “sheep” did not have the strong meat-animal distinction of today until centuries after the Norman conquest. Either was fine for both. The myth that said divide formed right after the Norman conquest was incepted in the book _Ivanhoe._
@@JustinCase99999 What's even weirder is how many people watched the video and completely missed the point, as evidenced by a large number of comments. A tl:dr summary may be quite useful.
Sir Walter Scott is a very respected poet in Scotland. The Scott Monument, which commemorates this guy, is an iconic landmark in Edinburgh. Edinburgh train station, Waverley, is named after one of his novels. I’d say though he made a mistake, don’t call him a bastard.
To be fair, while the theory is not literally true, it points to a deeper truth: that English has (at least) 2 distinct sets of vocabulary, 1 Germanic, the other French(or Latin). In almost all cases, germanic words are "low" and are more common in everyday speech. The French vocabulary tends to be used more in writing, and tends to be "higher" in register. Of course, when we look at things in detail it's messy and there's lots of exceptions, but I think it's useful to know for learners, especially given how many french/Anglo saxoj word pairs there are (like cook/chef or driver/chauffeur), and English speakers continue to look on the French language as inherently "posh".
You've just disproved your own theory-busting here ! Those quotes from 1300+ Middle English prove that the Norman / Piccard words for the animals were being used by the nobility for the meat they were eating, while also entering usage by the wider population, along with extant Anglo-Saxon words for both animals and meat. Maybe Sir Walter Scott noticed a stratification in choice of synonym in different registers through society in the 18th and 19th centuries which you are not yet party to. Explaining the breadth of English vocabulary, particularly Anglo / Norse / Norman - French synonyms through etymology is far too useful (and 'true') to linguists, English language teachers, students and the histo-curious, to be ditched in favour of pedantry. The point you make about Old English terms for animals and French vocabulary becoming recognised and standardised for meat in the 19th Century through fashionable French cuisine is no more than an amusing addendum. You've got to ask yourself if you're being honest about why you made this video and whether the broader brush is really so useless in depicting such a huge, multi-faceted language.
I think the hypothesis still holds up in my opinion. Just because the french words were being used by the anglo-saxons doesn't mean that those words didn't originate from old french. In fact, you would expect to find a transitionary state in which the french words begin to be used by middle-english speakers; and that's exactly the evidence you provided. So I think it's still fair to say that the english language gained these words as a result of the french holding aristocratic roles in society. It likely gained entry into the language via the aristocracy, and from there began to be used as a whole by english speakers. This would explain the lack of use of these words in old english, and their presence in middle and modern english. Edit: Also, the disassociation idea makes sense too, but I don't see that as evidence against Sir Walter Scott's hypothesis. I think it's more of a "both-and" rather than an "either-or" situation :)
I doubt that it makes sense beyond a very strict modern vegetarian perspective. In German, there is no such distinction, yet people eat swine flesh and cow flesh without any second thought.
Honestly I don't really understand why people today imagine that medieval would have been especially reticent in using words from other languages. Medieval England was a lot more multilingual than modern England. There was no national pride in refusing to talk a language that would let you access more markets. Most people were likely just thinking "oh, I don't know that word, what does it mean" and then they'd use it or pick the meaning from context. People couldn't just google a translation. It happened organically just because there was french speakers around.
Sadly, this reopens the previous question: why did the words for meat that we have end up meaning meat exclusively, rather than the other words we have? Surely, even if it didn't occur en masse in a short period after the Norman conquests, it has at least in part to do with class divisions, no? If not, what alternative explanation is there? Are we to believe the selection of almost entirely Norman words to refer to meat was coincidental?
Basically it's not because of French influence in the 12th century, but rather French influence in the 19th century. So it's not because of feudalism, but rather because of Enlightenment and Napoleonic influence.
It's normal in many languages, including French ITSELF, with cochon being pig and porc being, well, porc. Not to mention variants of Swine existing in almost every European language likely coming from the same proto Indo European root. Hell, in Ukrainian we have exclusive word for cow meat, yalovychyna, and toilet stealers nearby say goviadina, cow in both cases would be korova, yes like in Clockwork Orange. Nothing to do with Normans BTW.
The English aristocracy prior to the Norman conquest also wasn't completely replaced, there were still English aristocrats after 1066, they just adopted new titles and new surnames.
Why is salmon the only fish with a French name? Do they not exist in England? I live in the US northwest where salmon are native, so my assumption is they're everywhere, but maybe not?
I've never come across "lox", but apparently it's not used in Britain, only in North America, where - as you suggest - it is borrowed from Yiddish. The native English survival is "lax", but it's judged obsolete by the OED and dialectal by Wiktionary.
@@sluggo206 Salmon isn't the only fish with norman or french etymology. Trout from truite, mackerel from maquerel (today maquereau), sardine from sardine, anchovy from anchova/anchois, turbot, perch, plaice, sole etc. And it extends to other maritime animals. Lobster from lopestre (from latin locusta) etc.
My 2 fave vids of yours.. this one, and the one where you offhandedly debunk the notion of English being a western Germanic language, but instead a Northern Germanic one, via VSO and SVO differences
In inventories of the 16th and 17th Cs pigs are very rare and when they do occur they are listed as swine. The meats are listed as beef and much less common bacon. Oh and the word meat was never used, always Flesh which was kept in a Fleshtub. It is a bit of a cheat to say we use Lamb and not Agneau. True, but no-one ever ate the meat of young sheep until late in the 19th C. Sheep meat was always Mutton but the animal would be ancient and the meat relatively unappertising as mutton is today. Sheep were kept primarily for thier wool, the only ones which were killed were the excess males which were castrated and then left on the fells for two or three years and the worn out females, five or six shears. Of course a hog was usually if not always a young sheep, as it is today, not a pig. I always find it rather odd that with bovine animals the desire and understanding is to eat adult animals as beef with a British reluctance to eat Veal. But with sheep the reluctance is to eat the adult animal instead the meat is called Lamb even when the lamb is a ten year old grandmother. In France last month in a moderately upmarket meat restaurant I was rather surprised to see Cheval on the menu. I stuck with the boeuf
The history is complicated and the video could have been much longer. Beef as an animal was used up to very recently in the US. The reason the "beef" triumphed over 'cow' for the meat was because the English rarely ate the cow as it was valuable for the milk. That also explains why 'mutton' won out. The English kept the sheep for the wool.
The variant I was told is that the French words was for the foods the peasants were banned from eating, with Robin Hood being cited as his original crime being shooting a deer and eating it.
Some good points here, but others aren’t terribly compelling. The examples of interchangeable uses well after the Norman conquest are very convincing. That said, the fact that not every single meat and animal has a French or English name respectively doesn’t really counter the myth for me. And most other languages don’t use separate words for meat vs the animal, so I’m not really sure about the speculation at the end. One can still imagine the English/French distinction playing out in scenes after the Norman conquest exactly how the myth says, even if the differences weren’t solidified until the 18th century. But I’m now convinced it’s not as just-so as the myth suggests.
@@vytah Sure, but many don’t. If it was some innate human need to differentiate their food from their animals it would be universal. And the idea that people in Europe were squeamish about where their meat comes from prior to the 20th century is just ahistorical. These people ate suckling pig for God’s sake. Much more plausible to me is that English already had two words for each animal due to the Anglo-Norman influence, and the influence of French cuisine in the 18th and 19th centuries solidified the specific usage of meat vs animal.
Actually, the distinction between on and off the hoof meat predates the Victorian era. It was in common use when Ivanhoe was published; please see page one.
I had this debate after watching a linguist's video. It's quite simple to demonstrate that 'boeuf' is the French word for beef. If, following the Norman Conquest, there are instances of the term 'beef' being used for cows, it doesn't negate the French origin. It suggests that, for a time, a writer, perhaps aiming for sophistication, attempted to supplant the English word 'cow.' However, show me an instance of a peasant using 'beef' for cow before 1065.
This is so great! Thank you Gideon for the info! As someone enthralled by history and linguistics, this video is an absolute treat. Here in Canada, as far as I know in Ontario at least, we use coney and rabbit interchangeably for the meat
Yes, it's all ultimately from Latin. Also Slovene kunec, Croatian kunić. And funnily calqued in some other Slavic languages, by reanalysing the German word for rabbit as a diminutive for "king".
I'm not entirely convinced about the theory in this video but I want to cheer the creator on (the question of 'cow' and 'beef' simply needs a lot more research). His videos are always entertaining and enlightening. To give the devilish old story its due, isn't it possible right after the Norman invasion that serfs and other native English speakers had a lot to do with the invaders and would indeed adopt their aristocratic new words? I can imagine Mr. Serf going up to the Norman Castle and trying to sell the newly-arrived Lord Norman some cow meat. Lord Norman would of course blabber something about 'bouef' and Mr. Serf would get the point. From then on, he'd refer to the meat as 'bouef' whenever he went to the castle. Soon enough, the new term would be used all around Mr. Serf's neighborhood. (Mr. Serf to his friends: 'Look, guys, when you take cow meat to the Castle just call it 'bouef' and you're guaranteed a gigantic sale.') And so on. On another point in the video: 'deer' may well have meant all the animals being hunted in Merrie Olde England, because 'Tier' is the German word for any animal at all. And we all know that German contributed mightily to English. By the way, the Germans of today still refer to pork as 'pig meat' and don't seem at all disgusted to admit that they're eating a pig. They see no reason to rationalize the meal by calling it 'pork.' I'm sure this has something to do with inches versus centimeters but the question requires far more research.
I don't agree that more research is needed. There are literally thousands of quotes of "beef" being used to mean the living animal right up until recently. And they're easy to find. "Beef" for the animal was used by Shakespeare and the bible but that's inconvenient to this Norman/Anglo-Saxon tale.
Hi, when I check in French where we also differenciate meat and animal, the most given reason (with no precise origin) is that we dissociate the animal from the food to make it easier to eat. My mom, when she was a child (my grand-parents were peasants) use to exchange rabbits with the neighbours, so you would eat the animal you feed and connected with. But it's funny that in French lamb (agneau) or rabbit (lapin), we have the same name for food and animal. For the organs also we changee the names. Kidney (Rein) becomes "rognon", stomac (estomac) becomes "tripes"... We also change the names of some fishes.
Thank you - I learned something today! What I would like to see analysed is the odd separation between US and UK names for (a) meats and (b) plant-based foods. I can't think of a single example of a meat that has different names each side of the Atlantic, and yet the examples for plants are quite numerous: Aubergine / Eggplant Swede / Rutabaga Coriander / Cilantro Courgette / Zuchini I mean... WHY? Why plants and not meat?
Thank you for confirming my doubts about this. Another piece of circumstantial counterevidence would be that meat/animal word pairs can also be found in other Western European languages, e.g. I haven't heard French people talking much about eating vache or Germans about eating Kuh; bœuf and Rind seem to be preferred. And I suppose you could say, at least in Jewish cuisine, that a Germanic (Yiddish?) word is preferred to a Norman word, namely lax/salmon.
