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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's a similar thing with death, IMO. People say "passed", "passed on", "departed" and so on for someone who died. I suspect this is a fairly modern phenomenon, given how due to modern medicine, transportation and city planning, people became increasingly disassociated with death. It's not an ever present danger looming over most people's lives, and most people also don't pass by a churchyard full of headstones on a daily basis.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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._
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.
Smoked salmon is sold as "lox" all over America. So the Anglo Saxon name "leax" did not did 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.
Note: The discussed theory of Sir Walter Scot has not influenced *only* UA-cam 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.
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.
The different words for the animal and the meat is much more widespread in European languages than the UA-camrs 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).
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.
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!
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.
Words that became taboo (mostly words for animals) due to becoming used as vulgarities is a pretty fascinating subject. And the fact that it happened to such common animals is really bizarre. Also, the fact that this happened in so many languages.
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.
I’ve got so much respect for you: many people won’t admit their wrongs but you do, in fact you happily joke about it! Regarding the last question, I agree. I do think we like to distance the animal from the food #TeamVeggie
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.
Based on one more UA-cam video? I think this needs to be thoroughly kicked around by as many lexicographers as possible before we toss it into the myth bucket.
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.
Even though I've come across 'beef' and 'mutton' to refer to the live animals (not uncommon in, for example, 18th century literature), I have still repeated this apocryphal story to students of mine somewhat unthinkingly. This really goes to show the power of a compelling story, regardless of its veracity. If it's any consolation to all of us who have repeated this myth: the existence of these pairs of words does still illustrate English's mixed Germanic and Romance heritage, even if we should take a little more care to get the facts right.
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" :)
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
Congratulations to this well made myth-busting video. And to being a vegetarian. In support of your hypothesis about humans being a bit unwilling to be reminded of the precise origin of their meat, I recall having delicious ”pollo d’arbro”, in Nicaragua in the 80’s. It was the meat from ubiquitous large lizards inhabiting the trees and roof tops. Beautiful animals.
Interesting, thanks for the look-see. Over here in ze vaterland we call critters what they are, alive or dead or being chewed, "swine flesh" and "calf flesh" and all the rest. So it is tempting to search for some systemic reason why the English would separate them out in so many cases. However in the 1860s (US Civil War) the Union Army drove "beeves" with it in the field, for fresh meat. A book published as late as the 1880s referred to lice and such vermin as "deer". To this day a "porker" is a live pig. Those imply strongly that it is as you say, animal words were fluid until quite recently.
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.
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.
I think it's two different words because of cleanliness. You don't want to think about dirt, stench and blood when you are eating. Also they are completely different products. Aged meat ready to be cooked and eaten is something different from a living animal, or fresh meat that needs to be aged before being eaten.
I think this only applies to the double vocabulary of English. In my native language (German), we donʼt make a distinction between the animal and the meat. In fact, we donʼt even say “meat”; we say „Fleisch“ (flesh). *e.g.:* pig-Schwein pork-Schweinefleisch Rind-cow beef-Rindfleisch We certainly donʼt think about sweat and dirt when eating. But even if we did, it wouldnʼt take away the taste of the meat. Also, doesnʼt God literally command man to think about sweat and dirt when eating in Genesis 3:19? Maybe English speakers have a posh attitude towards dirt and see it as something dirty. In German, “dirt” means „Erde“, literally meaning “earth”. As we call our planet the same word as the dirt on the ground, there is no reason to be disgusted at the thought of farm labour.
ChatGPT, at least the most recent version, is actually programmed to look on specific websites for source. If you ask an etymology question it will try to find the information on reputable websites. So yes it will repeat rumors, but it has more chances to do that if the rumors are active in academic circles.
Very interesting. It seems to me what could be happening here is when we have two words for the same thing, over time those words often evolve related but separate meanings. In this case it took much longer than popular wisdom had previously assumed.
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.
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.
Maybe sir Walter Scott didn't intend his play to be an undermining of the veracity of thousands of UA-cam videos, he perhaps only wrote a hero story about an Anglo-saxon against the Normand evil overlords?
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 long 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.
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.
@@LetThemTalkTV It's not exactly that. The seat of the Police Judiciaire (Criminal Police) in Paris, 36 Quai des Orfèvres was located in the former poultry market from 1880 to 2017. It's a legendary address that anyone familiar with police stories (like commissaire Maigret) will know by heart. And of course, who comes from the poultry market? Chicken. So it came from parisian argot and became more generalized. Originally it wasn't just exclusively chicken, but also other farm birds like ducks etc.
