[LMB] AKICOT:L Bambi in Spanish & Italian

[Michael R N Dolbear]

> From: B. Ross Ashley <redlion at sff.net>
> Date: 13 August 2006 15:18
> 
> On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 02:04:23 -0400, Elvi Dalgaard <elvi at vl.videotron.ca>
> wrote:
> 
>  > I'd disagree somewhat on chicken - "poultry" is clearly related to
>  > the french "poule". Pigeon is the same word, as far as I know,
>  > and salmon nearly. Maybe rabbit and duck and others were simply
>  > not frequently eaten by the populations in question?

> Elvi, I don't buy "poultry" in the grocery store, I buy "chicken". But 
> the poultry farmer calls the particular bird I'm going to eat a 
> "pullet", defined as a young female bird who hasn't started laying yet. 
> So Little Egret's point is at least partially correct, the Norman-French 
> word went to the peasant in this case, and the Anglo-Saxon one went to 
> the wealthy ... perhaps it's because chickens are of not so great 
> antiquity in Western Europe as the others? I seem to remember that they 
> were introduced from the Middle East during the latter half of the Roman 
> Empire. Where I don't follow him is with those other meat animals, 
> unless he means that one word has pretty much crowded out the other 
> entirely.

The Normans did eat rabbit which they either reintroduced into England
(there is evidence that the Romans in Britain ate rabbit, but may have been
just hutch reared) or at least introduced the keeping of rabbits in
artificial warrens. Note the meat is rabbit and the French derived word is
coney which is used only for the creature, fur and by-products. This is,
like poultry, the reverse of the standard.

As for duck, before shotguns lords built 'decoy ponds' to net duck by the
thousand so it was, like swan, an upper class food.

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba86/news.shtml
The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), prized for its meat and skin,
is assumed to have been introduced from the continent after 1066. They were
reared in artificial warrens (often now called pillow mounds and marked by
placenames such as "warren" and "coney"), and from the start were also a
pest that ate young crops.==

The other meat animals haven't split with different names for meat and
animal/bird/fish they also show a random split between Old English and Old
French origins. This too fails to match the 'standard story'. Special terms
for differently mature animals I suggest don't require explanation though I
note 'suckling pig' is English not French even though a luxury item.

Little Egret