Based on one more RUclips video? I think this needs to be thoroughly kicked around by as many lexicographers as possible before we toss it into the myth bucket.
Interesting but I don't think you have proved your point, there was no one standing there in 1066 saying OK which words are now going to be french and recording them, so the fact that they were not recorded till 1300 or whenever just means that's the first we know of as literacy was so low, there was a lot of contact with France pre Norman invasion, even royal intermarriage, clergy etc, a lot of things that didn't change birds fish were lower status opposed to cow beef , pig pork, I see your point if the AS word had no meat word separately then the French added not replacing, the later 1800 recipes etc mentioning old English names could just be affectation. Still very interesting. Cheers from Mercia
It's a nice story, undermined by the actual words, and the history of the languages But as usual with simple stories, it's much more complicated than that
Excellent stuff. However, I think there is an argument for this being more of a refinement rather than a complete debunking. There is an argument for the Norman conquest being the foundation of the English class system, and when these Norman words entered the language they would still likely have been considered 'posh' versions of the same thing, and, eventually, over a longer period of time adopted to differentiate between the animal and the meat. As for it being used to cover any kind of squeamishness, that is likely a modern phenomenon as people in the Middle Ages were certainly a lot less squeamish than we are today. Death was an everyday part of life and many lived hand to mouth, eating whatever they could get their hands on, and shoving it into pies! I believe in fact that even the word 'meat' was a more general term for anything you could shove into a pie..
I'm so glad to see someone busting this myth. It's been one of my personal bugbears for years. It relies on cherry picking the results that comply with the rule and ignoring everything that doesn't. It also relies on ignoring all the words for both meat and livestock that used to be common but are generally obscure today. Hardly anyone eats squabs, neats or capons any more, at least not knowingly, but they were all once familiar terms. I've seen pigs referred to as 'bacons' in 16th and 17th century literature, despite the word apparently originally referring to specific cuts of meat, not the animal. So it seems like 'bacon' was a food word that became also an animal word by extension, but then reverted to being strictly a food word.
I just realized that “neatsfoot oil” preserves the term “neat” for cow. The oil is apparently made from cow feet and shins. You might have heard of it if you ever owned a baseball glove- it’s a leather conditioner, though we have some better substitutes nowadays. But it’s a very old substance and maybe the last holdout in modern English of an even older word!
@@Sokrabiades However you explain it, it's not as simple as 'Saxons feed animals, Normans eat animals', as the discrepancy just didn't exist for the majority of the feudal era. I'm not an expert by any means, but if I had to make a guess I'd say that it was due to the popularity of French food culture with the upper classes during the 19th century. French was very much the favourite international language of Europe during the period, and was spoken by elites across the continent. French culture was extremely fashionable in elite circles, with French 'Gastronomie' an integral part of that. Historically, it was common for words used by the upper classes to be adopted by aspirational people from the lower classes, but was rarer for the reverse to occur. As I said, I'm not an expert, and that's just a guess.
Wisdom unlocked! I also used to tell the story of the class warfare in food names, but it turns out everybody was naming everything what suited them best! Much more realistic, if not dramatic.
Excellent video! Love your work. The one thing I’m still curious about is that also in French they do not call a cow beef but une vache. And they go down the line using different words for meat vs animals. So could it be possible what was more of thing English picked up from the Normans was the idea of giving animals and meat different names as a concept itself; not so much that one used english words and the other used french words? Or perhaps that opens a can of worms on the French side where they also went through a language change upon converge with other peoples or just a dumb change that occured in time? The complexity you restore is brilliant. I believe the Ivanhoe root really demonstrates mosts tendencies for a quick and dirty answer for things, which is also a core flaw in much of academia who must alter classes for disinterested audiences.
9:56 In American English coney is pronounced with a long O, rhyming approximately with cone, the geometric shape. Most Americans and many Brits may be familiar with Coney Island, the seaside amusement district of New York City. Long before the city became the steel and concrete metropolis, Coney Island was an actual island isolated from the Brooklyn peninsula on all sides. At low tide, people could walk to Coney Island. The colonial settlers used it to graze their livestock, and it was a place to hunt and trap cottontail rabbits, hence the name. 19th-century civil engineering permanently joined Coney Island to Brooklyn, yet the name persists. However, in American English, the word coney has almost completely disappeared, replaced with rabbit and bunny, a word derived from the same root as the word for the bread used to make hamburgers. The few who know coney as a synonym for rabbit probably got it from reading "The Lord of the Rings".
Interestingly, French tends to use one word for the animal and the meat. Even "porc" is used commonly for pig, in addition to "cochon". One clear exception is "poule" (hen) and "poulet" (hen meat), so the clearest example of a missing meat name in English is at the very spot where the French have two.
Poulet isn't really the meat of the "poule" afaik. I've just ate some "poule" a few days ago, clearly stated as such and the taste seemed different. It seems a poulet is a related animal but is raised for its meat, while a poule usually has another purpose (even if some fancy restaurants serve them too). Edit: I just checked because I wanted to be sure before posting. The poulet is actually just the young of the poule (but who reached sexual maturity), but I was kinda right as they are consumed at that age usually. That's why it's rare to consume a poule, which is raised for her eggs and can live a very long life.
Your exception isn't correct. Poule and poulet are both used for the animal. Poule is exclusively female, while poulet is exclusively young (but either male or female). It's easy to identify a hen visually when it's alive, but when it's dead what you want is the firm meat of a young chicken. In general all the words for animals in French can be used both for the living animal and the meat. For chicken there's a bunch of other words as well, for example a poularde is a hen that hasn't laid eggs yet and is very fat because of a diet of cereals and dairy.
Sir Walter Scott was transferring back to the middle ages an ethnic enmity between Normans and Saxons which reflected the nationalism of his own time far more than the more rudimentary form found in the medieval period; certainly by the date in which "Ivanhoe" is set, ca. 1194, Normans and Saxons had, for the most part, put that hatred behind them (though there were a few eccentrics, like "William with the Beard," who made an ostentatious show of their old Saxon ways, rather as in my childhood there were still old Southern colonels and Daughters of the Confederacy who'd make a point of flying the Stainless Banner in their backyards). Sir Walter also contributed another medieval myth in "The Talisman" (1825) that has proven remarkably firmly rooted: the myth of the incredibly sharp Saracen sword (as opposed to the supposedly duller, though much heavier swords of the crusaders) that could cut through a pillow with the lightest possible touch (a myth that has nowadays transferred itself to the Japanese katana). Current research indicates that Western and Eastern steel were both much of a muchness, and that even the later two-handed swords of the German Landsknechts, let alone the arming swords of the high middle ages, were *not* particularly heavy.
Apparently the borough of New York City, named Coney Island means 'rabbit island,' taken from the Dutch name in the days of New Amsterdam, a rabbit/coney being "konijn" in Dutch. Since Dutch does borrow many French words, the original derivation may still be from the French.
You may be right, but the arrival of the Normans in 1066 would never have seen the immediate adoption of French words, it is likely to take 250 plus years or so, you know like 1316 or later. Clearly all the other French terms entered slowly as well. BTW what terms were used in the Domesday Book. The Aristocracy wrote in French, the Clergy in Latin and the peasants were mostly illiterate so no point in writing it down for them. Not saying you are wrong, just that history is a good read, shame it isn't true.
That kind of things can happen extremely fast. It definitely doesn't have to take 250 years. 250 years is an extremely long time, borrowings happen much faster. In English today you're still using borrowings that were made in just a few years. Balcony is a good example.
The 250 years I used was an amount of years that was close to when the author said these words first showed up in writing, not a suggestion it meant anything else. @@Ezullof
While I accept the argument presented, I do wonder if the "myth" has more than a kernel of truth to it. If numerous words for these animals and meats existed in the English language for hundreds of years, I would imagine that class delineated their use, as was suggested in the video. However I would then argue that French cuisine could have been influential in English speaking kitchens only because the affluent members of society who descended from Norman gentry, who took up an interest in the cuisine in the first place, doing so because the recipes offered something familiar -- the words used for various meats, which were unlike the recipes of the common people who still used native English words. And following the course of things, eventually the common people had access and the interest in these recipes and took up the terminology as well, as it sounded more sophisticated/educated.
French was in vogue in the entire Europe in the 18th and 19th century, even in places without gentry of Norman descent. This is why the word for "sauce" is similar across almost the entire Europe.
I can say that you are the greatest detective in the English language, at the moment here in my country it is fashionable to consume protein in large quantities, the steakhouses are always full of customers salivating to taste. The Steak here we say "BIFE", the theme of the video and the colorful pictures are incredible, I discovered a fabulous world of meats. As always I am happy to know. Congrats Gideon💥
Thanks, word history is so interesting but it's good not to get side tracked but unreliable tales. Yes, I know that Brazil is famous for its beef. Protein guaranteed. Best wishes.
Excellent video. "Venaison" is still used in French. The word "conin" was discarded for the same reason "coney" was. "Chatel" has been mostly replaced by "bétail", but we still have "cheptel".
Native French speaker here. I had never heard of the word venaison until I moved to the US. As far as I remember, the generic term for wild meat in French is "chasse" (direct translation: hunt), which in English is "game", which I always found very strange. "Game" is generic for any wild meat, whereas venison refers to deer meat, but then why not call it deer? In French, deer meat is known by the animal name, i.e "chevreuil" for a small one or "cerf" for a larger one. Or maybe after so long out of francophony, I am getting mixed up. Anyway, English is such a fascinating language, with so many influences.
I’m struggling to see this as being correct. Following the Norman invasion, the Norman aristocracy did not learn old English, but instead continued to use French not just in day to day parlance, but also in all governance structures. French was the official language of Britain from 1066 until 1362 with it being used in the courts. The people in England had to adapt to be able to understand their new lords that were governing them. I do agree that the English didn’t exclusive use the Anglo Saxon, while the Norman’s did exclusively use the French. My point is the English had no choice but to learn the French or risk being in breach of a French court without knowing it, and over time the words becomes intermingled into English, as you point out with the many examples. However the Anglo-Saxon words did not make their way into French. Which makes sense as why would the aristocracy of the time integrate into their language when they were in the position of power and had no reason to. The reason you have no evidence of the Anglo-Saxon words being used before 1300, is because the Norman’s refused any use of the Anglo Saxon language in high society where we have all the historical documentation. And the lack of the printing press means works of the peasantry have been lost to time. I think you’ve been victim to survivorship bias here.
what the normans did with their french language isn't really relevant to what the english did with theirs. there's writing going on in english for literally hundreds of years and the french words never come up - probably for the reasons you outlined. the french speaking aristocracy never learnt english, so why would their words end up in the english language? then, as the barriers come down in the 14th century and the aristocracy become bilingual french and english speakers, the french words enter the language.
