What happened to the n in restaurateur?
ciachef.edu
ciachef.edu
Similar in Google trends, but
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
Much smaller difference, when limited to the USA.
> BTW, the feminine version of a restaurateur was “restauratrice.”
That makes perfect sense, since the feminine agentive suffix in Latin is -rix. But I thought the feminine agentive ending in French was -euse! Where did we get "masseuse"?
Wiktionary suggests that -euse is an alternate equivalent of -rice, derived from Latin -osus (which has no agentive meaning at all; it means "full of [whatever]", and transformed into a French agentive suffix by people who felt that -eur and -euse must be related because they sound so similar.
Most verbs have a passive participial form that includes the -t-, but in some it's been swallowed by an S. The only example that comes to mind is missus [sent], the passive participle of mittere [send]. The modern French verb is apparently mettre. I guess if the agent nouns are formed from that root, they should be metteur and mettrice? But if they descend from Latin, the masculine form might not use -tt-.
I feel pretty safe in saying that "sender" would be missor in Latin - it's an attested (though "very rare") word - but I have no instinct for what the feminine form would be. Missrix just doesn't feel right.
You wish. I sure couldn't send my missus away at the drop of a hat.
___
ETA:
> Missrix just doesn't feel right.
I'm guessing they'd just (re?)insert the 't': "Misstrix" feels quite pronouncable.
I've heard at various times in my life the various feminine endings applied to same profession - people playing around with what sounds good or a generational thing. -esse -ice -enne -euse
There's also the debate in gendered languages over whether one should never use feminine endings on professions, and keep them generic, or always use them for all professions for consistency, avoiding suggesting certain professions are male vs female, while ensuring women are visible in professions where they used to be rarer.
This is a somewhat different kind of thing. In English, there are plenty of professions with a gendered suffix rather like this. Waiter / waitress; actor / actress; steward / stewardess.
In general, the -ess cannot be used for a word that doesn't already exist; the feminist prescription for a female doctor is "lady doctor", not "doctress". You might also note that the masculine versions of those three examples have three different "suffixes".
But the agentive suffix is always -er, whether the agent is male or female. Professions are conceptually different, and better modeled as opaque words than as stem+suffix combinations.
Being male I hesitate to speak for feminists, but I’m fairly sure at least 2nd wave ones would prefer just “doctor” and would frown on “lady” as an unnecessary qualifier.
WTF is that? And more importantly, can I get an armagnaqueur to keep me topped up?
Let's be a little cheeky and invent analogues. Try for example "color".
person that does coloring - colorer
thing that does coloring - colorant
Person that does adultering: adulterer Thing that does adultering: adulterant
Even Miriam Webster has a note that Americans mistakenly use it for main course (completely incorrectly) because French sounds fancier.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:te...
Including entrée, incidentally, which gave us the entrée and the entry.
Even in France, in the context of elaborate multiple course meals, the entrée eventually stopped being the very first thing that was served. Soup started to take that spot, and gave us what we now call the appetizer, which used to be chiefly soup or salad but now could be almost anything.
For those elaborate meals, the entrée was just the first course of the multiple courses that were the "main" dish.
Separate main courses have largely fallen out of fashion, and they collapsed into one plate with a serving of each. This is still the entrée in the US and Canada, and that makes perfect sense, given the history.
So no, it wasn't just that it sounded fancier.
That meaning is also accepted by the French Academy nowadays:
Fig. En parlant d’une période de temps, d’un processus. Commencement, début. À l’entrée de l’hiver. Dès l’entrée du repas. Par métonymie. Mets qui vient après les hors-d’œuvre et précède le plat principal. Une entrée chaude, froide. Servir un vol-au-vent, un soufflé en entrée. Par extension. Plat principal. Un repas composé d’un hors-d’œuvre, une entrée et un dessert.
>>>> Par extension. Plat principal. Un repas composé d’un hors-d’œuvre, une entrée et un dessert.
"By extension. Main dish. A meal consisting of an appetizer, an entrée and a dessert."
There the "entrée" is clearly the "main dish".
TL;DR: Apparently only traiteurs were permitted to sell meals. Restaurants were marketed as a kind of (I guess) upscale health service, originally only selling fancy broths. One of the early restaurateurs is documented as using the advertisement, "Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis, & ego restaurabo vos" ("Come to me, all of you whose stomachs are in distress, and I will restore you", an allusion to Matthew 11:28, "Come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.")
the question is, is the treatment covered by insurance?
But language evolves to follow common use, and "restauranteur" is also correct:
Or at least not completely extinct in South India. Some of my favorite childhood memories are from these messes (short for mess hall, I assume). You go there, pay what they ask, eat what they serve.
MTR, Brindavan on MG Road (though that's long gone), Iyer Mess in Malleshwaram.
What they lack in choice they usually make up for in taste.
You're right that they have a more traditional ambience and newer restaurants offer more choice, but they are definitely thriving in the parts of Bangalore that I grew up in.
I’m guessing the french use the same words. And maybe some english speaking countries as well? Given how pervasive french is around restaurants.
- adjective: (of a restaurant meal) having unlimited choices with a separate price for each item
- noun: a menu having individual dishes listed with separate prices
- adverb: by ordering items listed individually on a menu
I suspect that an establishment whose main purpose is selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.
It's not; every city has always had them. Food is actually far more important than alcohol is.
Also, a business that sells meals and also sells lodging or coffee is definitely still a restaurant.
The main difference a restaurant brings is the addition of a seating / dining space. I strongly doubt that extra space for patrons to eat is a recent innovation.
I don't think that's correct: They've excavated fast-food joints from under the ashes of Pompeii. There's nothing to say a business like that needs to be a side hustle of anything else.
I don't know why the thankfully was needed. It looks like a pretty word to me.
Here are words of this kind, like "applicant"/"applicator":
officiant inhalant applicant aspirant fumigant coagulant communicant contaminant lubricant litigant participant refrigerant resonant radiant celebrant defoliant desiccant discriminant vibrant
This list was built with:
grep -E "^($(grep -E 'ator$' wordlist_en.txt | perl -pe 's/ator\n/ant|/'))\$" wordlist_en.txt
aspell -d en dump master | aspell -l en expand | perl -pe 's/\s/\n/g;' > wordlist_en.txtI’d have incorrectly spelled it with the N when speaking English. When speaking French, the word restaurateur, in my experience, has generally referred to someone who restores things like artworks or buildings. When referring to someone who owns a restaurant, we’d have *always* said propriétaire.
Personally this is the first definition that come to my mind when seeing the word restaurateur, before artwork/building restaurateurs.
That's the whole story: people who don't know French (or any foreign language, likely) cannot spell a French word.
On macos: Option + q for œ
... and then, in my Firefox configuration, unexpectedly navigates me to HN's /show page.
FWIW, Option + O yields: Ø ... and then performs the same navigation.
Press Opt-o, then let go of opt. Then select the œ, which happens to be option 6.
So. <compose>oe = œ
I usually bind capslock to the compose key in Linux (and Windows with Wincompose). Hacker's Keyboard has a dedicated button.