Pork and Pig, Noun and Verb: Social Class Dimensions Of Modern English

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Nutter, Apr 5, 2008.

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  1. Nutter

    Nutter Shake it loose, baby! Registered Senior Member

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    Consider the terms "pig" and "pork" in modern English.

    "Pig" refers to animals with whom farmers associate. "Pork" refers to the meat humans consume. The class dimension is evident. "Pig" is the old Saxon word, since the Saxons were the underprivileged farmers. "Pork," on the other hand, comes from the French "porque," used by the privileged Norman conquerers who mostly ingested the pigs raised by farmers.

    The use of the terms as verbs introduces further nuances into the analysis.
     
    Nutter, Apr 5, 2008
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  3. Spud Emperor

    Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    Sure Nutter, you would never say " float the pig " in reference to dipping one's wick for example, even if the recipient of one's putrid meat was a real porker or just a plain pig.
     
    Spud Emperor, Apr 5, 2008
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  5. Spud Emperor

    Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    I mean, "the pig sword' just doesn't have the same ring to it either.
     
    Spud Emperor, Apr 5, 2008
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  7. Spud Emperor

    Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    Funny how the French call the English "Pig dogs" not porque dogs.
     
    Spud Emperor, Apr 5, 2008
    #4
  8. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Several of our meats have this dichotomy between the Anglo-Saxon name for the animal and the Norman French name for the meat: Cow/beef, chicken/cock, sheep/mutton, deer/venison.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Apr 5, 2008
    #5
  9. Orleander

    Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    where does swine fit into all this?
     
    Orleander, Apr 5, 2008
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  10. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Actually, "swine" (and the feminine form "sow") has deeper and more authentic roots than "pig." It has cognates throughout the Germanic languages, e.g. German schwein, Norwegian svin, and clearly goes all the way back to the Indo-European tribes, cf. Latin sus, Hindi suar.

    "Pig" can only be traced back to the twelfth century--several generations after the Norman Invasion began wresting our language from its Germanic roots. Pigge, pronounced "piggy," was originally exactly what it still is today: a slang or endearing term for a small or baby swine. It gradually lost the diminutive suffix and, by back-formation, became a word that had never existed for the adult animal. No cognates or earlier form of the word can be found.

    Back-formation is a powerful force that has given us words like "flammable," from the correct word "inflammable," meaning "capable of being inflamed." In this case the logic is: "doggy" comes from "dog," therefore "piggy" must come from "pig." (I have friends who humorously refer to their adult rabbits as "buns.")

    Before you ask, "hog" appears to be of Celtic origin, with cognates in Welsh and Cornish. Perhaps it is from the Brythonic language of the original Britons, who were displaced by the Anglo-Saxons and their Germanic language.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Apr 5, 2008
    #7
  11. Billy T

    Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    At the EliteTrader forums, where I am "BillDick," I posted:

    “... I think just making it illegal to use the words “beef” and “pork” (forcing use of “cow” and “pig”) on printed restaurant menus would help a lot to “SAVE FORESTS,” but the population control measures I have describe in earlier posts would do much more. …”

    Although the destruction of forests is now producing new pasture*, it is true that the former pastures are being converted to “fuel crops” and this creates the need for new pastures. The amount of land required for feeding the world would be significantly less if the food calories were not feed to animals destined to be eaten as that takes about six times more land to deliver the calories or protein in meat than as soy beans, etc. My text above was part of much larger economic discussion relating to the possibility of entirely displacing petroleum transport fuels with alcohol and bio-diesel from tropical lands.

    When anyone suggests this is possible, the opposition points out that many forests now storing carbon would need to be destroyed (and that is true) but not doing this will continue the “de-sequester”**of eventually more "fossil carbon" than the difference between that stored in the trees and that stored in the growing plants like sugar cane PLUS the distribution system of an alcohol fuel system. That includes many very large “capsize” ocean tankers, lots of storage tanks in the ports, even in pipelines, and importantly in more than 100 million alcohol powered car’s fuel tanks.

    I do not know how to give good link to my posts there, but here is a link to one of the two theads if you want to read some more of the pro and con posts in the Sustainable Development Forum 2007 - Ethanol and Biofuels:

    http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=93388

    I think following works as link to the other thread where ethonal as fuel was brief "off topic" diversion originally:

    http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=81958

    -------------------
    * Not why the forest are being destroyed - they are destroyed, usually illegally, for their standing tember, especially a few large valuable trees, like mahogany*** selectively harvested and then the forest is burned to hid the selective harvest crime.
    **I am becoming annoyed with the erroneous statement that “Oil companies produce petroleum.” They do not. They “de-sequester” it, causing huge amounts of safely sequestered carbon to become atmospheric CO2.