@@barnsleyman32 but the French words enter the English legal system as all laws between 1066 and the mid 1300 were written in French. So the English speakers had no choice but to learn the French words that would effect their day to day lives. If an English peasant was required to pay taxes to the Norman lord of their area, and the tax related the the number of Beef they owned, then they had better learn what the word beef means or face the wrath of the Norman lord. And we know the Norman’s were less than pleasant to the Anglos following the success of their conquest. The video makes no reference to laws at the time being written in French. I think that’s the big bit that has been missed.
I'm by no means the first to question the truth of this story. If you want to learn more then I have posted some of my sources in the description of this video.
You are wrong and Scott is right (why insulting a dead person, by the way?). There is no way in which French "veau" could become English "veal" in the 19th century, that's 2 plus 2 equals 5. Unless you are trying to say that menu writers in Victorian restaurants deliberetly pursued a recostructionist, philologically accurate policy in naming their offers. Yea they certainly thought a lot about these linguistical nuisances. Truth is that there was a lot of confusion after the Norman invasion, French and English words were frequently used interchanchably, then the French ones became the stabilized, prestigious ones for the upper classes. Meat instead of cattle. Exactly as in Shakespeare's plays usually commoners have English names and nobles French ones, but that's not a rule.
@@lucacremonini5731 All that doesn't mean he's wrong. Yes words of two different origins coexist to mean the same thing, that happens in any language, but I think that with menus in French the word from French origin eventually prevailed when meaning the food. Being French I'm always amused that English native speakers refer to snails as escargots, as if it was some sophisticated delicacy (when originally it was a poor man's dish, rather obviously). For me, escargot just means snail.
In the US, at least, a further distancing from slaughtered animals has entered the mainstream. Instead of even mentioning the animal name, meats are frequently vaguely called "proteins."
You said the reason why we STILL have different names for animals and the meat that comes from the animal is because we don't want to be reminded of the fact that it is a dead animal. So what about other languages that don't have different names for the animal and the meat. Are all non-English speakers just depressed?
@@Finity_twenty_ten He also says that doesn't apply to other animals in english, like duck or goat, which seems to confirm his theory about using the english words of french origin only when french cuisine became fashionable in the 18th century. Moreover, for a language to use a different word for the food and not the animal, it would need another word to exist. It does in english in some cases (beef, pork etc.) so they used them. In french, we have two main words for pig: cochon and porc, and we do prefer to use the former for the animal and the latter for the meat. Pork chop is côte de porc, not côte de cochon.
In New York, we have a part of Brooklyn called Coney Island. The Dutch, who were the first Europeans to colonize the area, named it for the large number of wild rabbits found there. Their word for rabbit is konijn. When the English took over, they Anglicized the name to Coney. At least that's the story I learned in school. I never realized that coney was Middle English for rabbit.
And here in Detroit, we have a hot dog named for your island. The restaurant chains are called "Coney Islands," and the hot dog is called either a ""Coney Dog" or, more often, just a "Coney."
I don't think I've ever had one, & now that I've been vegetarian for 25+ years, that ship has sailed.
The restaurants tend to be a mix of Greek & American foods (hot dogs, fries, spinach pie, sometimes gyros, e.g.).
But, Sam clearly tells Gollum that "there's only one way to eat a brace of _coneys."_
So, clearly, even in Tolkien's time, coney was understood to mean rabbit meat in English.
@@fuferito They didn't speak English. :) Tolkien used English for us to represent the Westron they spoke.
@@sluggo206Objection. In Appendix F, Tolkien says he found the Red Book and translated it from its native Hobbitish tongue into English. The words on the page truly are penned by Tolkien in the canon of LotR.
@@sluggo206 is this ment seriously?
Dyr (deer) still means any animal in Nordic language.
Same in Nederlands, "dier".
Also in German which has “Tier”
I believe it used to be the same for the English word deer, before being replaced by the French word. How it came to represent one single species of animal I have no idea but a humble guess; in some of these other germanic languages, the word which sounds similar to "deer" but means animal, has always been used as hunter slang for that particular animal, and is still common today in some if not all these germanic languages. In fact I know that in nordic languages, the more specific names for each type of deer often has this cognate word as an ending to the name of the particular species of deer: rådyr, dådyr, elgsdyr, rensdyr.
Another sample of hunter slang I can think of comes from danish, (mind you the word dyr still means animal) in words like dyrejagt, meaning deer hunting. My guess is that as "animal" replaced the word "deer" it continued to be used by hunters
The Anglo-Norman (French) word that has replaced the older Anglo-Saxon ‘deer’, meaning any animal (particularly edible quadrupeds) is ‘beast’. The Anglo-Saxon ‘game’ naturally specifically refers to the profit from (stylised or ritualised) hunting, and more closely corresponds to the Anglo-Norman ‘venison’.
You can see deep Indo-European roots here, seeing as Classical Greek for beast was "ther"
Your disassociation theory makes sense. I can remember my mom getting mildly upset when I was a kid and said something like "Can I have another piece of cow?", like I'd said something inappropriate.
Similar to how Americans don’t like to use the word toilet so have restrooms and power rooms and washrooms and little boys’ rooms etc.
Then why no problem with chicken, duck, turkey, or fish?
@@zevsero9170 "the chicken is a bird with a tiny brain, so we assume it doesn't feel any pain"
@@zevsero9170exactly
This theory doesnt make any sense
In romance languages the same names are used for the animal and the food for the most part. If you grew up using the same words you are automatically dissociated.
As Walter Scott once stated, that this theory was once told by one of his friends as an interesting remark on the history of English language, he believed this hypothesis and used it in his novel, so it happened before 1819, somewhere in the beginning of the 19th century. I think it should have taken more time for such a semantic change, that means, that this change could have probably happened in the 18th century and might have been pretty regular thing, that happened in many languages, when every word takes its place and avoids unnecessary disambiguation. It's only a hypothesis, but I hope, somebody may try to make a more detailed survey to prove the reason, why this thing happened in the English language
Thanks for your insight.
@@LetThemTalkTV, he still can be technically correct, given that Norman nobility and their close servants spoke in Norman French and not in Anglo-Saxon, it's only natural for English "ox" and "calf" to become French "beef" and "veau", even if the English words themselves will only change centuries later.
But it WAS Sir Walter Scott who published it in a book that got an audience.
Every French middle schooler have been taught this in English class for decades I think
He used it in Ivanhoe where the Anglo Saxon serfs are chatting.
It shows it shows a slower and more nuanced version of the story, but i'm not sure it conradicts it. The Norman conquest set the idea that French-Derived words were posher.
the timeline suggests it was not the Norman conquest but rather the Napoleonic conquests and post-Napoleonic/imperial French influence that drove the poshness
@@JustinLe hardly. well maybe indirectly, The English were not exactly enamored of Napoleon. The influence might be earlier - for example French nobility fleeing the guillotine.
I suspect that a lot of this is fanciful imagination. Contrary to something else the video said, the Normans were Anglicised in less than two centuries following the conquest. We like to imagine history and division (and for many of the people writing the histories in the 18th and 19th centuries, wishing to differentiate themselves with the lower classes).
@@zarathustra7291A lot of the focus on class divide comes from marxist historiography
Smoked salmon is sold as "lox" all over America. So the Anglo Saxon name "leax" did not die out. Of course, the original name of the fish was restored to us by German Jews who brought the word from Yiddish, which is a Germanic language.
You're welcome
Then it's related to the German "Lachs" (the -chs is pronounced like an x), which means salmon.
No, the exact root of the word 'fish' is currently unknown.
Or Scandinavian - Swedish lax.
You must be from the Midwest, where the majority of people are of German or Scandinavian ancestry. I have lived in New England for 13 years and have never seen the word lox to refer to smoked salmon.
To your point, we also have different names for the meat and the animal in french:
vache - boeuf
cochon - porc
taureau, porcelet, ... interestingly the English "steer" designates a castrated bull whereas "Stier" in German is a bull that hasn't been deprived of his reproductive capacity.
Well, porc is for the animal as well. We say “éleveur de porcs” or “fièvre porcine”. Cochon is more used as a cute name for the animal by children or as a mild insult for either a child being dirty or a man who is a bit perverted.
La vâche ne se mange pas mais produit le lait, le beurre et le fromage ; le bœuf se mange ; le taureau féconde. Ce ne sont pas des mots--l'un pour l'animal, l'autre pour la table.
@@russellbateman3392 le bœuf est aussi utilisé pour executer des travaux
In Spanish too:
Vaca - bife / carne de vaca
....... Actually not really in Spanish
Chancho/Cerdo/Puerco - Carne de Chancho/Cerdo/Puerco
Pollo - Carne de Pollo
Conejo - Carne de conejo
Etc. Etc.
Holy shit! I actually learned this myth from reading Ivanhoe, in Russian, when I was twelve. And I believed it all my life, before and after RUclips!
And this is why we should never read books other than the source of truth: SciFi.
Fun fact : the French technical term for a rabbit breeder is "cuniculiculteur". BTW, "conin" isn't used anymore in French for similar reasons than in English.
Raisin originally referred to grapes of the vine as well as dried grapes in English, but after around the 18th century, it became a term exclusively for the latter. Raisin is a Middle English borrowing from French, and the modern French word for grape is also raisin. But interestingly, grape is also a Middle English borrowing from French corresponding to modern grappe, which means a bunch (as in grappe de raisin). It displaced Middle English winberie (i.e. wineberry).
This is only tangentially related, of course, but I thought it was another nice example of different words originally referring to the same thing acquiring more specialized meanings. And we can speculate whether their use in cooking favoured the more obviously French form raisin as the exclusive term for the dried version around the eighteenth century.
Also found in the well known French phrase "raisin d'etre", meaning, of course "grape for existence"
@@RaytheonTechnologies_Official😂
Oh dried fruits have tons of this dysmorphism, not linked to French speaking nobility, raisins are izium in Ukrainian (yes, like the city) but grapes are vynograd, winegrapes. Dried apricots? Kuraga. Always. Many grains have similar stuff, i.e. corn vs maize vs kukurudza. We'd call the crop latter but products from it often use the word for mais.
@@RaytheonTechnologies_Officialno. It is raison d'être
@@tj-co9go that doesn't mean "grape for existence" at all
Fun fact, Lapin replace conil/conin in french for the same reason as Rabbit in English (similarity with obscene word).
I suspected it might be but I wasn't sure. Thanks for confirming it.
Not the Spanish, Portuguese and the Catalans, as they call them "conejo", "coehlo" and "conill". Similarly, the word "coño" is world famous and is used as an surprise exclamation, even by women. Spanish, Catalans and Portuguese don't have any problem with any association. In Spanish poetry, any word is useful for a metaphor. This is why Spanish poetry is one of the most advanced and difficult in all languages, way more difficult to rhyme than English, German or French.
