I think I’m going to do something slightly less formal for my post than has been done previously.
It seems to me that one of the main problems that we’ve had so far in talking about the ways that animals are classified or identified is the vocabulary we use. We struggle to find ways to express exactly what we mean. Often we carry over connotative meaning without intending to. The English language still carries with it some built-in distinctions that are left over from Medieval ways of talking about animals.
Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, most people in England were speaking a variation of either Old English or Old Norse. The OE word for cow is cú. Not much of a surprise there. Cow is one of those words that has come down to us through the Indo-Germanic roots of our language and hasn’t changed much in the last 2,000 years. Pigga is another word that probably looks pretty familiar, along with cicen (chicken), scéap (sheep), and déor (deer). All of these words are Germanic in origin, and the main difference between the way they are now and the way they were 1,000 years ago is the spelling. All of them, with the exception of deer, refer to domesticated animals, and they all played an integral role in the agricultural societies of northern Europe during the Middle Ages.
It seems to me that one of the main problems that we’ve had so far in talking about the ways that animals are classified or identified is the vocabulary we use. We struggle to find ways to express exactly what we mean. Often we carry over connotative meaning without intending to. The English language still carries with it some built-in distinctions that are left over from Medieval ways of talking about animals.
Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, most people in England were speaking a variation of either Old English or Old Norse. The OE word for cow is cú. Not much of a surprise there. Cow is one of those words that has come down to us through the Indo-Germanic roots of our language and hasn’t changed much in the last 2,000 years. Pigga is another word that probably looks pretty familiar, along with cicen (chicken), scéap (sheep), and déor (deer). All of these words are Germanic in origin, and the main difference between the way they are now and the way they were 1,000 years ago is the spelling. All of them, with the exception of deer, refer to domesticated animals, and they all played an integral role in the agricultural societies of northern Europe during the Middle Ages.
