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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Though not related specifically to pronunciation, a fun fact is that a lot of English words for meat and livestock are borrowed from Anglo-Saxon and French words respectively. This apparently comes from the Norman conquest: the French nobility dealt more with prepared meat while Anglo-Saxon peasants dealt more with livestock.

"Beef" comes from Old French "boef" (meaning ox), while "cow" comes from Old English "cu."

Same goes for sheep/mutton, pork/pig, and poultry/chicken.

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As a rule of thumb, English is choke-full of Anglo-Saxon/French redundancies that rarely come to light due to a register separation. Anglo-Saxon etymons tend to the lower registers of language, French (along with Latin, although the line between a word that came from French or straight from Latin can be very blurred, and Greek) ones to the higher.

chock ;-)

On this thread that gets a upvote!

Shouldn't that be a nupvote? ;-]

Which is the eggcorn? "Chock" seems more idiomatic, but now that I think about it, I'm really not sure.

This generalizes and is reinforced even more into words of Germanic origin being automatically considered lower register, while Latin and Greek words being assumed to be higher.

e.g. valediction instead of farewell

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

Not a great example; "farewell" is so archaic that it won't be understood as low register. It will be understood as purposefully fancy.

And there's doubling in the law. Cease and desist, plus a few others I can't remember.

Cool. I had never heard of that one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet

"Cease and desist" is a different, and also interesting, case from the field/table distinction baddox referred to. According to Jespersen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Jespersen ) phrases like "kith and kin" or "cattle and kine" are very old in English and far predate the Norman invasion.

My kid was learning English around the time the brand "Da Kine" became popular. In his second grade way he looked it up in the dictionary and decided it was a farm brand.

Jesperson's "Growth and Structure of the English Language" is a fantastic book by the way.

But wait... cattle and kine are the same thing, much like cease and desist. Kith and kin aren't the same. Do you also think it's strange to say "friends and family"?

'kin' comes from 'ken', so 'kinfolk' are folks that think like you. What does 'kith' mean?

>> 'kin' comes from 'ken', so 'kinfolk' are folks that think like you Is that right? I cannot find such a reference. Could you please give a source for the etymology.

I got that from an author, who apparently took liberties with the definition (see below).

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/kith

cȳththu is like tuatha, I always thought.

So, nothing you said is correct. Ken [know] < OE cennan "make known; declare". Kin [family] < OE cynn "family" (among other meanings, but that one seems apt).

http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=kin

Kith [] < OE cyðð also meaning family, but alternatively neighbors, countrymen, or acquaintances. Obsolete and only extant today in the fixed phrase "kith and kin", but originally meaning [countrymen] and later [friends]. Your kith and kin are all your relationships, blood or otherwise. Your kin are the blood and marriage relationships.

Thanks for being so kind. One thing I said isn't correct. That definition of 'kinfolk' came from a writer, Forrest Carter, so I blame them.

The definition of 'kinfolk' was probably pretty minor among the list of fabrications by Forrest Carter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Earl_Carter

There are two noticeable mistakes is your prior comment. One is a simple mistake of fact; kin is not related to ken. The other is the etymological fallacy, which says that the meaning of a word is or should be controlled by what it meant in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy

Cute. If a word is out of usage almost completely, I don't see how that fallacy can be brought into play.

Man, I kinda want to bring back "kith".

cattle and kine is another doublet. two different words used by two different groups. kith and kin, is like saying neighbours/extending group and family. but your right its not a doubling, but more a broading.

How interesting, thanks. I'd never paused to consider the origin of tautologies like terms and conditions, somehow you just soak them up and use them without thinking.

I always thought that meant "stop doing what you're doing" (cease) and "don't do it again afterwards" (desist).

So my follow-on question is: is urban American culture's general squeamishness about our food sources a cause of or an effect of that distinction?

Calling pig meat pork, or cow meat beef, seems to separate the "yummy stuff" from the "used to walk and make cute noises stuff" in our minds. We don't seem to do it with poultry or seafood, just the mammals.

I'm wondering if that was a culture-wide subconscious "decision" (I don't know the right term for that). It's similar to dehumanizing your enemies, in a way.

Spurious correlation.

Both pork and beef have been used in English (both American and British) for centuries. Both beef and pork refer to the meat from multiple subspecies while fish and poultry are considered game/sports meats and named for the animal 'bested'. You'll note many old recipes simply say "white fish" to denote cod, herring, haddock, pollock or any number of firm, white-fleshed fish. This custom persists today.

...English words for meat and livestock are borrowed from Anglo-Saxon and French words respectively.

You should either reverse the terms in the prepositional phrase (or the language names!), or use an adjective like "counter-respectively" or "regressively".

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