I really doubt the last idea of the name of the meat kept different from the animal just to hide the fact that it once was a living being. I know that many people like the idea, but to them I say: Why would we hide the fact that bread is in fact only wheat? (And we call it rye bread if not.) To me as a technician, meat is a type of bar stock. Not the final product, as you turn it into a meal first, but also not how we extract it from nature. In many cases, the bar stock has a different name than the raw material. Why overload the fact that it does so also for meat with some moralinic acid?
And more generally, considering that all animals are potential pets and it's cruel to eat them is an extremely recent idea. People nowadays may want to insist on the different words for that reason, but it's a recent development and not a historical explanation.
The disassociation between the meet and the animal names also happens in Spanish. Curiously it doesn’t happen in Portuguese witch is a very close language.
I think that the simplest explanation is that synonyms tend to arise naturally in languages (for various reasons, sometimes because of the influence of other languages like Norman in English, but sometimes it's just that words that used to have different meanings lose the distinction), but at some point the different words of the same meaning "try" to fill slightly different niches. It happens in all languages but not necessarily for the same things, which makes me think it's a rather solid hypothesis.
I was recently on a site that gave a name in Norwegian of a picture. In it, it translated the word "dyr" as deer. I queried this and suggested that this might mean animal. A Norwegian wrote back and said that I was right but it was also an archaic word for deer. It turns out, this was also the case throughout the Scandinavian languages. It suggests to me that in English, deer meant deer as well as wild animal from the beginning and that as time went on, the usage became more specific. Just a thought. Another thought is that deer meaning modern deer came to English from the Vikings, not as a natural outgrowth of English.
The Dutch, Frisian and German word for animal is also something similar (dier, dier, Tier) so it's likely that old English already had it before the vikings. I've always heard another theory : it changed because on the island, deer were the largest animals (however, bears where probably still present when the Anglo-Saxons arrived)
13:00 I think there´s a big problem with your theory, namely that people in Medieval England had no ethical issues with eating animals. And it´s not surprising why, given that these people knew things like famine, which we don´t have to experience. Meat consumption was on average lower (depending where you lived and your social class), but that wasn´t due to ethical issues. Also, the dissociation isn´t universal, it doesn´t exist for lamb, chicken, rabbit etc. French also has this dissociation for some meats, but not for others.
@@LetThemTalkTV I just did a little research. Check out 1:35 to 2:55; they use "cow" and "beef" almost interchangeably. This was a show produced in roughly 1960, so either the terms were interchangeable in 1960, or they were understood to be interchangeable in the era depicted (maybe 1875). ua-cam.com/video/y-eMTD__i-E/v-deo.html
That's really interesting, thanks, I would have used it in the video had I seen it earlier. I notice that the cowboy says "beeves" but the city boy says "cows". Was there a class distinction in the use of the terms?
@@LetThemTalkTV I really don't know. I'm guessing that the writers don't know a whole lot about life on cattle drives, and I wouldn't put it past them to throw in synonyms because they were taught that reusing a noun gets dull and repetitive.
In Russian, there's exactly one pair of words like that: a cow is корова (korova), and beef is говядина (govyadina). Ironically, the cow one is a loanword from some Celtic language, and the beef one is of native Slavic origin (which used to mean cattle; also, compare cow and govyado - they are cognates). One possible reason for that is that govyadina is govyado + -ina suffix; -ina means 'material it's made of,' and govyado was used as a measure word, like a head (200 head of cattle). So it had this technical/administrative implication, while a living animal was a korova. Maybe it went the same way for beef and cow. It works well with the culinary verson, too.
@@deutschermichel5807 Great question. First of all, I should've said 'most probably' because we're really talking about the Dark Ages of history and it's still hypotheses, although generally accepted ones. To me personally, the more sound version is that it was indirect borrowing via Germanic languages, namely Gothic - same as many Latin words came into Proto-Slavic (like wine, desk, Christ, czar, etc.) It's also assumed that Early Slavs might've had direct contact with Celts along the Western borders of modern Poland and Ukraine. For example, the Przeworsk culture is associated both with the Celtic La Tène and very early Slavs. There's a good chance that the early Slavic expansion was one of the reasons easternmost Celtic speakers perished. We don't know that much either about Continental Celts and even more so Early Slavs, but that's a believable story as far as I'm concerned. Other Celtic words that came into Proto-Slavic - or even Pre-Slavic - might've been krov (roof), bronya (armor), Dunaj (Danube), braga (moonshine), sluga (servant), etc. The list is controversial, obviously.
