Random question about meat...

Haggisman

Haggisman

Haggisman

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Joined
6 Oct 2004
Posts
19,331
Location
Birmingham
Having spent all day/week trying to fix email systems that an external company has well and truely ****** and a phone bill that has too many zeros on the end, I decided to give my brain 5 minutes to recover.

And I got thinking.

Some meats have funny names.

Cow meat = beef
Baby cow meat = veal
Pig meat = pork (or the million other names it goes by)
Deer meat = venison
Sheep meat = mutton

So, why on earth is:

Lamb meat = lamb
Chicken meat = chicken
Duck meat = duck

What's wrong with lambs and chickens that they don't deserve a special name for their meat? Is there some rule as to why certain meats have their own special name and others don't?

Useless fact for the thread:

It has been proposed that kangaroo meat be referred to as ""Australus"
 
This may be completely wrong but I believe the difference in the name of the meat to the name of the animal comes from Norman times.

The names of the meat are derived from the french names, as many of the Norman lords were of French decent.
Whilst the animals who were looked after by the Saxon peasantry were named from the saxon origins.
 
That explains why there are different names, but not why some meats don't - unless it's because the peasants ate the chickens, but not the other meats?
 
From my understanding it is to do with the way that Norman French was assimilated into the English language during the 11th and 12th centuries.
 
The reason for this comes from a long time in the past when most of England was ruled by French-speaking lords and noblemen.

The peasants working in the fields spoke old English but the lords in their castles and their chefs spoke French. So, in the field, an animal had an English name but once it got to the kitchen, the French name was used.
Click to expand...
 
The English language is comprised of, historically, Latin and Germanic words. The egs, ugs, and igs are from Saxon/Germanic languages, and then the Latin words are also mixed in there.

Pig = Saxon
Pork = Latin
 
same goes for swearing if memory serves - the peasantry were of germanic descent (Anglo Saxons?) and so most of the 'colourful' words are harsh and gutteral, also probably meaning nothing as sinister then as it does today. However the ruling classes were of latin speaking origins (Normans etc) so saw the language being used as dirtier than what they'd use and so it became cussing. Thats kinda how I remember it being explained anyways
 
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