I was under the impression that coney was still a common word in English. It’s still used by some people in America and I remember it in the Lord of the Rings movies
UOHHH 😭😭😭💢💢💢
Coño is world famous and use as an exclamation because it's a word for vagina (it comes from Latin cunnus, meaning vulva). It has nothing to do with conejo/rabbits. What do you mean by "even by women"?? "In Spanish poetry, any word is useful for a metaphor" "Spanish poetry is the most difficult and advanced in all languages" what? I am a native in Spanish, French and English and I've never heard of seen any evidence of that.
Im confused about the logic here. Did anyone ever claim that no body used "porc" or "beef" for the living animals? The "myth" is a story about how the words came about and why you have multiple names. But in french a cow is called "vache" and a swine is called a "cochon", while "porc" and "boef" designate the meet (a bit) more than the animals, so the question is why english did not import "vache", but "boef", and not "cochon", but "porc". The choices made here do suggest that when these words came into english with the normans, it was via the table, not the stable.
Cow. Beef Critter (actually used in the movie Sargent York), Heifer. Cow or Cows is used generically yet a Cow is a female bovine while a bull is male.
Pigs. Porkers
Un bœuf is indeed not a cow, it is the French for steer. Cochon is a barrow or stag, that is, a castrated pig. A boar is for breeding.
I think yer man is mostly right: the names are a mish-mash: they don’t divide neatly into field or food at all.
Yeah the logic doesn’t add up. Following the Norman invasion the entire judicial system of the time was conducted in French. If an Anglo Saxon was brought in front of a lord for hunting deer in their estate, they would have been charged for the slaughtering of venison, not deer. Therefore the Anglo Saxons had to learn and integrate the French into the dialect to understand the laws that now governed them. French was used in the court system from 1066 to the mid 1300s, which is also why all the documentation to prove the point of Anglo-Saxon is post 1300. Any works written in Anglo-Saxon prior to 1300 would have been frowned upon by the French aristocracy. It’s this very reason why the amount of Anglo Saxon literature that exists pre 1300 is so minimal. I’m calling this out as survivorship bias.
@@DaveSmith-s6e Did you even listen to what he said in the video?
Note:
The discussed theory of Sir Walter Scot has not influenced *only* RUclips posts. I read it many a year ago in a serious academic book about the history of English book (I don't remember its name offhand).
Indeed so have I but not all academics said that. Robert Burchfield (one of the sources of the video) called out this half-truth in his book about the history of English.
I read it in a popularised history called The History of English. This was about 1980 so before the internet.
History In English Words - Owen Barfield
The word “cunny” for rabbit also became”coney” which is where we get “Coney Island” in New York, which apparently once had a lot of rabbits…
fun fact, "coney" was the spelling and pronounced "cunny." "Coney Island" had a sound change to disassociate its sound from the dirty implication.
The Scottish Gaelic word for Rabbit is "Coineach," pronounced kind of like "Koenakh"
I think this is your best video yet. As a side note I quite like how Spanish differentiates between the live fish and the one served on your plate - pez vs pescado. I think you’re right that having a different word for the meat allows us to eat it without feeling so guilty. I like fish so I wish English had that alternative. Maybe then I could order a fillet-o-poisson and be guilt free.
It's ok to eat fish cuz they don't have any feelins
@@Justen1980Debunked. Fish are more intelligent than we give them credit for.
@@Justen1980 They do, they feel pain.
@@Justen1980 Nirvana 😂
@@Justen1980go pick a book of biology mate
No rabbits in the British Isles before 1170? What about the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog then?
Maybe that was the first attempt at importing them.
@@martinvranovsky7085 It was an African rabbit.
As someone who grew up on the farm in Australia I can confirm that the word beef is still used for the animal. To be precise, a farmer who has a dairy, and produces milk calls his animals cows and cattle, but a farmer who produces meat refers to the animals as beef. And of course, there are some farmers who run both beef and cattle. The distinction is real because the breeds are very different. The beef might be Hereford, while the cow may be a Friesian. They look very different. The beef is thick and brown, while the Friesian cow is lanky and black and white, so while they are the same species they look different, there is good reason to refer to them by different words.
Also, I suspect that the cute story about meat names being different to animal names due to squeamishness is shot down by beef. But also, we call chicken meat chicken and have zero issues about associating it with the living, walking egg laying bird.
Another thing. Only city dwellers equate veal and calf. Veal, as used by the farmer means young, not newborn. When the animal is newborn, and for its first days and weeks when it is small it is called a calf. These very young calves are not usually used for veal. It takes time for them to get enough meat on the bones to worth killing for meat. Once the calf reaches a certain size and for the rest of its first year it is usually no longer called a calf by the farmer and is called a vealer. These animals are sold as veal meat. Unless being raised for meat, most males are killed at this stage. The females are referred to as heifers up until their first calving, and sometimes beyond, because heifer just means a young female older than a calf, although for convenience even a female calf might be referred to as a heifer. there is no special word referring to young bulls other than bull.
I suspect, however that there may be differences in farm word usage between different countries, but I also suspect that in most countries there will be differences between words used on the farm, and words for the same things by people in town. This would tend to lend credence to old stories about different words used by producers and consumers. I doubt it came down to differences between classes, but differences between farmers and those who don't raise animals.
I am suggesting by that, that even Anglo-Saxon consumers in addition to the Anglo-Norman consumers may well have been using the French words. Farmers tend to hang on to old ways because a lot of farming knowledge gets passed from old farmers to young farmers, generation to generation, and as a result older words are likely to persist, whereas sellers of produce directly to consumers are more likely then, as now, to use 'updated' marketing terms to make the product sound more appealing to the buyer.
Here in the U. S., also. I have heard "beeves" for referring to the animals with fair regularity.
Interesting, thanks. Is beef also used in the singular? For example would farmers say both "We raise beef" and "There is a sick beef in our herd"?
@@birchlover3377 Interesting question, and it would not refer to singular, but I don't remember how a single beef stock animal would be called. We were dairy farmers, and all our stock was numbered with a yellow tag on the ear. So my father would simply say 'Number 214 is sick, or Number 347 is having problems. I better call the vet.' He would get upset at my mother, because she would give names to stock and my father was insistent that the animals be referred to by number as it reduced emotional attachments. It is true, because I remember my mother crying quite a few times when an animal she knew by name was being loaded onto a truck to go to market. I left the farm to go to the city as a teenager, and that was over 60 years ago, so some memories are sketchy.
@@birchlover3377 yes, also "beef"
Interesting reply. I do wonder though if you ever used the term bobby calf?
Growing up in New Zealand, I heard many terms for sheep, and there was also a distinction between lamb, hogget, and mutton meats. Of course, the animals are sheep, rams, ewes, and lambs. I've never worked on an animal farm, but have worked in the countryside (on vineyards, herb farms, orchards, etc.) and spent time speaking with various kinds of farmers, so I picked up a few terms there ('tupping' for example). There were also farming TV shows and even comic books (Footrot Flats) where I picked up even more. And, after some searching online, I found a few terms new to me, too. So, if you (whoever might read this) want to know, you'd better rattle your dags and search for yourself. 😄
Beef or Cow? (Air Afrikaans hostess to passengers when passing out meals in tourist class)
If you say "cow" they will give you the whole thing.
And what do they mean by that?
@@mabrurhrivu4998 its a sketch on youtube called air afrikaans
@@mabrurhrivu4998 It is just satire. A joke about ignorance. In Afrikaans "beef" is referred to as "beesvleis", cow as "koei", "bull" as "bul" and "cattle" as "beeste" - there is a definite distinction in the language.
I'm sorry, we've run out of cow, we only have beef left.
I think the issue lies more in that the norman influence is a bit overstated and the general french influence is understated since that was the language of rulers, diplomats, most nobility and merchants nearly everywhere in europe. Dutch and German use similar or identical french root words for all supposedly unique norman or french words. For dutch its Biefstuk, lam and konijn (coney/rabbit) and the connection is not the norman conquest but rather dutch coming from the old lower Franconian language and close proximity.
I think a better way to rephrase it is saying English has a strong french influence that got more intensified after the norman conquests in 1066.
Exactly. Much of the same 1500s to 1700s French influence happened in other germanic countries and languages as well.
(Not least in my native Sweden, btw, where it peaked under our francophile king, Gustav III.)
Um... French "bifteck" is a back-borrowing from English "beefsteak." It's likely that Dutch borrowed "biefstuk" from English.
The word for "beef" in French is "boeuf," yet French borrowed "beefsteak" and changed it to "bifteck" and the other languages then borrowed this from French.
To be fair, it’s the character of Wamba the jester who started this myth. To my knowledge, Scott never claimed Wamba was correct. And it’s a good way to introduce a modern audience to the Saxon-Norman conflict.
This also appears in "Life in the UK" book for passing the ILR test for UK settlement
Really! I didn't know.
I got excited by this video and was going to tell my American wife all about it later (she's currently not taken the Life in the UK test). I might have to delay telling her the geeky news...
@@dave_yarderstheres no better way to remember this information than by learning it's mostly bs
The different words for the animal and the meat is much more widespread in European languages than the RUclipsrs seem to think. Take Bulgarian for example: cow is крава while beef is телешко/телешки/телешка(the ending changes based on grammatical gender), chicken(female) is кокошка, chicken(male) is петел, but chicken(meat) is пилешко/пилешки/пилешка. To the best of my knowledge, Bulgarian words for meat and the animal aren't influenced by outside languages(Bulgarian has some borrowed words from Greek and Turkish, but to a much lesser extent than English has from other languages. Unless we're talking about modern inventions, which typically get transliterated in Bulgarian).
Interestingly, корова is cow in both Ukrainian and the 404 country language BUT meat is яловичина & говядина, so with Bulgarian, all three have similar words for the animal but three completely separate words for meat.
Теля is the cow's calf, related root to your телешко, and we do have телятина as calf meat specifically.
There's also a very similar idea with some dry fruit, i.e. grapes and raisins or apricots and kuraga.
I've had to learn a so many nuances working with cows in Normandy. Is reference being made to: 1) dairy or beef cattle, 2) male or female, 3) castrated or not (usually correlated with age), 4) having calved yet or not, 5) if she has calved, is she dried off yet (une "tarie", "tarissement" being the drying-off).
A "boeuf" is actually a castrated bull (ox), so young castrated bull is a "bouvillon". Bull (uncastrated) is "taureau", so a young uncastrated bull is a "taurillon".
(Supposedly these nuances must exist in English, but I never worked in agriculture in English!)
The funny thing is that in French there are also different words for the animal and the meat:
- "boeuf" comes from "la vache"
- "porc" comes from "le cochon"
- all hunted animals become "gibier" on the table ("venaison" is not used anymore, exept in canadian French)
The French do understand this as it being intentionally done to dissociate the animals you interact with from the slaughter and butchery system which people generally prefer not to think about.