The conventional etymology may be chronologically inaccurate but it's clearly correct in its basic premise. The regularity of the split between Anglo-Norman meat words and Anglo-Saxon animal words, and especially the correlation with eating habits related to class and ethnicity, is not nothing. Rather, it fits into the general pattern of Anglo-Saxon words being lower register while their Anglo-Norman synonyms are higher register. Open any science textbook and you'll see a wealth of French-derived words, Latinate words and Greek words, but when you speak to your window cleaner you're probably using more Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. This kind of code switching is so universal and normal among native English speakers in Britain that's it's obviously good prima facie evidence for a class-based split. So while I'd agree that your historical examples refute the condensed time frame of the Scott hypothesis, I don't think you've disproved the meat of it.
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 knew much of the 'Saxon vs. Norman' stuff was conjured up by Scott, but hadn't realised this was part of it. A minor quibble about 'coney': the Middle English pronunciation may have been something like [kʌni], but those encountering the word for the first time might also like to know that the usual _modern_ pronunciation is [kǝʊni].
Why canʼt Anglos just write the words how theyʼre spoken istg? Why is your language mandatory all across the world when you canʼt even agrew how to speak it💀
In Brooklyn there’s an area called Coney Island and I was curious about your definition of the word Coney and upon looking it up on Wikipedia it referenced a possible origin of the name as an Irish word for rabbit, which the land seems to have had an abundance of. Possibly the Irish word came from the French word for Rabbit? It’s very vague.
@@jenniferbrien3408I imagine being an isolated land, an islands rabbit population would only be limited by the available food to feed them so their numbers could become very high.
I buy your theory about distancing the meal from the (often loved or revered) animal - and I'm not a vegetarian ;-) It's done in other languages that I speak with varying degrees of fluency (Danish, Swedish, German).
I mean, just think about it. Hey, I have pigs with me vs Hey, I have pork with me. I think that's enough to understand the need of two words. The two words existed and cohabited for a while. But then, quite naturally, each one filled its own niche in English. The same thing doesn't always happen, sometimes words of different origins stay synonyms, but I don't buy at all the idea that it's about distancing the meal from the animal: that's a very modern idea.
All but the first example from the 1390s and the recipe from 1330 though are from after 1500 though, and the recipe is written in English rather than French so perhaps it was written by a commoner rather than a member of the nobility, and the common people were more likely to use the Germanic term. Meanwhile the examples from 1500 onward are not from Middle English but modern English. Do we have more evidence the French term was commonly used to refer to the living animal during the Middle English period?
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.
Have fun explaining the etymology that has resulted in lamb -> hogget -> mutton? Does hogget derive from species identification? Or age? And consider that Welsh often refers to meat for eating as meat lamb (cig oen), or whatever. So I am not convinced by any table/farmyard separation ideas.
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.
The basic problem is how the English language aquires new words. Some are made up because the thing is new. A good example is Laser. It actually derives from the acronym Light Ampliphication........ Another wouldve Kodak. Some are borrowed as new speakers bring words with them. Pizza, Pasta, Gestalt, Bungee, Thug, Boogy, etc. And then there are the instances when English lurks in dark alleys and mugs innocent languages as the pass by. Often changing the pronunciation or spelling to uide the evidence.
Hey Gideon, good to have you back old chap ! Same goes to Human, you lose your name when you kick the bucket, innit r kid ? We need to bury the BODY and not Mr Smith 😉
This was really informative. Do you have a hypothesis of why the animals that kept Anglo-Saxon weren't likewise influenced by French? I feel like it might be tempting for people to say 'we call it 'Oxtail' because there isn't a history of aristocrats eating it.'
Well it's not a great example because oxtail was consumed by the french nobility, especially in jelly. And in fact the oxtail soup was brought to England by Huguenots.
both theories probably explain this phenomenon, how the words originated and how this divide came about though I don't believe the last theory holds much weight, I'd say it is more likely up selling tactics.
Your video is correct. It's common that misconceptions happen as a result of previous focus on one source. Where I am here in Cagayan de Oro City Mindanao Philippines we of course use the words applicable in Cebuano. Basically the meat and the animal is the same.
