Hi.
Good morning.
How are you?
I'm excellent.
Thanks for coming.
Today, I want to talk to you for five minutes about why English has a different word for
the animal than it does for the meat.
Here we go.
Not sure if I can finish this in five minutes, but let's try.
OK, most countries, they have the same word for the animal as they do for the meat.
For example, cow, the meat word is cow meat.
Pig - the meat word is pig meat.
Something like that.
But, in English, of course, we don't.
We have two different words.
Cow - the meat is beef.
Pig - the meat is pork.
Sheep - the meat is mutton.
Calf, which is a young cow, - the meat is veal.
Deer - the meat is venison, and chicken - the meat is poultry.
Why is that, well, basically, there's a simple reason.
In 1066, William the Conqueror came from Normandy, part of France, and he basically conquered
England, as it was.
Don't think of the U.K. now.
England was much smaller back then.
He conquered England.
At the time, people spoke Old English.
When William the Conqueror came, he only spoke French of course.
He brought French with him.
However, he didn't impose French on the people.
He imposed French on the government, the educated, and the wealthy.
So, basically, government and wealthy people, they spoke French.
Regular people, they still spoke Old English.
Now, if you think about meat.
Think about beef and cows for example.
Who eats the meat?
Well, it's the rich people, the wealthy people.
Who grows the meat?
It's the poor people, the farmers.
So, because the farmers grow the animal, they use the old English word for it, which is
cow, and because the French people ... or the French speaking upperclass eat the meat,
they used the French word for the meat.
And, of course, in French cow is boeuf.
So, boeuf became beef.
In French pig is porc, sheep is mouton, calf is veal, chicken is poulet, poultry.
Deer is a little bit different.
Deer comes from the Latin word veneer, which mean ...
er, sorry, venor, which means to hunt.
So, basically, anything you hunt is venison, but, because deer was the most hunted animal,
venison stuck to that.
So, that's why we have a different word for the animal and for the meat, because the poor
people grew the animal speaking English, the rich people ate the animal speaking French.
OK?
After 1066, for about three hundred years, the British government ... the English Government
was ... was a French speaking government.
However, after that, French started to fade away.
If you think of most colonies these days, back in the 1800s, France and England colonized
large parts of the world.
A terrible part of our history, I know.
No time to talk about that now.
And, generally, we impose our language on those people.
Many people in Africa speak English or French because of our colonization.
And why is that?
Well, that's because we basically control the government.
We also control the schools and the systems of education, and we force those people to
learn our language.
However, when the French colonized England, there were no schools.
There was no system of education.
The only people you could educate were the wealthy people,
and they ended up speaking French.
The poor people you could not educate
and there was no way to enforce French upon these people.
That's why they continued speaking English.
However, of course, you cannot have one group of people speaking French and one group of
people speaking English.
There must be some overlay.
At some point, these two languages must come together, and, if you look at English today,
we do ... we have a lot of French loanwords.
Now, many people, many of my students, they complain about learning English.
They say, "there are too many words.
There are too many words to learn.
Every week they have word tests.
We have to learn more and more words."
Yes, there are many words, but part of the reason for that is because of the history
of England.
Now, when French and English started to meld, started to mix, in ... from 1066 onwards,
over the next few hundred years, we took on some of the French words, but we didn't lose
our English words.
So, now we have two words that are almost indistinguishable,
that come from different roots.
For example, freedom / liberty.
What do they mean?
They mean almost the same thing.
The nuance is slightly different, but they mean almost the same thing.
Freedom comes from Anglo-Saxon, old English, liberty comes from the French, of course.
We have many words like this.
Thinking / pensive.
Thinking comes from Old English, pensive comes from French.
Kingly / royal.
Kingly comes from Old English king, royal, royale comes from French.
Brotherly / fraternal.
Brotherly comes from Old English, fraternal comes from French.
Weapon / arm.
Weapon comes from Old English, arm comes from French.
So, we have many words like this that almost have the same meaning, the nuance is slightly
different, but they almost have the same meaning and that's because one has a root in Old English
and one has a root in old French.
After about the 1300s, French and English, they start to come together a little bit.
English overtakes the French but evolves into what we call Middle English.
And, for the next three hundred years or so, English is Middle English and stays the same.
Then, of course, we move into the great vowel shift, which comes on a little bit later.
So, if I was ...aaargh ... So, if I was to go back a thousand years in my own country,
I probably couldn't talk to people.
Not probably, I definitely couldn't talk to people.
It's almost like a completely different language.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
Sorry, I went over my five minutes there.
If you want to read the script while you listen to this, click on the link in the description
down here.
You can find the script for this, you can find some questions,
and you can find sample answers.
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Thank you.
See you next time.
Goodbye.
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