Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

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"Stealing words"

That's a bit harsh. We borrow words (or loan them). We certainly don't steal them - you are welcome to take them back at any time.

My favourite borrow word conundrum is "biftek". That is a loan word from French by quite a few languages (not English) - bifteck. Now, bifteck is derived from "beef steak" (English)

English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh via the Norse invasion in 1066. Here we have a cow and beef for the flesh. Cow is a Saxon word and beef is a French word. We also have sheep (Saxon) and mutton (French) and a few others (eg chicken and pullet, pig and pork).

So we have biftek -> bifteck -> beef steak. However beef is a French word (boeuf).

I gather that during a siege of Paris by British troops back in the day, the Parisians noticed that the rostbifs, roasted their beef over barbies. The locals usually boiled their beef, which was a heinous crime. My mother in law also managed to remove all flavour from beef, despite using a sanctioned method of cooking.

Thankfully the Parisians noted that frying or roasting beef was the best way to do the job and also invented "medium", "rare" and "blue". The Brits basically charcoaled their beef.

Despite being British, I like my steak blue.

>"Stealing words" That's a bit harsh. We borrow words (or loan them). We certainly don't steal them

Exactly: you can't "steal" a word, because when Language B borrows a word from Language A, Language A still has that word.

It's just like copying digital data: if I download a copy of Movie A, the studio hasn't lost a copy of it, so it's not "stolen".

> English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh via the Norse invasion in 1066. Here we have a cow and beef for the flesh.

Is it that odd? I've never seen vache on a menu in France. Keema in Hindi (and probably other indic languages) is non-descript mince, it wouldn't be beef in India of course, typically lamb or goat. Carne in many romance languages but in particular Spanish chili con carne just means 'meat'. I assume Spaniards have a different word for cows (or whatever they like in their chili), as well as probably an equivalent for beef.

Speaking of oddities, Korean gogi (고기) means either "meat" (beef, pork, chicken, etc.) or "fish" the animal, but not the fish on your dish (which is saengseon 생선), because otherwise it would be too confusing.

> English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh via the Norse invasion in 1066.

It's not _that_ unusual to have different words for the meat and the animal. The slightly odd thing about English is that the word for the animal comes from Germanic roots and the word for the meat comes from the French root.

Weirdly enough, Japanese sort of has the same situation: the word for "cow": 牛 (pronounced "ushi") and the word for "beef": 牛肉 (pronounced "gyuuniku") being a loan word from Chinese.

> English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh

How odd is this? I noticed something odd in Mandarin:

cow: niu 牛

beef: niu rou 牛肉

sheep: yang 羊

mutton: yang rou 羊肉

pig: zhu 猪

pork: rou 肉 [it's possible to specify 猪肉, but not necessary]

deer: lu 鹿

venison: lu rou 鹿肉

And some where the distinction doesn't exist in English:

chicken (animal): ji 鸡

chicken (food): ji rou 鸡肉 [English pullet refers to the animal, not the meat]

goat (animal): yang 羊

goat (food): yang rou 羊肉

But there's also this one:

jellyfish (animal): shuimu 水母

jellyfish (food): haizhe 海蜇

I think you failed to realize that 肉 just means "meat", in the most general sense possible. Under no circumstance is the character by itself ever directly denotes pork. So there's really nothing odd about saying "chicken meat" or "cow meat" when you want to specifically specify the flesh of the animal for consumption.

> I think you failed to realize that 肉 just means "meat", in the most general sense possible.

Yes, I'm aware of that. (It isn't restricted to meat; it will also, much like the English word "flesh", refer to the flesh of fruit.)

> Under no circumstance is the character by itself ever directly denotes pork.

But this is just false. The character by itself directly denotes pork. It's not an unusual use.

The constructions with 肉 are not being given as examples of using a different word for the animal and the food. They all use the same word.

The example was the one at the end of the list, 水母 vs 海蜇.

> Norse invasion in 1066

Is that a common way of describing the Norman invasion?

No. The Normans had been in Normandy for a long time and were quite distinct from the Norse. The Normans had been there for 150 years before they invaded South East England at pretty much the same time that Harald Hardrade was trying to invade the North East. The latter were Norse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_activity_in_the_British...

Harold was a Saxon king and I think you got former and latter reversed.

I very deliberately used the word Norse instead of Norman. 150 years is sod all time for "cultural" change, 1000 odd years ago. Nowadays we have all this jingoistic, nationalistic bollocks going on. The articles on HN reflect this:

"British scientists discover their own arses", "Russian scientists forget humanitarianism", "Chinese scientologists discover Pi three million years ago"

Norman is a modern word and so is norse here, and both are English terms and both mean northman - ie bloke (or bird - let's not be sexist) from the "north"

Bear in mind that travelling by boat is far easier than land, when the Fosse Way hasn't been built, let alone the A38 or M5.

If you want to get to grips with the olden times, you have to lose silly modern notions of well ... everything.

>> Harold was a Saxon king and I think you got former and latter reversed

Harold Godwinson was a saxon. He's talking about Harald Hadrada, a viking who invaded the North of England just before William The Bastard invaded from the South.

Sounds also eerily similar to spanish's bistec btw

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