    *** Wood from one good mahogony tree is often worth more than $8000! It can come down and be at the saw mill in a day and on its way to the USA in less than a month - not bad pay where the common labor's pay is about $280 PER MONTH. -If you live in USA, like mahogony and other beautiful woods; Look in the mirror to see who is destroying the forests.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 6, 2008
    Billy T, Apr 6, 2008
    #8
  12. Orleander

    Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    LOL, you read my mind.

    Thanks for the info!! I always love reading your posts.

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    Orleander, Apr 6, 2008
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  13. Pandaemoni

    Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    I think both checken and cock had Old English variants, which chicken (cycen) being the word for the mean and having no frenmch cognate. Cycen may have originally been a diminutive of cocc, though I've never seen any formal word on their exact relationship.

    There is also "calf/veal," that was not on your list.
     
    Pandaemoni, Apr 9, 2008
    #10
  14. Orleander

    Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    what's horse meat called? And if sheep is mutton, what is goat?
     
    Orleander, Apr 9, 2008
    #11
  15. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Hmm. I always assumed that "cock" was French coq, especially since there's no German cognate. But I see that it does indeed go back to Anglo-Saxon, before the Norman Invasion, and there's even a cognate in Old Norse. The dictionary says it might be an imitation of the chicken's call, like the Chinese and Egyptian word for "cat," mau. The Latin word for cock is gallus, and that came down into Spanish and Italian. I don't know that any other Romance Language has a cognate for coq. It's hard to trace the etymology of foreign words. Maybe French inherited it from a Frankish German dialect, or maybe it went through the same process of imitating the sound and came up with the same word, like the Egyptians and Chinese.

    Dictionary.com also says that "chicken" is an old word in its own right, with cognates in Dutch and German dialects, so if it's a diminutive of "cock" it goes back a very long way.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Apr 9, 2008
    #12
  16. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Neither horse nor goat meat is popular enough in English-speaking countries to have its own culinary terms. I don't know if the medieval French liked horsemeat as much as their modern descendants, but if they brought the practice to England it didn't catch on. Frankly, since until the invention of internal combustion horses were prized for their horsepower, I doubt that raising them for food would have been economically sensible in an earlier era. As for goats, they are closely related to sheep and there are several species of each, all members of the bovid family of cattle and antelopes. Sheep adapted to foothills and level terrain and gather in flocks, using the aggregate horn-power of the flock to fend off predators. Goats adapted to steeper mountainous terrain and rely on their sure-footedness to escape predation. Goats would not be at home in the gentle countryside of England. They're also destructive grazers that uproot ground cover rather than mowing it politely and wouldn't fit well into the manicured English ecosystem.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Apr 9, 2008
    #13
  17. FelixC

    FelixC Registered Senior Member

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    excuse my french

    "Excuse my French"

    I was wondering about that expression, I'm guessing that it was first said by a Norman counqueror to his buddy, making fun of an Anglo-Saxon servant by using 4-letter words around him/her?
     
    FelixC, Apr 16, 2008
    #14
  18. darini

    darini Registered Senior Member

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    Interesting to notice that in Portuguese the word "galinha" (chicken) is also a diminutive form for "galo" (its masculine form). In Spanish they say "galiña" (you pronounce the same way).

    A good work about it is from a French linguist (whose name I've forgot) called "The Vocabulary of the Indo-European Institutions" ("free" title translation by me, hehehe). He explains such differences between the roots {sus} and {pork}, for example.

    cheers
     
    darini, Apr 16, 2008
    #15
  19. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The origin of this idiom is murky but the most convincing sources I've found agree that it's a 20th-century coinage. It seems to be an expression of the eternal rivalry between the English and the French. The French (until recently anyway) were regarded as more vulgar and obsessed with sex, so one is begging pardon for speaking like a Frenchman. The French mirror this in their own idioms, e.g. une education anglaise, meaning a spanking on the bottom, which is full of sexual connotations.
    No, you've got the palatalization on the wrong consonant. It's la gallina in Spanish, pronounced ga-YEE-na in the Americas or ga-LYEE-na in Spain. "Rooster" is el gallo, pronounced GA-yo or GA-lyo.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Apr 16, 2008
    #16
  20. darini

    darini Registered Senior Member

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    Argh... sorry, I was too lazy to check that word on the dictionary before posting it... :shy:

    Yes, but a very interesting change is happening in Argentina and Uruguay: ll > i > sh. I would even consider something like a dj before the final sh, but I don't know if that'd be correct.

    You can already hear "shuva" instead of "lluva", for example (well, it's already happened to many words in Portuguese: the Latin "pl" became "ch"). I got baffled when I was in Montevideo last February and the bakery clerk asked me if I wanted "shevar" my food, hehehe... two hours later I got what she meant (as I don't speak Spanish, I usually communicate in Portuguese when I travel to Argentina or Uruguay). ;-)

    cheers
     
    darini, Apr 17, 2008
    #17
  21. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    English J for Y and LL is very common in Mexico. Perhaps elsewhere in Latin America too, but I've heard other Latin Americans make fun of Mexicans for saying "Jo Jevo las toaJas" instead of yo llevo las toallas.