I'd like to see you discuss "boar" and "sow". Those terms are used to refer to male and female bears as well as pigs. Are there any other animals using those terms?
I believe that cavies go by boar and sow and their young are called pups. In similar fashion, rabbits go by buck and doe and their young are called kittens (almost always shortened to "kits").
But then why is the french dish not "Canard a l'orange" instead of "Duck a l'orange"? (Vegetarian also here, and I hope you've sent Tom Scott your video :) )
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.
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?
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
Yeah, it's a similar thing with death, IMO. People say "passed", "passed on", "departed" and so on for someone who died. I suspect this is a fairly modern phenomenon, given how due to modern medicine, transportation and city planning, people became increasingly disassociated with death. It's not an ever present danger looming over most people's lives, and most people also don't pass by a churchyard full of headstones on a daily basis.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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._
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.
Smoked salmon is sold as "lox" all over America. So the Anglo Saxon name "leax" did not did 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.
Note:
The discussed theory of Sir Walter Scot has not influenced *only* UA-cam 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.
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 UA-cam!
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
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
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.
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
Dyr (deer) still means any animal in Nordic language.
This also appears in "Life in the UK" book for passing the ILR test for UK settlement
Really! I didn't know.
The different words for the animal and the meat is much more widespread in European languages than the UA-camrs 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).
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
Cam on luv, show us yer rabbit eh, phwoar!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Words that became taboo (mostly words for animals) due to becoming used as vulgarities is a pretty fascinating subject. And the fact that it happened to such common animals is really bizarre. Also, the fact that this happened in so many languages.
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’ve got so much respect for you: many people won’t admit their wrongs but you do, in fact you happily joke about it!
Regarding the last question, I agree. I do think we like to distance the animal from the food #TeamVeggie
Unfortunately, I have a couple more skeletons in the closet. All will be revealed...I didn't know you were team veggie. No boeuf for you.
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.
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 UA-cam 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.
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.
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 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.
Even though I've come across 'beef' and 'mutton' to refer to the live animals (not uncommon in, for example, 18th century literature), I have still repeated this apocryphal story to students of mine somewhat unthinkingly. This really goes to show the power of a compelling story, regardless of its veracity. If it's any consolation to all of us who have repeated this myth: the existence of these pairs of words does still illustrate English's mixed Germanic and Romance heritage, even if we should take a little more care to get the facts right.
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" :)
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.
Very interesting. As a side note, in old French, conil also had sexual undertones. chasser au conil meant to actively pursue the favors of a lady.
~9:00 But we also have "poultry," derived from the French term and primarily if not exclusively used for the meat of birds in modern English.
And in Australia it seems no one know what mutton is, it's all lamb, no matter how old it is.
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
In Portuguese pig is porco Or suíno for meat or animal, beef is (carne,Meat ) (de,Of)(vaca,Cow) or carne de( bovino, Bovine )
I've wondered how salmon replaced the highly-conserved lox, and where it came from, but never looked into it.
Coney. Rhymes with honey, and money, and… bunny??!! (btw - "Conejo" in Spanish!)
Congratulations to this well made myth-busting video. And to being a vegetarian. In support of your hypothesis about humans being a bit unwilling to be reminded of the precise origin of their meat, I recall having delicious ”pollo d’arbro”, in Nicaragua in the 80’s. It was the meat from ubiquitous large lizards inhabiting the trees and roof tops. Beautiful animals.
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.
Interesting, thanks for the look-see. Over here in ze vaterland we call critters what they are, alive or dead or being chewed, "swine flesh" and "calf flesh" and all the rest. So it is tempting to search for some systemic reason why the English would separate them out in so many cases. However in the 1860s (US Civil War) the Union Army drove "beeves" with it in the field, for fresh meat. A book published as late as the 1880s referred to lice and such vermin as "deer". To this day a "porker" is a live pig. Those imply strongly that it is as you say, animal words were fluid until quite recently.
9:09 - I actually have seen and heard goat mean being called "chevon" - I grant you that it isn't very common.
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.
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!
I think it's two different words because of cleanliness. You don't want to think about dirt, stench and blood when you are eating.
Also they are completely different products. Aged meat ready to be cooked and eaten is something different from a living animal, or fresh meat that needs to be aged before being eaten.
I think this only applies to the double vocabulary of English. In my native language (German), we donʼt make a distinction between the animal and the meat. In fact, we donʼt even say “meat”; we say „Fleisch“ (flesh).
