922: Words for Meats Jun 18, 2017

There are a number of words in English that denote the meat of an animal separate to the word for the animal itself, including 'pork' and 'beef' as opposed to 'pig' and 'cow' respectively. This is because the names for the food came from Old French whereas the names for the animals are Germanic. To a native English speaker this might seem typical, but compared to most other languages this is quite rare; most of the time, the word for a food and the word for an animal are the same. This happens in English with 'chicken' and kinds of fish however, so the idea should be understandable. In those cases where the two words are the same, the meaning may be discerned not only from context but from grammar, which all native speakers will know subconsciously. In the sentence, "I like chicken", food doesn't even need to be mentioned at all, but because it has no article and is singular people would know this 'chicken' is for food. This also holds in cases where the animals aren't commonly eaten, so "I like dog" is understood to mean 'dog-meat'. Luckily with 'sheep' where the singular form is the same as the plural, we don't have this confusion since there is the word 'mutton'.