    Palatalization is one of the most common phonetic shifts. It's an epidemic in the Romance languages, e.g. Spanish llave, Portuguese chave, Italian chiave for Latin clavis (but not Catalan clau), French chanter for Latin cantare. The mere softening of C and G before E and I is universal in the whole group including Catalan, Occitan and Romanian, although sometimes the "softening" takes unusual turns such as Spanish TH and KH.

    Palatalization distinguishes American from British English, e.g. e-joo-cate, ac-choo-ary, u-zhoo-al, vs. ed-yoo-cate, ac-tyoo-ary, uz-yoo-al. We even use it dynamically, as in "Didja go," "Whatcha doin," "Cancha see?" for "Did you go," "What are you doing," "Can't you see?"

    It's just as widespread in other language families. In the Japanese syllabary, S is palatalized before I, sa-shi-su-se-so, and T is palatalized in two positions, ta-chi-tsu-te-to. You can see palatalization at work in the Chinese languages: Cantonese Hong Kong, pronounced "hong gong," is Xiang Geng in Mandarin, pronounced "shyang gong."
    That's a borrowing from Portuguese, since it's lluvia in Spanish but chuva in Portuguese.
    PL and CL have both been palatalized into CH in Portuguese, e.g. chamar for clamare.
    It seems as though the nearby Spanish dialects are being influence by the Portuguese of the dominant population and economy in Brazil. It may be that the phonetic shift to SH is being adopted, but from your examples it's more likely that they're simply borrowing whole words. The two languages are so similar that a hybridized form would not be difficult to create or understand. There are already such dialects on the border between Spain and Portugal which are genuine remnants of ancient local speech before the linguistic territories were consolidated. In fact Catalonians understand Portuguese as easily as Spanish, while both the Spaniards and Portuguese find Catalan easier to follow than each other's language.

    Argentina's huge Italian community has cobbled together a Spanish-Italian hybrid.
    Don't try that in any other Spanish-speaking country! Their geographical and economic proximity to Brazil illustrates the old homily, "Language follows the coin, not the flag." Brazilians are bombarded with Spanish in the media so many of them have a passing familiarity with it. But aside from the people you mentioned, most Spanish speakers go their entire lives without seeing or hearing a word in Portuguese.

    It's like the Finns and the Estonians, whose languages are closely related. For decades as part of the impoverished USSR with its primitive technology infrastructure, the Estonians became accustomed to watching TV programs from nearby Finland, so most of them can understand the language. But very few Finns can puzzle out a sentence in Estonian.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Apr 17, 2008
    #18
  22. darini

    darini Registered Senior Member

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    Perhaps the Italian chiave (pronounced /kyave/) is "closer" to the Catalan clau than to its Romance conterparts. Although I have Italian ancestry (as well as 50% of the World's population

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    ), I don't speak their language, but it seems that the palataliation hasn't happened (yet?) to them:

    Latin > Italian / Portuguese / Spanish

    plumbum > piombo / chumbo / plomo
    pluvia > pioggia / chuva / lluvia
    plenus > pieno / cheio / lleno

    I much doubt that piombo, pioggia and pieno can get palatalized one day and that has reminded me of something: wasn't the letter "J" a "Celtic invention"? That'd be the answer! Correct me if I'm mistaken, but there were no Celtic people in the region of Italy, right? So, that sound was not known by them and there was no way to get the Latin pl palatalized. On the other hand, why does the letter G sound as J before E and I in Italian? Bilinguism, maybe?

    I still bet on a "natural change" of their language. I don't believe it's a "border influence" only, as Montevideo and Buenos Aires are some hundred (not to say thousand) kilometers away from the biggest Brazilian cities.

    Anyway, our southernmost state, "Rio Grande do Sul" has a very interesting kind of Portuguese... some of them speak as if they were singing, heheeh... many years ago I heard that it was influence from some indigenous tribes from there, but I cannot say if it's true or not. They also stress the final "E" and "O" (like in Spanish and Italian), something that doesn't happen in the rest of the country - we speak those sounds like /i/ and /w/.

    Actually, we don't have so much of the Spanish in the media... the Latin American soup-operas are always dubbed... and not worth to be watched, hehehe...

    cheers
     
    darini, Apr 18, 2008
    #19
  23. FelixC

    FelixC Registered Senior Member

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    isn't English, like a mixture of stew,

    English is a stew, a little of this & a little of that
    or my English buddy's Mum says, "triffle" of this and a "triffle" of that, good Triffle cake (or is it pudding?), its yummy whatever it is

    as I was saying, it has a Germanic base, with Latin & Greek overtones (some fake wine talk I heard on the Food Channel

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    ), from the original Celts, place names, from the French (Norman conquest) parrallel words , from science (Latin & Greek), from colonial times, some spices (you know "the flavor")
     
    FelixC, Apr 22, 2008
    #20
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