*e.g.:*
pig-Schwein
pork-Schweinefleisch
Rind-cow
beef-Rindfleisch
We certainly donʼt think about sweat and dirt when eating. But even if we did, it wouldnʼt take away the taste of the meat. Also, doesnʼt God literally command man to think about sweat and dirt when eating in Genesis 3:19?
Maybe English speakers have a posh attitude towards dirt and see it as something dirty. In German, “dirt” means „Erde“, literally meaning “earth”. As we call our planet the same word as the dirt on the ground, there is no reason to be disgusted at the thought of farm labour.
“Even ChatGPT”? You do know that what it _does_ is repeat rumours (or of course synthesise them if it hasn't heard them already)?
ChatGPT, at least the most recent version, is actually programmed to look on specific websites for source. If you ask an etymology question it will try to find the information on reputable websites.
So yes it will repeat rumors, but it has more chances to do that if the rumors are active in academic circles.
Very interesting. It seems to me what could be happening here is when we have two words for the same thing, over time those words often evolve related but separate meanings. In this case it took much longer than popular wisdom had previously assumed.
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.
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?
That was in common usage before WW2. Excuse AI, it is only a copy machine.
And dead cow was heard in the supermarket aisles 4 or 5 years ago.
Maybe sir Walter Scott didn't intend his play to be an undermining of the veracity of thousands of UA-cam videos, he perhaps only wrote a hero story about an Anglo-saxon against the Normand evil overlords?
Urchin was once the name of the hedgehog and is related to the French hérisson.
As for the duck, mallard comes from french.
I think I first saw that story in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which was written in the early 1800’s.
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 long 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.
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."
It also seems many claim veal comes from 'veau' in modern French (not written with L any more). Simplification probably, but still
The art of hunting in latin is known as venatoria (venatorious) too
Rabbit in German is "das Kaninchen"
Did you know that the French call the police " poulets " I believe it's a slang word.
Yes, I know. The French say that it's because a police station was built on a former chicken farm. I can't say if that's true.
@@LetThemTalkTVmaybe it was Sir Walter Scott 😂
@@LetThemTalkTV It's not exactly that. The seat of the Police Judiciaire (Criminal Police) in Paris, 36 Quai des Orfèvres was located in the former poultry market from 1880 to 2017. It's a legendary address that anyone familiar with police stories (like commissaire Maigret) will know by heart. And of course, who comes from the poultry market? Chicken.
So it came from parisian argot and became more generalized. Originally it wasn't just exclusively chicken, but also other farm birds like ducks etc.
I really doubt the last idea of the name of the meat kept different from the animal just to hide the fact that it once was a living being. I know that many people like the idea, but to them I say: Why would we hide the fact that bread is in fact only wheat? (And we call it rye bread if not.) To me as a technician, meat is a type of bar stock. Not the final product, as you turn it into a meal first, but also not how we extract it from nature. In many cases, the bar stock has a different name than the raw material. Why overload the fact that it does so also for meat with some moralinic acid?
And more generally, considering that all animals are potential pets and it's cruel to eat them is an extremely recent idea. People nowadays may want to insist on the different words for that reason, but it's a recent development and not a historical explanation.
The disassociation between the meet and the animal names also happens in Spanish. Curiously it doesn’t happen in Portuguese witch is a very close language.
I think that the simplest explanation is that synonyms tend to arise naturally in languages (for various reasons, sometimes because of the influence of other languages like Norman in English, but sometimes it's just that words that used to have different meanings lose the distinction), but at some point the different words of the same meaning "try" to fill slightly different niches.
It happens in all languages but not necessarily for the same things, which makes me think it's a rather solid hypothesis.
That topic was on my mind. I only recently learnt about it.
Not so long ago Horse meat was sold as Beef in UK supermarkets, However some countries do eat horse.
The Irish for "rabbit" is "coinín", pronounced "coh-nyeen".
I was recently on a site that gave a name in Norwegian of a picture. In it, it translated the word "dyr" as deer. I queried this and suggested that this might mean animal. A Norwegian wrote back and said that I was right but it was also an archaic word for deer. It turns out, this was also the case throughout the Scandinavian languages. It suggests to me that in English, deer meant deer as well as wild animal from the beginning and that as time went on, the usage became more specific. Just a thought. Another thought is that deer meaning modern deer came to English from the Vikings, not as a natural outgrowth of English.
The Dutch, Frisian and German word for animal is also something similar (dier, dier, Tier) so it's likely that old English already had it before the vikings.