PS: both "mouton" and "agneau" are used for the meat and animal, "agneau" describing a young less than a year old.
Pigs and cows live at the farm and need daily handling and care, so people develop more bonds with them than sheeps that are mostly left to wander in mountains
Boeuf is also just a castrated male bovine. Porc and cochon are synonyms (and are both used for the animal as well as the meat).
It's a similar situation in most Romance languages. The distinction can exist, but it's not as clear cut as in English.
And the idea that it's done to not have to think about slaughter and butchery is yet another myth. The real reason is simply that Romance languages in general but French even more so love synonyms (and in fact it's even considered incorrect to make repetitions in speech).
@@Ezullof I partly agree with you except that noone will ever say "manger de la vache" nor a "côte/fillet mignon/rôti de cochon".
As a general term "cochon" can be used when talking about food but in specific cases: for the general public, I can only think of the feet and head, otherwise it is "porc".
Furthermore, using "cochon" for food is limited to some socioeconomic backgrounds and geographic areas (town vs countryside for example).
Also, people who aspired to elevate their circumstances preferred to distance themselves from terms associated with food production: a snobbism that claims ignorance of farm work.
Could "gibier" be the source of our word "giblet".
@@lauraleeogan7523 Yes it is.
According to various online sources that I looked at "gibier" would have derived from a line of old french and germanic words that meant "falcon hunting" and "game bird stew".
There are other suggestions but this explanation sounds sensible to me.
Its is also for trade, so like to know what you have on a boat. The state of the animal matters for planning long voyages
I've just come to this channel, and it's brilliant! It's wise, civilised, learned and good-humoured on the subject of our language - and language generally. Thank you.
That's why it's my favourite language channel! Always unique, interesting and exciting topics. 🔥I can see hitting that 1M subs soon! 🚀
@producedbypodcast thanks that's very kind. Readers should check out your podcast channel. It's truly enlightening.
I'll be damned. French here. 38 years of teaching English (retired) and now I must tell all my former students that story isn't true. But thank you. I always felt something was off about it. Like you said, why not duck and goat. This myth reminds me of the one about gladiators, also created in the 19th century (the thumb up or down for life or death). The 19th century is responsible for a lot of those myths. In reaction to the Industrial Revolution there was a renewed passion for old history, so that could be the reason, the general public ate it all up.
The old French word for coney/rabbit was conil, by the way. Very close to coney if you ask me. The dirty French word spelled c.o.n for a bad or stupid person actually meant the female genitalia (and still does in some cases, but rarely). When I looked up the etymology of that French word, they said it comes from the latin and greek words for rabbit AND "vulva". So apparently the word had both meanings even in ancient times!! In greek it could also mean the rabbit hole, hence the confusion. Well a furry animal at the entrance of a hole, that's all the ancient male mind needed to use the word in that other sense. And it was passed down the generations and through languages... my take.
Re: the conclusion you reached in your second paragraph. I was beginning to draw that same conclusion as I was reading your earlier explanation. It makes sense to me, too.
@@lauraleeogan7523 Ah, thank you. Funny that in both English and French the more modern word used in that sense has to do with cats, not rabbits anymore.
I hope you will become Muslim
@@JustinCase99999 But in French, we never had "beaver". We had "tablier de sapeur" which means "combattant engineer apron" in reference to the Foreign legion's sappers traditionaly bearing a long beard.
@@BangFarang1 huh?
My native language is Czech and we also have different words for the animal the meat. Therefore, I've never found it to be strange in English. (In Czech, the names for meet come from some archaic words for the animals, different from the present day usage). So, your theory about separation the perception of the meet from the animal seem plausible to me. Also, lot of things about meal are ritualized. The usage of some fancy words meet squares well with this.
In a flash of dementia to check off a bucket list item, I committed to learn modern Icelandic. Fourteen declensions for "cat"! What could go wrong? With only a century-old semester of German to my credit, I was beginning to think that I'd never find cognates to help retain such old vocabulary. What a coincidence that, in this video at 7:31, you mention 'deor' meaning any animal in the forest. It turns out that in the modern Icelandic dictionary, "dýr", (pronounced "deer"), as a noun means animal; but as an adjective it means expensive, a usage that's more common in your neck of the woods, I believe, but certainly with French as cher for dear or expensive or as a term of endearment, (pun not intended). Time travel at its finest. Thank you for this video.
In German, “animal” means „Tier“, which is pronounced like teer or tee-ah
Something similar that has recently played out in South Florida (and possibly other heavily Spanish speaking places in the USA) is how food is described when Spanish is translated from native Spanish speakers into English. Let me give you the best example I can think of. If you go to a bakery/cafe that is run by primarily Spanish speaking propirietors & they offer empanadas, you will almost always see the beef ones offered as meat empanadas. It's understood locally that it means beef.
Here in the Philippines empanadas are popular. Beef is expensive though, so chicken or pork is more likely. Even tuna is a possibility.
The reason why the Spanish name for beef is often translated into meat in English is because the Spanish for beef is carne de res. Frequently it is shortened to carne (which means meat), so when translated into English, it is translated correctly as meat. That's why places with large populations of bilingual English and Spanish speakers tend to refer to beef as meat. It's a translation of a shortening of the Spanish.
@@nvdawahyaify pero por que no pasa con otras carnes? puerco/cochino, pollo... todo seria "carne de ...".. :)
in Spain we don't call beef "carne", it's usually "ternera" which is actually the word for "veal", but it's understood as beef in most cases.. you might hear "carne de vaca" sometimes, as in "cow's meat"
@@nvdawahyaify Yeah my Spanish mum did the same her entire life, up until just a couple of years ago, not sure why; might have been to do with family members complaining of ambiguity or us just eating less beef (which is true, it's too expensive these days)
@@Fadogar911 I apologize that I didn't make this clear, when I referred to Spanish, I meant the language, not Spain. Most of my experience with the Spanish language is with people from Mexico.
I do understand that not everywhere that uses the Spanish language will necessarily use the same terms for things.
The majority of people I know who speak Spanish, call beef carne. And most of them are either from Mexico, or are of Mexican decent.
The real question is why that particular style of painting(such as at 6:20) depicts livestock as pallalelograms
The thing about etymology is that when etymology became a field of study, about the only thing academics in the field had to go on was how words looked in English and other languages, and then if they saw a pattern that made sense to their own imagination, that's what they put down as the etymology for a particular word, and their reasoning, especially when it makes a good story that captivates other people's imagination too, is then later taken as gospel fact.
When it comes to the original English word for rabbit, the only reason it's a rude word is that the word for rabbit was used as a euphemism. It is quite common for small furry rodents to be used as euphemisms for this anatomical feature in many languages, though English - uniquely perhaps - and in a surprising and probably rather unique move, actually removed the non-euphemistic meaning of the word to make it completely dirty. If all languages did that, we'd struggle to talk about small rodents of any kind after a while...
I don't know the wider context of the Ivanhoe story, but is it clear this is what Scott thought himself, or just what the character relating the story in the book thought? If the latter is the case, that's just bull, and it's not Scott you should have a beef with, but all those who came after him - yourself included - who made a pig's ear of the whole thing not being able to tell fact from fiction.
That was not only informative, but a lot of fun. Loved the puns throughout. Brilliant! "Sir Walter Scott, you complete and utter bastard" was the funniest line I've ever heard on RUclips.
Fun fact: in the north germanic Swedish, we use different words for pigs and pig meat, but the culinary word has nothing to do with French (it is, however, a cognate with the English word "flesh"). We also use the same words as the animal for calf, sheep, lamb, any game, reindeer, fish and fowl meat, but call cow meat with our word for "bovine" (except for ox, which sometimes keeps its name, and sometimes gets the name "biff", which is a loan from _English_ and not French!). So there seems to be an argument for the tendency to use separate words for what you put on your plate at least for the most popular meats.
Incidentally, "rabbit" in Swedish is "kanin" :)
Nothing I can argue with in the video, however I don't think this constitutes busting a myth really, it's more describing the complex process which is simplified into the story we all know - but the story itself isn't exactly a myth, it's a massive oversimplification, but the core idea there and the association with class through the millennium is still broadly true. Appreciate that's hard to get into a title and I may not have clicked on it otherwise!
Agreed. Some of the points don’t even contradict the “myth” at all. But still learned a lot and now know it’s not nearly as hard and fast as the “myth” makes it out
Perfectly worded, @@ModernEphemera
No mythbusting at all.
It most definitely constitutes a myth. It is an oversimplified inaccurate story that people peddle around as if it were fact. If you've come to appreciate the more complex nature of reality, then that myth as been busted
It very much is a myth and not just an oversimplification. The myth is that after the Norman conquest of England, because the aristocracy who ate the meat were French and the peasants who kept the animals were English, a distinction emerged between the word for the animal (Anglo-Saxon) and the meat (French loanword) emerged. This is not merely an oversimplification, it is entirely false. The distinction between the word for an animal vs. its meat wasn’t a thing until centuries later, and there did not exist a broad pattern of French loanword for meat vs. English word for animal that was caused by the French aristocracy eating the meat while the English peasants kept the animals.
@@luckyblockyoshiI’m not sure oversimplification is the right word but I don’t think myth is either.
The part of the “myth” that the Anglo-Saxon peasantry in the early years after the invasion would have called pig “pig” and the Anglo-Norman nobility would have called the pig on their plate “pork” is true.
The problem is the “that’s why we call it that way today”, given that both terms were ultimately adopted and used interchangeably for meat and animal from what we can tell until the influence of French cuisine on English in the 18th and 19th centuries.
If I heard someone repeat the story, I wouldn’t be saying “that’s a myth!”, I’d be saying “that’s true that the nobility spoke French for centuries after the Norman invasion, but there’s actually evidence people used both terms interchangeably for meat and animal until the 18th and 19th centuries.”
And frankly, the “words for meat are French because it’s fancier or more upper class” idea is likely still true, given that French cuisine would have been more known to the upper classes in those later centuries.
My father told me this story--he was in France for a few years in the late 1930s, though who knows where he learned the story. Like most things, the truth is more complicated.
Still, the story may be a useful half-truth for conveying the multi-sourced and often two-tiered nature of the English lexicon. At least, I sometimes try to encourage Romance-language speakers who find English hard by telling them that, after they get the structure and the "little" vocabulary (of childhood, daily life, etc), both of which will seem foreign to them, they will get to an academic/governmental/scientific/business vocabulary that will be familiar... that they can even (more or less) improvise based on their native Romance language. Though I frame this encouragement with reference to 1066 etc, not to the animals-and-meats story.
Your rant makes me wonder: while the vocabulary of the fancier or more privileged register of English certainly came from French, how much of the social and status separation of the registers of English was already there by, say, the early 1600s? Your revision suggests an alternate hypothesis, that some or many of the words of those registers may have co-existed for centuries _without status differences_, and that their sorting into different registers happened only in more recent times? I suspect a mix-probably a minority with any such long period of equality-but I never thought to ask the question! Thank you!
