Thursday, October 7, 2010

To Beef or not to Beef?

I think I’m going to do something slightly less formal for my post than has been done previously.

It seems to me that one of the main problems that we’ve had so far in talking about the ways that animals are classified or identified is the vocabulary we use. We struggle to find ways to express exactly what we mean. Often we carry over connotative meaning without intending to. The English language still carries with it some built-in distinctions that are left over from Medieval ways of talking about animals.

Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, most people in England were speaking a variation of either Old English or Old Norse. The OE word for cow is . Not much of a surprise there. Cow is one of those words that has come down to us through the Indo-Germanic roots of our language and hasn’t changed much in the last 2,000 years. Pigga is another word that probably looks pretty familiar, along with cicen (chicken), scéap (sheep), and déor (deer). All of these words are Germanic in origin, and the main difference between the way they are now and the way they were 1,000 years ago is the spelling. All of them, with the exception of deer, refer to domesticated animals, and they all played an integral role in the agricultural societies of northern Europe during the Middle Ages.
In 1066 William the Conqueror sailed across the English Channel and attacked the exposed flank of King Harold II of England. His flank was exposed because he was already busy fighting King Harold Hadrada of Norway who had launched his own (completely separate) invasion a month earlier. Within five years William had complete control of the country, at which point he began the official Frenchifying of England.

While most scholarly work continued to be done in Latin regardless of who was in charge, the language of business and the court became Anglo-Norman French rather than Old English. The long term affect of this was that French started to bleed into variations of Old English spoken by the common people. French changed our grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Eventually Norman culture was subsumed by English culture, and within a few hundred years the Norman nobility were having their kids sent to France in order to learn French so they could speak it at court.

You might be thinking, “What does all this have to do with cows and chickens?” Well, I’ll tell you. The Old French word for cow was boef from the Latin bovem. This is where we get our modern word beef. The Anglo-Norman word for chicken was pulteri, the source of our word poultry. Anglo-Norman for sheep was mutun, which became mutton. Porc became pork, from the Anglo-Norman for pig, and venison from veneysun, the Anglo-Norman word for deer. Beginning to see a pattern?

The words that we still use today to describe a large number of domesticated animals come from the Germanic roots of English. On the other hand, the words we use to describe the food that we make those animals into are almost all Anglo-Norman French in origin. The Norman aristocracy, being the ones with the money, were the ones actually talking about food. Courtly culture involved feasting, so the ordering of food, the inventing of new recipes and the discussing of them were all done in French. At the same time, the Anglo-Norman French spoken by the aristocracy had more prestige attached to it than the Old English of the peasants. For this reason French was seen as being more cultured than English. English preserved these French terms as the preferred way of talking about food and what we eat. The agricultural vernacular continued to be English, regardless of what was spoken at court or used in official record keeping.

Those distinctions persist in our language to this day whether we know it or not. We continue to refer to our food in a more delicate manner than the livestock from which they are taken. We eat ham, bacon, and pork (all French), not pig (English). We eat beef, not cow. Now, this isn’t meant to be some kind of rant against the French, or an attempt to convince everyone to embrace peasant values and start eating “green eggs and pig.” Nor is this an attempt to convince you to make your hamburgers from ground cow instead of ground beef. My point is simply that it can be difficult to discuss anything, especially something as universally involved in our lives as animals, without carrying in to the discussion all kinds of other meanings and connotations.

For sources I mostly used the Oxford English Dictionary Online to refresh my memory, as well as my copy of Inventing English by Seth Lerer, with occasional peeks at Wikipedia for context.



  1. I'd never thought about that (also, definitely a fan of the more informal style blog, if that counts for anything). Wonder how many people would be vegan (or at least vegetarian) if we did have "green eggs and pig".

    Do you think the authors we're reading (especially the early ones) still thought of the animal words they were using as food+living thing? Or had the use of French to signify food already become significantly entrenched enough that everyone understood the animals being discussed were strictly about the living thing and not what it became at the end of its life?

    It does provide an interesting historical background on the instrumental view of Albertus!


  2. A salutary reminder of how important language is for our understanding of animals; Walter Scott would be very pleased (see Ivanhoe, chapter 1, the conversation between Wamba and Gurth)! Given that Albertus was writing in Latin about a text (Aristotle's De animalibus) that had been translated from Arabic and Greek, in a tradition that was extremely conscious of the power of words, it would be interesting to see how far this distinction between animals as food and animals as living creatures went. According to Isidore, of course, Adam named all of the animals not in Latin or Greek "or in any of the languages of foreign nations, but in that language which, before the Flood, was the language of all peoples, which is called Hebrew." So would we understand animals better if we named them in Adam's language?


  3. I had the same question while reading Isidore: why does he avoid the Hebrew words? Perhaps using Adam's language would not offer anything to Isidore's examination of etymologies because the Hebrew word, as the original name bestowed by Adam, would capture the essence of the object(in this case, the animal) being named. Therefore, providing the Hebrew term would create a vacuum in Isidore's account as the Hebrew name would be all telling, leaving the Hebrew terminology to only offer a list. Then again, I may be romanticizing the whole concept of etymology.