I've always heard another theory : it changed because on the island, deer were the largest animals (however, bears where probably still present when the Anglo-Saxons arrived)
13:00 I think there´s a big problem with your theory, namely that people in Medieval England had no ethical issues with eating animals. And it´s not surprising why, given that these people knew things like famine, which we don´t have to experience. Meat consumption was on average lower (depending where you lived and your social class), but that wasn´t due to ethical issues.
Also, the dissociation isn´t universal, it doesn´t exist for lamb, chicken, rabbit etc.
French also has this dissociation for some meats, but not for others.
Hmmm, even watching reruns of the Western "Rawhide", they sometimes refer to their cattle as "beeves".
thanks, that's interesting. I didn't know that.
@@LetThemTalkTV I just did a little research. Check out 1:35 to 2:55; they use "cow" and "beef" almost interchangeably. This was a show produced in roughly 1960, so either the terms were interchangeable in 1960, or they were understood to be interchangeable in the era depicted (maybe 1875).
ua-cam.com/video/y-eMTD__i-E/v-deo.html
That's really interesting, thanks, I would have used it in the video had I seen it earlier. I notice that the cowboy says "beeves" but the city boy says "cows". Was there a class distinction in the use of the terms?
beeves are in the King James Bible (1611)
@@LetThemTalkTV I really don't know. I'm guessing that the writers don't know a whole lot about life on cattle drives, and I wouldn't put it past them to throw in synonyms because they were taught that reusing a noun gets dull and repetitive.
Konijn (pronounced almost like the french conain) is dutch for rabbit
In German we say Kaninchen
Tom Scott’s biggest mistake was that vape.
In Russian, there's exactly one pair of words like that: a cow is корова (korova), and beef is говядина (govyadina). Ironically, the cow one is a loanword from some Celtic language, and the beef one is of native Slavic origin (which used to mean cattle; also, compare cow and govyado - they are cognates).
One possible reason for that is that govyadina is govyado + -ina suffix; -ina means 'material it's made of,' and govyado was used as a measure word, like a head (200 head of cattle). So it had this technical/administrative implication, while a living animal was a korova. Maybe it went the same way for beef and cow. It works well with the culinary verson, too.
How did Russian adopt Celtic words? Did any Slav ever see a continental Celt?
@@deutschermichel5807 Great question. First of all, I should've said 'most probably' because we're really talking about the Dark Ages of history and it's still hypotheses, although generally accepted ones.
To me personally, the more sound version is that it was indirect borrowing via Germanic languages, namely Gothic - same as many Latin words came into Proto-Slavic (like wine, desk, Christ, czar, etc.)
It's also assumed that Early Slavs might've had direct contact with Celts along the Western borders of modern Poland and Ukraine. For example, the Przeworsk culture is associated both with the Celtic La Tène and very early Slavs. There's a good chance that the early Slavic expansion was one of the reasons easternmost Celtic speakers perished. We don't know that much either about Continental Celts and even more so Early Slavs, but that's a believable story as far as I'm concerned.
Other Celtic words that came into Proto-Slavic - or even Pre-Slavic - might've been krov (roof), bronya (armor), Dunaj (Danube), braga (moonshine), sluga (servant), etc. The list is controversial, obviously.
Learned this from you and now have unlearned it from you
My humblest apologies. I'm trying to make amends.
In German We put -fleisch after the animal name: Schweinefleisch, Rindfleisch, Lammfleisch.
Normans brought rabbits to Ireland too and the Irish for rabbit is "coinín" so obviously same source as "coney" but still persists
The conventional etymology may be chronologically inaccurate but it's clearly correct in its basic premise. The regularity of the split between Anglo-Norman meat words and Anglo-Saxon animal words, and especially the correlation with eating habits related to class and ethnicity, is not nothing. Rather, it fits into the general pattern of Anglo-Saxon words being lower register while their Anglo-Norman synonyms are higher register. Open any science textbook and you'll see a wealth of French-derived words, Latinate words and Greek words, but when you speak to your window cleaner you're probably using more Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. This kind of code switching is so universal and normal among native English speakers in Britain that's it's obviously good prima facie evidence for a class-based split. So while I'd agree that your historical examples refute the condensed time frame of the Scott hypothesis, I don't think you've disproved the meat of it.
I'm always suspicious of these kind of stories because normally they come up not to be true.
Some are true but you have to be suspicious.