P.S., The KJV was commissioned 1604, published 1611. (Actual date of translation of any passage in it therefore between these two, but 1611 would be the way to say it. Aka, the Authorized Version of 1611.)
The KJV was largely based on earlier translations, especially the Bishops Bible, which was itself influenced by still earlier translations. The result was that the language of the King James Bible was already a bit on the archaic side at the time that it was published.
@@RolandHutchinson That's right, there was already a L-O-N-G history of English-language translations, not only early modern English, but old and middle English as well. Plus, the AV of 1611 (KJV) was meant to replace the so-called Geneva Bible, an English-language translation considered subversive!
Thanks!
Thank you for your tip. It's very kind and much appreciated. Best wishes.
Very interesting. Thank you. Funny how you started with Tom Scott and finished with Sir Walter Scott.
And when Tom Scott is knighted, these bookends will be even tidier.
@@joadbreslin5819 Even more so if his parentage is questionable.
I think English is one of the few languages that differentiates between the species and the consumable flesh of the species using completely different words. In Vietnamese, for example, cow is bò, and beef is either bò or thịt bò, literally cow flesh/meat. Compounds make things so much easier, though perhaps not elegant. Lol
In Welsh we have lamb = oen and lamb meat = cig oen (oen is obviously related, though distantly, to the French agneau) and cig eidion (bullock meat), cig moch (pig meat) etc.
In German, it is like in Vietnamese:
Rind (cow), Rindfleisch (beef or literally cow flesh)
It's actually quite common in Romance languages, but relatively rare in Germanic languages (they will just add a bit meaning "flesh" instead of having a different word). Spanish for example has cerdo (pig) vs puerco (pork) or vaca (cow) vs carne de res (beef).
While this video it's true, it's also true that the Normans imported the "habit" of Romance meals to England, and with that the need to make a difference between the animal and the meat of the animal.
More generally, it's quite common in a lot of languages to call the animal "cow" and the meat "beef", because the first one is the female animal that gives birth and milk, while the beef is the male animal that is eaten. See Turkish inek vs sığır eti, Russian korova vs govyadina etc. Other animals like chicken or fish very rarely get the same treatment.
there is "mucca" e "manzo" in italian
@@Ezullof If never seen that "beef" indicates a male (bull). When the word is applied to the animal, it indicates one raised for meat, so beeves can be male or female. Among breeds raised primarily for milk, it is more common for the males to become beef.
I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to simply take this as a complete myth, and call it debunked, when the overarching statements are all evident.
The Normans invaded.
The locals and the invaders had differing terms for animals and meats.
Many (but not all) of the modern English words for the meats are cognates with the French words.
There were evidently mixings of the terms that were more common than that of today.
Just because it didn't immediately take over all of the island the day of the invasion doesn't mean that there is a still a great amount of individual truths to this.
Unrelated, this is the first time I have heard Ivanhoe in English and my god that is some absolutely gorgeous prose.
The myth here is that the distinction between the word for an animal and the word for its meat arose because French aristocrats were using a different word for the meat that they were eating vs. English peasants who kept the animals. This is what is completely false, with the distinction only arising centuries later.
I really don’t see how any of this “refutes” anything about this supposed “myth”.
So… instances exist of the French words being used in English to mean the animals rather than the meat, for multiple centuries after the conquest, and also there are exceptions to the general food-French/animal-English pattern. Neither of those are remotely surprising. French had an enormous influence on English, and no subject matter or sector of society was entirely immune to that influence.
But none of that changes the fact that the terminology eventually settled down and became stable, and when it did so it conformed, for the most part, to a clear pattern that matched the class demarcations in British society.
In German We put -fleisch after the animal name: Schweinefleisch, Rindfleisch, Lammfleisch.
Pretty sure it was similar in old english, Rotherflesh for beef, as an example.
Or we eat "Wild" (game), "Ente" (duck) or "Lachs" (salmon)...
I’ve regurgitated the same thing for many years. I commend you for your willingness to accept being incorrect (if, indeed, you were incorrect).
It’s a rare, and admirable trait.
I loved this video. I heard the story so many times that I never even suspected it could be untrue.
It’s not really untrue. A bit simplified, maybe.
Hi Gideon, Castle is even closer to the french Castel which gave château in the singular form, the plural is châteaux and not chateaus in english to name a "grand cru" of wine for instance. Note the circumflex accent on château, it replaced the "s" from castle. Chatel can be seen with a circumflex accent but the owner of château called the châtelain (lord) or the châtealaine (lady) can also be written without the cicumflex accent in modern french. So you are right for Chatel, I just wanted to add my contirution. Thank you, always a pleasure to watch you videos. I was laughing with the texan lady speaking the cockney about ball, she got it! 🙂
The Anglo Saxon farmers planted potatoes, but once they ate it, they called them french fries.
They didn't want to be remembered that these living potatoes ended up as boiled and cut to death.
I think they actually called them chips, being Anglo Saxon 😉
😂😂
🤣🤣🤣
@@leftmono1016, only peasant made potato the Anglo-Saxons ate, not the elite french fries
I feel like this isn't right, but I don't know enough about potatoes to argue with you.
Thank you! I didn't know that. I heard the story (from you, by the way, and not only from you too), but didn't know that it's not true.
Sorry for my earlier blunder.
As late as the 1730s Cattle was a synonym for Livestock not Bovine Animals. I could give you some very long examples of legal cases where freeholders were asked to list the cattle they put on some common land and the lists produced included mainly sheep and horses as well as milk cows.
Yes and the word 'cattle' cognates with 'chattel'
I've seen an 18th century horse race notice that announced 'a purse for the beaten cattle'
Wait, are yʼall saying that “cattle” only refers to cows? As a non-native English speaker, I always thought cattle is a synonym of livestock.
It's not surprising that something like ChatGPT would pass on wrong information, it's just a language model that's built off of what everyone's saying. If what everyone's saying is wrong, then that'll happen
Summary: While the impression is that Norman words sound aristocratic and Germanic words sound peasantly, “beef”, “pork”, and “mutton” vs. “cow”, “pig”, and “sheep” did not have the strong meat-animal distinction of today until centuries after the Norman conquest. Either was fine for both.
The myth that said divide formed right after the Norman conquest was incepted in the book _Ivanhoe._
@@cmyk8964 You watched the video I see.
So I'm not the only person who watches these videos. I thought people came here just to socialize in the comments section.
@@pavloz1818 Some watch the videos and describe them in the comments. Weird, right?
I often write summaries of videos like these so I can understand the video’s contents better, and possibly help others understand it better.
@@JustinCase99999 What's even weirder is how many people watched the video and completely missed the point, as evidenced by a large number of comments. A tl:dr summary may be quite useful.
Sir Walter Scott is a very respected poet in Scotland. The Scott Monument, which commemorates this guy, is an iconic landmark in Edinburgh. Edinburgh train station, Waverley, is named after one of his novels. I’d say though he made a mistake, don’t call him a bastard.
Thumbs up for correctly pronouncing _coney._
Thanks. As "coney" is in the bible, much later they changed the pronunciation to "coh-ney" to avoid confusion with the C word.
@@LetThemTalkTV The alternate spelling "cunny" reflects the old pronunciation. 😉
I love how we use that word very differently nowadays. xD
Shall we now call them boneys in retaliation? 😂
To be fair, while the theory is not literally true, it points to a deeper truth: that English has (at least) 2 distinct sets of vocabulary, 1 Germanic, the other French(or Latin). In almost all cases, germanic words are "low" and are more common in everyday speech. The French vocabulary tends to be used more in writing, and tends to be "higher" in register. Of course, when we look at things in detail it's messy and there's lots of exceptions, but I think it's useful to know for learners, especially given how many french/Anglo saxoj word pairs there are (like cook/chef or driver/chauffeur), and English speakers continue to look on the French language as inherently "posh".
You've just disproved your own theory-busting here ! Those quotes from 1300+ Middle English prove that the Norman / Piccard words for the animals were being used by the nobility for the meat they were eating, while also entering usage by the wider population, along with extant Anglo-Saxon words for both animals and meat. Maybe Sir Walter Scott noticed a stratification in choice of synonym in different registers through society in the 18th and 19th centuries which you are not yet party to. Explaining the breadth of English vocabulary, particularly Anglo / Norse / Norman - French synonyms through etymology is far too useful (and 'true') to linguists, English language teachers, students and the histo-curious, to be ditched in favour of pedantry. The point you make about Old English terms for animals and French vocabulary becoming recognised and standardised for meat in the 19th Century through fashionable French cuisine is no more than an amusing addendum. You've got to ask yourself if you're being honest about why you made this video and whether the broader brush is really so useless in depicting such a huge, multi-faceted language.
I think the hypothesis still holds up in my opinion. Just because the french words were being used by the anglo-saxons doesn't mean that those words didn't originate from old french. In fact, you would expect to find a transitionary state in which the french words begin to be used by middle-english speakers; and that's exactly the evidence you provided. So I think it's still fair to say that the english language gained these words as a result of the french holding aristocratic roles in society. It likely gained entry into the language via the aristocracy, and from there began to be used as a whole by english speakers. This would explain the lack of use of these words in old english, and their presence in middle and modern english.
Edit: Also, the disassociation idea makes sense too, but I don't see that as evidence against Sir Walter Scott's hypothesis. I think it's more of a "both-and" rather than an "either-or" situation :)
I doubt that it makes sense beyond a very strict modern vegetarian perspective. In German, there is no such distinction, yet people eat swine flesh and cow flesh without any second thought.
Honestly I don't really understand why people today imagine that medieval would have been especially reticent in using words from other languages. Medieval England was a lot more multilingual than modern England. There was no national pride in refusing to talk a language that would let you access more markets.
Most people were likely just thinking "oh, I don't know that word, what does it mean" and then they'd use it or pick the meaning from context. People couldn't just google a translation. It happened organically just because there was french speakers around.
Sadly, this reopens the previous question: why did the words for meat that we have end up meaning meat exclusively, rather than the other words we have? Surely, even if it didn't occur en masse in a short period after the Norman conquests, it has at least in part to do with class divisions, no? If not, what alternative explanation is there? Are we to believe the selection of almost entirely Norman words to refer to meat was coincidental?
exactly!! the myth is basically correct and this video is wrong
Yes, what a coincidence.
He said it is due to the fashion of French cuisine in the 19th century.
Basically it's not because of French influence in the 12th century, but rather French influence in the 19th century. So it's not because of feudalism, but rather because of Enlightenment and Napoleonic influence.
It's normal in many languages, including French ITSELF, with cochon being pig and porc being, well, porc. Not to mention variants of Swine existing in almost every European language likely coming from the same proto Indo European root. Hell, in Ukrainian we have exclusive word for cow meat, yalovychyna, and toilet stealers nearby say goviadina, cow in both cases would be korova, yes like in Clockwork Orange. Nothing to do with Normans BTW.
