For non-swearing example, "beef" "poultry" "pork" refer to meats because the French nobility would eat the meat but not work with the animals. Beouf really is just french for cow. We inherited the English underclass terms for the animals though: cow, chicken, and the like...
I'll restate this more accurately since I've made this comparison elsewhere and have some background in history and the French and German languages:
"beef" "poultry" "pork" refer to meats because the French nobility would eat the meat but not work with the animals:
French "boeuf" -> English "beef"
French "poulet" ~> English "poultry"
French "poulet" -> English "pullet"
French "porc" -> English "pork"
Beouf really is just french for cow:
No. French "boeuf" (and "vache") !-> English "cow"
We inherited the English underclass terms for the animals though: cow, chicken, and the like...
The reason all of this happened is because the Normans conquered the Angles and Saxons (Germanic, and really better described as Anglo-Celts) in Angle-land -> England. The Normans were from Normandy in France, and spoke French even though they were effectively assimilated Vikings. The Anglo-Celts in England spoke Old English, which became Middle English once it absorbed words from the language of their conquerors. English and French share a very large number of words, known as cognates, for exactly this reason. As you point out, English words for meat came from French while the words for the animals that meat came from were Germanic:
German "schwein" -> English "swine"
German "kuh" -> English "cow"
German "küken" -> English "chicken"
Related words have older etymologies from proto-Indo-European, like:
English "cock", French "coq", German "kük" |
