After my infographic about words such as ‘wall’, ‘street’, and ‘kitchen’, which are very early Germanic borrowings from Latin, here’s a second one, this time about food.
While words such as ‘carnivore’, ‘cereal’, and ‘edible’ are late and obvious borrowings from Latin, words such as ‘cheese’, ‘pear’, and ‘wine’ were adopted from that language 2000-1500 years ago, when the Romans occupied the parts of Europe where the ancestor of English was spoken.
Next episode: utensils!
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How do we know that the words featured in these infographics were borrowed? Couldn’t they just be the native Germanic cognates of the Latin words? There are several ways we can identify them as borrowings. You’ll learn all about them in the short article below.
@yvanspijk You mention Dutch vrucht = fetus. Is that common? Because in German, „Frucht des Leibes“ bzw. „Leibesfrucht“ is oldfashioned for fetus/baby.
I find it fascinating that some words hardly change their meaning while others divert widely.
Yoïn van Spijk
Arthur van der Harg
Hraban (fiëé visuëlle)