My understanding is that the difference in terms goes back to the Norman invasion, which is when a ton of French-based terms for things were carried over.
The peasants referred to everything as the name of the animal but the French nobles referred to it as porc, boeuf, etc. This is also where we got the words for venison, mutton, veal, poultry, and also apparently pheasant
Buffalo in english is a weird word, because it’s an animal, a city and an action, which is why the phrase “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo” is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard, but completely correct english.
If you don’t mind my asking, which language is yours?
It’s an interesting question to ponder which different languages ended up with distinction words for the meat vs the living animal, and maybe what that says about the culture.
The distinction is not a feature of French, from what I understand, and English ending up with this distinction seems to have been entirely accidental.
From what I can work out, yep it seems that way. Pork and beef were too expensive for the peasants so they just referred to them as the animals they were raising, but chickens were actually on their menu so we ended up keeping the animal words for it. We still got the word for pullet (young hen) though.
I just read a theory that poisson, french for fish, didn’t come over because it sounded too much like poison, but who knows if that’s true lol.
To add to this, the rich (i.e., French-speaking) consumed the most butchered meat, by far. So, it came to be that butchered meat for sale would be labeled in French, while the live animals, which were tended by (English-speaking) peasents retained their English names.
Piggybacking off of this, “venison” comes from a Latin word meaning “to hunt” and was originally used as more of a catch-all term for game meats. You might have deer venison, boar venison, rabbit venison, etc. Over time it came to mostly be used to refer to deer
one of my english teachers in highschool was actually ESL, and from Croatia. She spoke like seven or eight languages, though. It was funny, because occasionally she’d just slip into whatever random language.
She also liked to swear in french. it was truly hair raising. Incidentally, she also refused to use the ‘standard’ books reading. She’d probably get banned in half the country these days, but she genuinely was probably the best English teacher I’ve had. also the best french teacher ;)
As a bilingual, switching into other languages by accident often sounds insane, like you're just talking and then "Oh shit, that was the wrong language"
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I ever made a huge deal over it. there were definitely jerks that did though. (and also trolled her to the point of swearing in other languages… I felt bad about that. Especially looking back because I don’t think school admin had her back with those kids.)
There are some words I can’t remember in my native language as quickly and have an easier time with not using because of that. It isn’t an issue when I speak Spanish for those words
It gets even weirder. As a New Zealander, we would never say hogget for meat for the consumer (unless you went to a 'proper butcher), Farmers/Butchers will call 1-2 y/o sheep hoggets though.
But as for consumers, might depend on generation or whereabouts you're from. I have memories of my mother getting angry "this isn't lamb it's hogget" when she tasted it.
lamb is the young animal. Sheep raised for meat don’t live long enough to not be lamb, though. old animals tend to produce tougher meat. (as apposed to sheep raised for wool production.)
It’s because of the Norman conquest of England. Basically, the ruling nobility spoke French and the lower classes spoke English. The peasants who were in charge of livestock spoke English so pig, cow, and chicken stuck around. But it was mostly the upper classes who ate the meats so they used French words at the dinner table (beef from boeuf, pork from porc, poultry from poulet, etc.).
Because of the Norman invasion. 1066 and all that. (edit: specifically, after a time the peasants spoke English and looked after the animals, the nobility spoke french and named the food, so we got the English words for the animals and the French words for most of the farm animals were used for the food made from them)
The French eating it called it beef, the English raising it called it cow. The french didn’t call it roast cow because they were eating it as food, thus beef.
I’m also confused as to why English-speaking people in general, at least in the U.S. and Britain, are fine with eating sheep but not goat. Goat is one of those exotic meats the foreigners eat for some reason. I’ve never even had the opportunity to try goat. Could it be all that different?
Goat is a bit of an acquired taste. That’s why it’s usually heavily spiced and stewed or slow cooked. And it’s not like people eat a ton of mutton, either.
Coming to think about it, really don’t know why lamb is not common here. Maybe it is some availability issue… I really don’t have much idea about this but was wondering lamb/sheep have any problems surviving hot weather.
Very good question. I’m actually often not sure what I’m eating. Have to remember that pork is pig, and beef is cow. For some reason I never thought about it even.
As I understand it, after the norman invasion in 1066, generally the Saxon (Germanic speaking) people reared the animals so the names for the animals come from the German language, but the norman (French speaking) people eat the animals so the names for the meat generally derive from the French language.
You generally never eat cow, because cows produce milk. When you eat beef, it is usually a steer.
Sometimes English uses culinary names - pork for pig, calamari for squid, etc. The explanation for each is likely to be distinct, but e.g. for pork, that’s from Latin for pig (porcus) and for some arbitrary reason it stuck around. The answer is probably always going to be some variant on “it’s arbitrary”, though.
calamari is just squid in Greek, maybe English people learned about cooking squid from Greece since there’s so many of them and the word for it just stuck
c. 1300, “an ox, bull, or cow,” also the flesh of one when killed, used as food, from Old French buef “ox; beef; ox hide” (11c., Modern French boeuf), from Latin bovem (nominative bos, genitive bovis) “ox, cow,” from PIE root *gwou- “ox, bull, cow.” The original plural in the animal sense was beeves
There’s nothing arbitrary about it. The Norman invasion meant the English ruling class, and therefor the ones introducing culinary terms, spoke French. Peasants spoke English, which was far more Germanic at the time. So the peasants breeding animals and whos names for the live animal stuck, used the words pig and cow, while those creating what few recipes we do have were using French boeuf and porc
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