The Norman Invasion

The Norman Invasion in 1066 was a landmark moment in the development of the English language. It forced the Germanic dialects brought to the shores of Britain (categorized by us as Old English) together with the Romance language Norman, which brought a Frankish linguistic touch to the region. This gave rise to Middle English, which houses the works of the great Geoffry Chaucer.

It is amazing how much a single author or piece of writing can impact the entire course of a language. Chaucer is credited with reinventing and developing elements of English. William Shakespeare is a notorious developer and revolutionizer of words. For example, there is speculation that in Macbeth, in Macbeth’s act one soliloquy, the phrase “If the assassination could trammel up the consequences” saw the first instance of “assassination” being used as a noun (I heard this on the radio), meaning the act of assassinating. Martin Luther’s prose (widely disseminated) impacted the development of German, and the Koran has obviously had a significant impact on Arab (and Muslim) language and culture. Moral of the story: liturgical languages are often underestimated and beware of petty vernacular.

Well anyways, what I intended on imparting was this little interesting factoid that brings us back to the point about the Norman invasion. It so happens that the words for most farm animals come from the Germanic (swine, sheep, and cow translate respectively into modern German: Schwein, Schaf, Kuh), whereas the words for the edible forms of those animals can be linked to modern French (porc, mouton, and boeuf).

This is an interesting little trend and though the correlation does not put me at liberty to say exactly why this is the case. But my best guess is the new establishment (Norman) probably comprised the wealthier population who dealt much more with the cooked forms of the meat than the poor German farmers.