The English aristocracy prior to the Norman conquest also wasn't completely replaced, there were still English aristocrats after 1066, they just adopted new titles and new surnames.
We do use the Germanic word for salmon, at least in its smoked form, it's lox. However id guess that lox comes from Yiddish not Anglo Saxon.
You're right. Lox is most likely from Yiddish (although the Swedish also say 'lax').
Why is salmon the only fish with a French name? Do they not exist in England? I live in the US northwest where salmon are native, so my assumption is they're everywhere, but maybe not?
I've never come across "lox", but apparently it's not used in Britain, only in North America, where - as you suggest - it is borrowed from Yiddish. The native English survival is "lax", but it's judged obsolete by the OED and dialectal by Wiktionary.
@@LetThemTalkTV In German it’s Lachs too.
@@sluggo206 Salmon isn't the only fish with norman or french etymology. Trout from truite, mackerel from maquerel (today maquereau), sardine from sardine, anchovy from anchova/anchois, turbot, perch, plaice, sole etc.
And it extends to other maritime animals. Lobster from lopestre (from latin locusta) etc.
My 2 fave vids of yours.. this one, and the one where you offhandedly debunk the notion of English being a western Germanic language, but instead a Northern Germanic one, via VSO and SVO differences
In inventories of the 16th and 17th Cs pigs are very rare and when they do occur they are listed as swine. The meats are listed as beef and much less common bacon. Oh and the word meat was never used, always Flesh which was kept in a Fleshtub.
It is a bit of a cheat to say we use Lamb and not Agneau. True, but no-one ever ate the meat of young sheep until late in the 19th C. Sheep meat was always Mutton but the animal would be ancient and the meat relatively unappertising as mutton is today.
Sheep were kept primarily for thier wool, the only ones which were killed were the excess males which were castrated and then left on the fells for two or three years and the worn out females, five or six shears.
Of course a hog was usually if not always a young sheep, as it is today, not a pig.
I always find it rather odd that with bovine animals the desire and understanding is to eat adult animals as beef with a British reluctance to eat Veal. But with sheep the reluctance is to eat the adult animal instead the meat is called Lamb even when the lamb is a ten year old grandmother.
In France last month in a moderately upmarket meat restaurant I was rather surprised to see Cheval on the menu. I stuck with the boeuf
The history is complicated and the video could have been much longer. Beef as an animal was used up to very recently in the US. The reason the "beef" triumphed over 'cow' for the meat was because the English rarely ate the cow as it was valuable for the milk. That also explains why 'mutton' won out. The English kept the sheep for the wool.
Proper mutton is the best meat, it has so much flavour!
The variant I was told is that the French words was for the foods the peasants were banned from eating, with Robin Hood being cited as his original crime being shooting a deer and eating it.
Some good points here, but others aren’t terribly compelling.
The examples of interchangeable uses well after the Norman conquest are very convincing.
That said, the fact that not every single meat and animal has a French or English name respectively doesn’t really counter the myth for me. And most other languages don’t use separate words for meat vs the animal, so I’m not really sure about the speculation at the end.
One can still imagine the English/French distinction playing out in scenes after the Norman conquest exactly how the myth says, even if the differences weren’t solidified until the 18th century. But I’m now convinced it’s not as just-so as the myth suggests.
Many European languages have that distinction, usually limited to three or four species of large animals.
@@vytah Sure, but many don’t. If it was some innate human need to differentiate their food from their animals it would be universal. And the idea that people in Europe were squeamish about where their meat comes from prior to the 20th century is just ahistorical. These people ate suckling pig for God’s sake.
Much more plausible to me is that English already had two words for each animal due to the Anglo-Norman influence, and the influence of French cuisine in the 18th and 19th centuries solidified the specific usage of meat vs animal.
Actually, the distinction between on and off the hoof meat predates the Victorian era. It was in common use when Ivanhoe was published; please see page one.
Man. It is funny that first time I heard this story was from your channel lol.
My humblest apologies for misleading you.
@@LetThemTalkTV no harm done ;)
I had this debate after watching a linguist's video. It's quite simple to demonstrate that 'boeuf' is the French word for beef. If, following the Norman Conquest, there are instances of the term 'beef' being used for cows, it doesn't negate the French origin. It suggests that, for a time, a writer, perhaps aiming for sophistication, attempted to supplant the English word 'cow.' However, show me an instance of a peasant using 'beef' for cow before 1065.
Even in french the animal and the meat have different names, vache and cochon become boeuf and porc etc...
Yes, indeed but it's not because of feudalism. or is it?
@@LetThemTalkTV The french cuisine culture has crossed the channel, the Normands have not much to do with it.
Well vache is cow and boeuf is ox so not 100% agrees. True for cochon though.
This is so great! Thank you Gideon for the info!
As someone enthralled by history and linguistics, this video is an absolute treat.
Here in Canada, as far as I know in Ontario at least, we use coney and rabbit interchangeably for the meat
A canny ?? As in Kaninchen , Konijn , Knyn, Kanin, Kanin, Kanin, Kanína in other germanic languages?
Yes, it's all ultimately from Latin. Also Slovene kunec, Croatian kunić. And funnily calqued in some other Slavic languages, by reanalysing the German word for rabbit as a diminutive for "king".
Interesting and humorous at the same time. Congratulations!
I'm not entirely convinced about the theory in this video but I want to cheer the creator on (the question of 'cow' and 'beef' simply needs a lot more research). His videos are always entertaining and enlightening. To give the devilish old story its due, isn't it possible right after the Norman invasion that serfs and other native English speakers had a lot to do with the invaders and would indeed adopt their aristocratic new words? I can imagine Mr. Serf going up to the Norman Castle and trying to sell the newly-arrived Lord Norman some cow meat. Lord Norman would of course blabber something about 'bouef' and Mr. Serf would get the point. From then on, he'd refer to the meat as 'bouef' whenever he went to the castle. Soon enough, the new term would be used all around Mr. Serf's neighborhood. (Mr. Serf to his friends: 'Look, guys, when you take cow meat to the Castle just call it 'bouef' and you're guaranteed a gigantic sale.') And so on. On another point in the video: 'deer' may well have meant all the animals being hunted in Merrie Olde England, because 'Tier' is the German word for any animal at all. And we all know that German contributed mightily to English. By the way, the Germans of today still refer to pork as 'pig meat' and don't seem at all disgusted to admit that they're eating a pig. They see no reason to rationalize the meal by calling it 'pork.' I'm sure this has something to do with inches versus centimeters but the question requires far more research.
I don't agree that more research is needed. There are literally thousands of quotes of "beef" being used to mean the living animal right up until recently. And they're easy to find. "Beef" for the animal was used by Shakespeare and the bible but that's inconvenient to this Norman/Anglo-Saxon tale.
"Venatus" absolutely does not mean "to hunt." It is the perfect participle "hunted," not the infinitive form of the deponent verb "vēnor, vēnārī,"
Rabbit in German is "das Kaninchen"
Hi, when I check in French where we also differenciate meat and animal, the most given reason (with no precise origin) is that we dissociate the animal from the food to make it easier to eat. My mom, when she was a child (my grand-parents were peasants) use to exchange rabbits with the neighbours, so you would eat the animal you feed and connected with.
But it's funny that in French lamb (agneau) or rabbit (lapin), we have the same name for food and animal. For the organs also we changee the names. Kidney (Rein) becomes "rognon", stomac (estomac) becomes "tripes"... We also change the names of some fishes.
I have heard some farmers in the US refer to cattle as Beeves. I think it started as a joke and became habit.
I found many examples of 'beeves' being used until quite recently in the US.
probably an industry term
I've heard people call beef cows "beefs" in old movies so I think that terminology has been around a long time
Thank you - I learned something today!
What I would like to see analysed is the odd separation between US and UK names for (a) meats and (b) plant-based foods. I can't think of a single example of a meat that has different names each side of the Atlantic, and yet the examples for plants are quite numerous:
Aubergine / Eggplant
Swede / Rutabaga
Coriander / Cilantro
Courgette / Zuchini
I mean... WHY? Why plants and not meat?
Cam on luv, show us yer rabbit eh, phwoar!
Thank you for confirming my doubts about this. Another piece of circumstantial counterevidence would be that meat/animal word pairs can also be found in other Western European languages, e.g. I haven't heard French people talking much about eating vache or Germans about eating Kuh; bœuf and Rind seem to be preferred.
And I suppose you could say, at least in Jewish cuisine, that a Germanic (Yiddish?) word is preferred to a Norman word, namely lax/salmon.
Argh. I've taught that myth to hundreds of students. Luckily, I am now retired and no longer spreading this falsehood.
I'm still teaching, and will redress my 30 years of misinformation from today.
Based on one more RUclips video? I think this needs to be thoroughly kicked around by as many lexicographers as possible before we toss it into the myth bucket.
Another person pointed out it's not a myth as we have the food words for animals from French but not the living animal words.
Excellent, myth busting and informative with a nice younger in cheek attitude.
Interesting but I don't think you have proved your point, there was no one standing there in 1066 saying OK which words are now going to be french and recording them, so the fact that they were not recorded till 1300 or whenever just means that's the first we know of as literacy was so low, there was a lot of contact with France pre Norman invasion, even royal intermarriage, clergy etc, a lot of things that didn't change birds fish were lower status opposed to cow beef , pig pork, I see your point if the AS word had no meat word separately then the French added not replacing, the later 1800 recipes etc mentioning old English names could just be affectation. Still very interesting. Cheers from Mercia
It's a nice story, undermined by the actual words, and the history of the languages
But as usual with simple stories, it's much more complicated than that
Very interesting and edifying talk. Thank you.
10:40. Is the derived word from Coney related to Shakespeare's "Country Matters"? (Hamlet act 3 scene 2 line 111)
Yes, it is a pun. Apples grow on an appletree. Peaches grow on a peachtree. Guess what grows on a country.
Interestingly, one way to say "vulva" colloquially in Spain is "conejo" (rabbit, coney).
@@ale.2p284
Not coño?
@@h.washingtonsawyer6614 Counts?
Excellent stuff. However, I think there is an argument for this being more of a refinement rather than a complete debunking. There is an argument for the Norman conquest being the foundation of the English class system, and when these Norman words entered the language they would still likely have been considered 'posh' versions of the same thing, and, eventually, over a longer period of time adopted to differentiate between the animal and the meat.
As for it being used to cover any kind of squeamishness, that is likely a modern phenomenon as people in the Middle Ages were certainly a lot less squeamish than we are today. Death was an everyday part of life and many lived hand to mouth, eating whatever they could get their hands on, and shoving it into pies! I believe in fact that even the word 'meat' was a more general term for anything you could shove into a pie..
