Animals’ names change when we eat them: is that universal?

Question

I rebound off a question asked on French Language & Usage: in many languages, some designations for animal meats (in its raw, uncooked and uncured form) differ from the live animal's name itself. Examples in various languages include:

• in English: pig / pork
• in French: cabillaud / morue
• in Russian: свинья / свинина (a cognate of свинья)
• in Czech: prase / vepřové (a cognate of vepř, meaning barrow)
• in Japanese: 豚 / 豚肉 (lit. pig meat, the interesting part here is that 豚 already includes radicals for both meat and pig which makes the addition of 肉 somewhat redundant)

How universal is this feature? What could have given rise to it, apart from the understandable need to differentiate between the live animal and the meat, which could be achieve by saying, e.g., pig meat instead of pork.

Answer 1

There's a broader phenomenon here: we name things based on what they're used for, and not always just on what they're made from. Some examples off the top of my head:

• The same square of plain cotton cloth could be a "rag," a "bandana," a "handkerchief," a "placemat" or a "wrapper" depending on the use you intend to put it to. Similarly, a big rectangle of terrycloth could be a "bathmat" or a "towel," depending on what you're using it for.

• "Seed corn" is just ordinary corn that someone intends to plant in the future. It's physically indistinguishable from other kinds of corn. In some languages, there are separate, unrelated words for "corn kernels used as food" and "corn kernels set aside as seeds."

• Where I grew up, a "chock" is a triangular wedge of wood that you put behind the wheels of a truck to keep it from rolling downhill. An identical wedge of wood that was, say, being used as part of a little kid's set of toy blocks wouldn't be called a "chock."

• A stoat that's being raised for fur is called an "ermine," as is the fur it produces.

So you could ask the same question for all of these: "Why aren't rags just called wiping cloths? Why aren't handkerchiefs just called nose cloths? Why did we coin the word chock instead of calling them wheel wedges? Why isn't an ermine just a fur stoat?"

I'm not sure I have a positive answer to those questions. But it's good to keep in mind that language is rarely as logical or as efficient as it could be. So I'd look at this as a general feature of human language rather than a specific weirdness about livestock terminology. Sometimes we coin new words for things that we use for a special purpose — even when it's redundant to do so.

Answer 2

It has long been noted that in English, the while the words for many animals are of Germanic etymology, the words for their meats are of French etymology. This must be related to the Norman French invasion of England in 1066, and the usual story goes: the peasants were too poor and oppressed to eat the meat from the animals they raised, because it all went to the French ruling class, and the ruling class never touched the actual animals.

Whether or not the story about why is true, language contact is certainly the culprit.

Notice that for less commonly eaten meats, we just use the name of the animal: bear meat; likewise for meat of North American origin: bison burger.

Answer 3

Here is a funny clip from a dramatization of a Japanese class: Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo episode 1 clips.

At 2:10, a discussion begins about tuna. The teacher explains the classifier used on tuna in its different forms:

• Swimming in the ocean: ippiki
• When caught: ippon
• When first cut at market (big pieces): icchou
• When cut into medium pieces: hitokoro
• When cut up thin and packaged for the supermarket: hitosaku
• When it enters your mouth: hitokire

In this example, the name for the animal does not change. However, the classifier changes slightly when the tuna is countable (first three) and dramatically when it becomes destined for the table (last three).

In English, tuna seems to undergo less dramatic changes:

• My kid hates tuna.
• I caught a 300 pound tuna.

But:

• My kid hates tuna fish.
• ? I caught a 300 pound tuna fish.

Here, tuna fish makes it clear that it is a food.

Answer 4

In Spanish and Galician (my two native languages), we use the same words for the live animal and its flesh when eaten in general:

• Cerdo (ES) / Porco (GL): Pig or pork
• Pollo / Polo: Chicken
• Ternera / Tenreiro: Veal or beef
• etc.

However, in Spanish we distinguish between pez (fish) when alive or dead but not intended to be used as food, and pescado (also fish) when captured, processed or served as a meal.

So, answering the question in the OP, I guess this is not a universal phenomenon.

Answer 5

In French, all the words are the same if they refer to the same animal or product. There is a difference between "cabillaud", the fish still fresh, and "morue", which is dried and salted, in the past from "Terre-Neuve".

However, "porc" is a little more polite than "cochon" ; you should ask for "une côtelette de porc" at the butcher's. But "Cette ferme est un élevage de cochons" is perfectly correct.

And beef is always "bœuf" at the butcher's, even if is a cow. For leather, it is always "vache" or "vachette", even it is a bull.