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 knew much of the 'Saxon vs. Norman' stuff was conjured up by Scott, but hadn't realised this was part of it. A minor quibble about 'coney': the Middle English pronunciation may have been something like [kʌni], but those encountering the word for the first time might also like to know that the usual _modern_ pronunciation is [kǝʊni].
Why canʼt Anglos just write the words how theyʼre spoken istg? Why is your language mandatory all across the world when you canʼt even agrew how to speak it💀
In Brooklyn there’s an area called Coney Island and I was curious about your definition of the word Coney and upon looking it up on Wikipedia it referenced a possible origin of the name as an Irish word for rabbit, which the land seems to have had an abundance of. Possibly the Irish word came from the French word for Rabbit? It’s very vague.
There are quite a few Coney Islands in Ireland, an island being a useful place to keep a rabbit warren
@@jenniferbrien3408I imagine being an isolated land, an islands rabbit population would only be limited by the available food to feed them so their numbers could become very high.
I buy your theory about distancing the meal from the (often loved or revered) animal - and I'm not a vegetarian ;-) It's done in other languages that I speak with varying degrees of fluency (Danish, Swedish, German).
Nein, im Deutschen wird nicht zwischen dem Tier und dem Fleisch unterschieden.
Schwein - Schweinefleisch
Rind - Rindfleisch
I mean, just think about it.
Hey, I have pigs with me vs Hey, I have pork with me.
I think that's enough to understand the need of two words. The two words existed and cohabited for a while. But then, quite naturally, each one filled its own niche in English. The same thing doesn't always happen, sometimes words of different origins stay synonyms, but I don't buy at all the idea that it's about distancing the meal from the animal: that's a very modern idea.
All but the first example from the 1390s and the recipe from 1330 though are from after 1500 though, and the recipe is written in English rather than French so perhaps it was written by a commoner rather than a member of the nobility, and the common people were more likely to use the Germanic term. Meanwhile the examples from 1500 onward are not from Middle English but modern English. Do we have more evidence the French term was commonly used to refer to the living animal during the Middle English period?
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.
Can't believe a rabbit didn't come across on a ship before, and then multiplied (Ah, we need 2 in one location) like crazy!
Have fun explaining the etymology that has resulted in lamb -> hogget -> mutton?
Does hogget derive from species identification? Or age?
And consider that Welsh often refers to meat for eating as meat lamb (cig oen), or whatever. So I am not convinced by any table/farmyard separation ideas.
This is outstanding - a dose of reality.
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.
The basic problem is how the English language aquires new words. Some are made up because the thing is new. A good example is Laser. It actually derives from the acronym Light Ampliphication........ Another wouldve Kodak.
Some are borrowed as new speakers bring words with them. Pizza, Pasta, Gestalt, Bungee, Thug, Boogy, etc. And then there are the instances when English lurks in dark alleys and mugs innocent languages as the pass by. Often changing the pronunciation or spelling to uide the evidence.
Hey Gideon, good to have you back old chap !
Same goes to Human, you lose your name when you kick the bucket, innit r kid ?
We need to bury the BODY and not Mr Smith 😉
This was really informative.
Do you have a hypothesis of why the animals that kept Anglo-Saxon weren't likewise influenced by French?
I feel like it might be tempting for people to say 'we call it 'Oxtail' because there isn't a history of aristocrats eating it.'
Well it's not a great example because oxtail was consumed by the french nobility, especially in jelly. And in fact the oxtail soup was brought to England by Huguenots.
both theories probably explain this phenomenon, how the words originated and how this divide came about though I don't believe the last theory holds much weight, I'd say it is more likely up selling tactics.
Your video is correct. It's common that misconceptions happen as a result of previous focus on one source. Where I am here in Cagayan de Oro City Mindanao Philippines we of course use the words applicable in Cebuano. Basically the meat and the animal is the same.
I'd like to see you discuss "boar" and "sow". Those terms are used to refer to male and female bears as well as pigs. Are there any other animals using those terms?
I believe that cavies go by boar and sow and their young are called pups. In similar fashion, rabbits go by buck and doe and their young are called kittens (almost always shortened to "kits").
Thank you for bringing us the truth.
I shall pass this new found knowledge on to my South American ESL students.
👍😎
But then why is the french dish not "Canard a l'orange" instead of "Duck a l'orange"? (Vegetarian also here, and I hope you've sent Tom Scott your video :) )
Very well done!