I'm so glad to see someone busting this myth. It's been one of my personal bugbears for years. It relies on cherry picking the results that comply with the rule and ignoring everything that doesn't. It also relies on ignoring all the words for both meat and livestock that used to be common but are generally obscure today. Hardly anyone eats squabs, neats or capons any more, at least not knowingly, but they were all once familiar terms. I've seen pigs referred to as 'bacons' in 16th and 17th century literature, despite the word apparently originally referring to specific cuts of meat, not the animal. So it seems like 'bacon' was a food word that became also an animal word by extension, but then reverted to being strictly a food word.
Excellent insight. Thanks
I just realized that “neatsfoot oil” preserves the term “neat” for cow. The oil is apparently made from cow feet and shins. You might have heard of it if you ever owned a baseball glove- it’s a leather conditioner, though we have some better substitutes nowadays. But it’s a very old substance and maybe the last holdout in modern English of an even older word!
How do you explain the reversion? Once they were shuffled in the deck, wouldn't they be distributed randomly?
@@dianabriggs1032wow! Very cool :)
@@Sokrabiades However you explain it, it's not as simple as 'Saxons feed animals, Normans eat animals', as the discrepancy just didn't exist for the majority of the feudal era. I'm not an expert by any means, but if I had to make a guess I'd say that it was due to the popularity of French food culture with the upper classes during the 19th century. French was very much the favourite international language of Europe during the period, and was spoken by elites across the continent. French culture was extremely fashionable in elite circles, with French 'Gastronomie' an integral part of that. Historically, it was common for words used by the upper classes to be adopted by aspirational people from the lower classes, but was rarer for the reverse to occur.
As I said, I'm not an expert, and that's just a guess.
Wisdom unlocked! I also used to tell the story of the class warfare in food names, but it turns out everybody was naming everything what suited them best! Much more realistic, if not dramatic.
Excellent video! Love your work. The one thing I’m still curious about is that also in French they do not call a cow beef but une vache. And they go down the line using different words for meat vs animals. So could it be possible what was more of thing English picked up from the Normans was the idea of giving animals and meat different names as a concept itself; not so much that one used english words and the other used french words? Or perhaps that opens a can of worms on the French side where they also went through a language change upon converge with other peoples or just a dumb change that occured in time? The complexity you restore is brilliant. I believe the Ivanhoe root really demonstrates mosts tendencies for a quick and dirty answer for things, which is also a core flaw in much of academia who must alter classes for disinterested audiences.
"Boef" can be used for a living animal (an ox), as in "Le Boef sur le Toit."
9:56 In American English coney is pronounced with a long O, rhyming approximately with cone, the geometric shape. Most Americans and many Brits may be familiar with Coney Island, the seaside amusement district of New York City. Long before the city became the steel and concrete metropolis, Coney Island was an actual island isolated from the Brooklyn peninsula on all sides. At low tide, people could walk to Coney Island. The colonial settlers used it to graze their livestock, and it was a place to hunt and trap cottontail rabbits, hence the name. 19th-century civil engineering permanently joined Coney Island to Brooklyn, yet the name persists. However, in American English, the word coney has almost completely disappeared, replaced with rabbit and bunny, a word derived from the same root as the word for the bread used to make hamburgers. The few who know coney as a synonym for rabbit probably got it from reading "The Lord of the Rings".
Interestingly, French tends to use one word for the animal and the meat. Even "porc" is used commonly for pig, in addition to "cochon". One clear exception is "poule" (hen) and "poulet" (hen meat), so the clearest example of a missing meat name in English is at the very spot where the French have two.
English has "poultry" that comes from the french words "poule" or "poulet"
Poulet isn't really the meat of the "poule" afaik. I've just ate some "poule" a few days ago, clearly stated as such and the taste seemed different. It seems a poulet is a related animal but is raised for its meat, while a poule usually has another purpose (even if some fancy restaurants serve them too).
Edit: I just checked because I wanted to be sure before posting. The poulet is actually just the young of the poule (but who reached sexual maturity), but I was kinda right as they are consumed at that age usually. That's why it's rare to consume a poule, which is raised for her eggs and can live a very long life.
@@xenotypos That's the first time I have heard this explained and it makes sense. Much like veal (veau).
Your exception isn't correct. Poule and poulet are both used for the animal. Poule is exclusively female, while poulet is exclusively young (but either male or female). It's easy to identify a hen visually when it's alive, but when it's dead what you want is the firm meat of a young chicken.
In general all the words for animals in French can be used both for the living animal and the meat. For chicken there's a bunch of other words as well, for example a poularde is a hen that hasn't laid eggs yet and is very fat because of a diet of cereals and dairy.
@@Ezullof Someone beat you to it.
Sir Walter Scott was transferring back to the middle ages an ethnic enmity between Normans and Saxons which reflected the nationalism of his own time far more than the more rudimentary form found in the medieval period; certainly by the date in which "Ivanhoe" is set, ca. 1194, Normans and Saxons had, for the most part, put that hatred behind them (though there were a few eccentrics, like "William with the Beard," who made an ostentatious show of their old Saxon ways, rather as in my childhood there were still old Southern colonels and Daughters of the Confederacy who'd make a point of flying the Stainless Banner in their backyards). Sir Walter also contributed another medieval myth in "The Talisman" (1825) that has proven remarkably firmly rooted: the myth of the incredibly sharp Saracen sword (as opposed to the supposedly duller, though much heavier swords of the crusaders) that could cut through a pillow with the lightest possible touch (a myth that has nowadays transferred itself to the Japanese katana). Current research indicates that Western and Eastern steel were both much of a muchness, and that even the later two-handed swords of the German Landsknechts, let alone the arming swords of the high middle ages, were *not* particularly heavy.
Apparently the borough of New York City, named Coney Island means 'rabbit island,' taken from the Dutch name in the days of New Amsterdam, a rabbit/coney being "konijn" in Dutch. Since Dutch does borrow many French words, the original derivation may still be from the French.
They use that word in Lord of the Rings. ‘A brace of coneys’ if I remember correctly.
I have read that but I believe it's disputed.
Is that why they keep saying 'cunny' in Boardwalk Empire?
THANK YOU for debunking this myth. I don't know how long I've believed this and justified prejudice by it.
What a relief! 😅😅
You may be right, but the arrival of the Normans in 1066 would never have seen the immediate adoption of French words, it is likely to take 250 plus years or so, you know like 1316 or later. Clearly all the other French terms entered slowly as well. BTW what terms were used in the Domesday Book. The Aristocracy wrote in French, the Clergy in Latin and the peasants were mostly illiterate so no point in writing it down for them.
Not saying you are wrong, just that history is a good read, shame it isn't true.
That kind of things can happen extremely fast. It definitely doesn't have to take 250 years. 250 years is an extremely long time, borrowings happen much faster. In English today you're still using borrowings that were made in just a few years. Balcony is a good example.
The 250 years I used was an amount of years that was close to when the author said these words first showed up in writing, not a suggestion it meant anything else. @@Ezullof
Great story and good soft humor. )))
While I accept the argument presented, I do wonder if the "myth" has more than a kernel of truth to it. If numerous words for these animals and meats existed in the English language for hundreds of years, I would imagine that class delineated their use, as was suggested in the video. However I would then argue that French cuisine could have been influential in English speaking kitchens only because the affluent members of society who descended from Norman gentry, who took up an interest in the cuisine in the first place, doing so because the recipes offered something familiar -- the words used for various meats, which were unlike the recipes of the common people who still used native English words. And following the course of things, eventually the common people had access and the interest in these recipes and took up the terminology as well, as it sounded more sophisticated/educated.
French was in vogue in the entire Europe in the 18th and 19th century, even in places without gentry of Norman descent. This is why the word for "sauce" is similar across almost the entire Europe.
Minor correction: 'venatus' in Latin means either 'hunted' (adjective) or 'hunting' (noun). The Latin word meaning 'to hunt' is 'venor'.
I can say that you are the greatest detective in the English language, at the moment here in my country it is fashionable to consume protein in large quantities, the steakhouses are always full of customers salivating to taste. The Steak here we say "BIFE", the theme of the video and the colorful pictures are incredible, I discovered a fabulous world of meats. As always I am happy to know. Congrats Gideon💥
Thanks, word history is so interesting but it's good not to get side tracked but unreliable tales. Yes, I know that Brazil is famous for its beef. Protein guaranteed. Best wishes.
@@LetThemTalkTV you're right. Best Wishes.
I was told that by my linguistics professor as well. Thanks for the research and clarification
Excellent video.
"Venaison" is still used in French. The word "conin" was discarded for the same reason "coney" was. "Chatel" has been mostly replaced by "bétail", but we still have "cheptel".
Native French speaker here. I had never heard of the word venaison until I moved to the US. As far as I remember, the generic term for wild meat in French is "chasse" (direct translation: hunt), which in English is "game", which I always found very strange. "Game" is generic for any wild meat, whereas venison refers to deer meat, but then why not call it deer? In French, deer meat is known by the animal name, i.e "chevreuil" for a small one or "cerf" for a larger one. Or maybe after so long out of francophony, I am getting mixed up. Anyway, English is such a fascinating language, with so many influences.
I’m struggling to see this as being correct. Following the Norman invasion, the Norman aristocracy did not learn old English, but instead continued to use French not just in day to day parlance, but also in all governance structures. French was the official language of Britain from 1066 until 1362 with it being used in the courts. The people in England had to adapt to be able to understand their new lords that were governing them.
I do agree that the English didn’t exclusive use the Anglo Saxon, while the Norman’s did exclusively use the French. My point is the English had no choice but to learn the French or risk being in breach of a French court without knowing it, and over time the words becomes intermingled into English, as you point out with the many examples. However the Anglo-Saxon words did not make their way into French. Which makes sense as why would the aristocracy of the time integrate into their language when they were in the position of power and had no reason to.
The reason you have no evidence of the Anglo-Saxon words being used before 1300, is because the Norman’s refused any use of the Anglo Saxon language in high society where we have all the historical documentation. And the lack of the printing press means works of the peasantry have been lost to time. I think you’ve been victim to survivorship bias here.
what the normans did with their french language isn't really relevant to what the english did with theirs. there's writing going on in english for literally hundreds of years and the french words never come up - probably for the reasons you outlined. the french speaking aristocracy never learnt english, so why would their words end up in the english language? then, as the barriers come down in the 14th century and the aristocracy become bilingual french and english speakers, the french words enter the language.
@@barnsleyman32 but the French words enter the English legal system as all laws between 1066 and the mid 1300 were written in French. So the English speakers had no choice but to learn the French words that would effect their day to day lives. If an English peasant was required to pay taxes to the Norman lord of their area, and the tax related the the number of Beef they owned, then they had better learn what the word beef means or face the wrath of the Norman lord. And we know the Norman’s were less than pleasant to the Anglos following the success of their conquest. The video makes no reference to laws at the time being written in French. I think that’s the big bit that has been missed.