Posted on 06/15/2015 1:44:50 AM PDT by Cronos
“Weekend? What’s a ‘weekend’? “ - Dowager Countess of Grantham
Maybe...the French word for chicken is “poulet”....
poultry (n.)
“domestic fowls,” late 14c. (mid-14c. as “place where poultry is sold”), from Old French pouletrie “domestic fowl” (late 13c.), from pouletier “dealer in domestic fowl,” from poulet “young fowl” (see pullet).
Britain to a considerable extent has a reverse accent snobbery thing going on.
Americans miss a good deal of the status byplay in English TV and movies because it’s accent/language based and goes right over our heads.
In America southern accents are, or used to be, considered low class and uneducated by some. But there I think it’s more that some such accents are. Used to listen to the historian Shelby Foote on the Civil War documentary. He had a strong MS accent, but still sounded very refined and educated.
OTOH, I had a good friend from the mountains of East Tennessee who sounded like he’d never darkened the doors of a school. Guy was sharp as a tack in business and used his accent as a tool to get people to misunderestimate him. Worked, too.
Here’s the funny part. The French have for centuries had government agencies devoted to keeping French “pure.”
Nobody’s ever even tried to do that for English. We steal words from wherever we find them useful.
French was THE international language up thru the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Being shouldered out almost entirely by English in that role. Perhaps partly because we don’t care where our words come from.
The typesetter in question would have had to have been pretty high up the social food chain to afford such cloths and weaponry. That sword looked like a very serious expenditure. Maybe I am confusing that era typesetter with the Sam Clemens era with which am more familiar. Possibly in earlier years it was a higher level profession.
Possibly the sword guy was a customer instead of employee.
Printers in the early days were also generally editors and publishers. Also often translators.
I presume a quality sword was worth a great deal of money. Even with modern metallurgy, an even vaguely quality one isn’t cheap.
How right you are...
I’m a product of the South and people would underestimate a Southern gentleman’s accent to their stupidity...Neat that you mentioned Shelby Foote...his accent is fluid poetry...I miss him.
My hubs is from the Northeast and listening to a raw, New England, “pahk the cah, youse guyz” accent also sounds rather base.
This of course means that there is a lost connection.
in contrast with German
pig. pork = Schwein, Schweinflesih
So English words aren't "connected"
It probably was slang becoming mainstream. Though nowadays it is much faster.
Saxon buxom barmaid: "Oo yew cawlin a koochie?"
Unfortunately when you say English barmaid, I get a picture in my mind of the barmaid at a pub in Brighton -- large mass of bottle blond hair, pieces of flesh overflowing from various places and lots of "ooeers" and other Sussex accented words :)
well, Scottish is another dialect of English — I’m talking about the language spoken in the lowlands — in the highlands they still somewhat speak Gaelic
:-P
it would be so much better if we went back to Latin
Though english is not that complex grammatically — it’s just illogical phonetically, so lesser brain development or intelligence for just English monolinguists? :-P
for the meat example you give, the German can be more logical -- Schwein and Schweinfleish -- so pig and pigflesh (pork)
i heard that Norwegian and Swedish eliminated all gender differences in their languages -- so no "he" or "she", just a generic "it" -- but I don't know if that's true or not
Did they have chicken in the British isles in the 11th century? the birds originated in India and were taken to the Mediterranean, but were they acclimatized to colder climates?
I envy those folks who are natural linguists...
I have loved the French language all my life as my mother was Swiss-French and it was her native language.
Having to agree verbs, etc. with gender just throws me every time.
A royal pain.....
Zaer goot :-D
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