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20th September 2013, 01:54
#1
The Craziness of the English Language
Someone sent this to me recently. I thought it was fun
Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France . Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig..
It made me wonder.... who came up with these words that were such paradoxes and why?
I'm sure there are many more, if one is compelled to add to the list.
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20th September 2013, 03:00
#2
It really is. Though as somebody who speaks the English variety rather than the American, I've always thought "eggplant" was a stupid name for aubergine lol. I've never seen a purple egg lol. When it comes to words like pineapple, the word from which we get the word apple (æppel) was used to refer to the fruit of the apple tree, but it was a much more general term than it is today and referred to fruit in general terms. The term "fruit" didn't exist in old English (it comes from Latin fructum and means "a thing enjoyed"; compare French produit from productum). The process which took the general term and applied it in a stricter and less general sense until it became the word for the fruit of the apple tree only is called semantic narrowing.
The same process happened to the words meat and bread. Originally the word meat meant food of any kind, not just animal flesh, although the food had to be generally solid. As for bread, it meant a crumb or morsel. The reason both are called sweet is that the word sweet far precedes the recent obsession with sugar, and so sweet meant not too salty or bitter, and so on. It really meant mildly- or pleasantly-flavoured — in fact, some of these meanings are retained in some uses of the word. The "flavour" aspect was nowhere near as important as the pleasing aspect, and we see this still today with kids who refer to something they like as "sweet".
The word pineapple is today applied to the fruit of a bromeliad family, but it too appeared long before English-speakers had ever encountered pineapples. It originally referred to the pinecone, being the "fruit" of conifers, or pines. As the word was replaced by pinecone in that usage, it began to be applied to the fruit we think of as pineapples by analogy, because of the similarities in shape and the spikes on the pineapple resembling the "scales" of a pinecone.
So the answer is when the words first appeared they were perfectly logical words. We have these sorts of things today. By the botanical definition, a tomato is a fruit but by the culinary definition it is a vegetable. If we came back in a hundred years and found that the botanical description had won out, people would wonder how stupid we were to ever think that a tomato might be a vegetable. Just look at French, where potatoes are called pommes de terre, or "earth apples". The French don't believe that potatoes are a boring kind of savoury apple that just happens to grow underground. The French word "pomme" means apple in the strict sense, but originally it meant any kind of fruit exactly paralleling the word "apple" in English. It's not so hard to see why English turned æppel, meaning fruit, into the word apple while French turned pômum, meaning fruit, into the word for apple too when apples are the predominant fruit in both lands — at least historically.
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20th September 2013, 06:23
#3