Anglo-Saxons did not use the four-letter profanities we credit them with | Hacker News Reader

Anglo-Saxons did not use the four-letter profanities we credit them with

timeshighereducation.co.uk

52 pointsbenbreen18 comments

Not a linguist, but there is a popular idea that many Anglo-Saxon words only became profane when one had the option of instead using the French (Norman) words. After the Norman conquest. Once the French became common, using the old version was seen as crude.

This also explains pig vs. ham, cow vs. beef, etc. The farmer raised the cow; his lord ate the beef.

Here is my point: This article was frustrating because it did not squarely address this theory. It feels to me like the article is avoiding the elephant in the room. This theory is too compelling to me to discount simply because we don't see certain words in writing. I wonder if this article is drawing hasty conclusions.

The swear words had to have come from somewhere, and the above explanation still seems to me to be the most compelling explanation.

Plus, the good old English profanities tend to have Germanic cognates: the German "ficken", "scheiss", and "kott"; the Dutch "fokken", "schijt", and "kut", the Swedish "focka", "skit", and "kunta".

Also, more interestingly, during the Norman period English wasn't even remotely as standardized as we like to imagine it today. French was not only the language of the nobility, it was also wide-spread and relatively consistent. English wasn't, at all.

The French nation-state, which appeared after the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon's empire, unified the French people in particular through the consolidation of the use of the French language. Hence, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm, "the French language has been essential to the concept of 'France', although in 1789 50% of the French people did not speak it at all, and only 12 to 13% spoke it 'fairly' – in fact, even in oïl language zones, out of a central region, it was not usually spoken except in cities, and, even there, not always in the faubourgs [approximatively translatable to "suburbs"]. In the North as in the South of France, almost nobody spoke French."

Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 : programme, myth, reality (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990; ISBN 0-521-43961-2) chapter II "The popular protonationalism", pp.80–81 French edition (Gallimard, 1992). According to Hobsbawm, the main source for this subject is Ferdinand Brunot (ed.), Histoire de la langue française, Paris, 1927–1943, 13 volumes, in particular volume IX.

To this day you have langue d'oc (opposite langue d'oil, among other regional dialects in France. But this marginalization of non-official dialects has been the history of European nations, for the express purpose, as you mention, to solidify a sense of nationhood. So plattdeutsch, frisian, langue d'oc, sicilian, catalonian, etc. have been supplanted by the 'official' languages and spellings, grammars, etc...

If 50% of people did not speak French, what did they speak?

I am extremely skeptical of this claim (but I haven't looked at your cited sources). I mean, the French government worked to unify the language used in the country well before the time you are talking about.

I can't imagine that langue d'oil was actually a different language(s) than "French," and not properly considered to be perhaps French dialects, but maybe I'm wrong.

Breton, Gallo, Picard, Walloon, Provençal, Catalan, Alsacien, ...

Go talk to some 70+ people in rural parts of France and ask them if they had to learn to speak differently when they went to school or had to start communicating with people in the cities and I'll bet they say yes. Languages other than Standard French were very common even in the 20th century.

(By the way, whether something is a "dialect" or a "separate language" is much more of a political question than a scientific one. Speakers of some of the languages I mentioned -- Gallo, Walloon, and Picard are all oïl languages -- may have thought of themselves as speaking uneducated peasant French. But they were more different than, say, Scots and English, and probably not more than superficially mutually intelligible.)

British French, since it came via a small group of conquerors might still have been a fairly consistent affair. More consistent than mainland French.

(I don't know. But the argument that mainland French wasn't homogenous doesn't tell us much about French in Britain.)

I think you want pig-pork, not pig-ham. (Ham is an Anglo-Saxon term.)

IIRC, this "theory" first appears in dialogue in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820).

Ah, that's where I'd heard it. I was wracking my brains for a minute, thank you.

It is a good book, I heartily recommend it. I was perplexed by the anti-Semitism of WW2 (Where did it come from? How? Why?) until I read Ivanhoe.

Re: pork, yes, you are correct, thanks.

Re: The provenance of the theory. It makes a lot of sense to me, but I don't know how valid it really is. If it first appears in Ivanhoe, that's very interesting.

Right, ham refers specifically to cured pork.

There was a wave of gentility that set in about 1800, and words good enough for the King James Bible fell out of use for much of the population.

If anyone is interested in a more detailed history of profanity in the english language check out: https://books.google.com/books?id=hPfuSMp_70oC

> "ears-þerl for buttocks" ...

> "“Fart”, which is believed to have existed in Old English as feortan

Perl, Fortran ... priceless!

Except "þerl" is actually "therl", not "perl".

Also, OE "feortan" sounds nothing like modern "Fortran" ;)

Sorry to rain on your parade, but þ is a voiceless "th" sound (as in "thing"). Also, that's the part that means "muscle".

oh, shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com