The one that gets to me is that the anglosphere is still calling a fairly common crop [cooking product] “rapeseed [oil]”.
And why is that etymologically connected to the latin for ‘turnip’? This seems as strange now as the fact “mincemeat” (no space) in mince pies is vegetarian (the answer: because “meat” used to mean any food not just animal flesh, but it’s still strange to see that today).
It's also why (among other reasons) the UK peerage doesn't have "Counts." It uses the old Anglo-Saxon "Earl" for county-level peers even though the Norman system largely displaced the Anglo-Saxon system after the conquest. Curiously though, the wives of earls are countesses.
The jarls still held a lot of land, especially in the north, even after the southern kingdoms changed hands. Medieval feudalism was never a simple one-party dictatorship. Balance of local power probably has more to do with the propagation of nomenclature than simply having a new guy in a castle several days' journey away from your village.
My 2c as a catalan speaker. Apparently cunt is related to the latin "cunnus" (wedge). We also have a vulgar word related to cunnus for vagina, "cony". Its use is not as offensive as cunt, but it is up there with "puta" (whore) as the worst things you could say to a woman. However "cony" is also used in a sexual context: "Et vull menjar el cony" could be translated to "I want to eat your pussy".
Of course we have other obscene words for vagina. One of them is "conill" (rabbit), which is apparently related to "cunniculus" (burrow). The analogy between the action of the animal when hiding and the sexual act seems clear, but however this one is almost exclusively used in descriptive contexts: "L'hi he vist el conill", "I've seen her pussy".
"Conill" is also used more innocently. A young girl (~4yo) who is playing and running around naked could be affectionately called by female relatives "conillet". "Ai el conillet!" as in "oh, the little rabbit!". The goal here, I believe, seems to be not really shaming her to get dressed, but to make her aware that she is naked.
The animal analogy (?) would be similar to that of beaver, I suppose. But of course no mother would call her naked girl little beaver.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it fascinating how languages converge and diverge, and how we find hilarious and imaginative ways to describe the world around us.
Help out a non English speaker if you can. What vulgar associations ?
EDIT: Thanks, all who responded. I wouldn't have made the connection although I am quite familiar with the 'vulgar' word in question. The phonetic similarity sounds farfetched to me, one ends with a hard consonant, the other with a vowel sound.
> EDIT: Thanks, all who responded. I wouldn't have made the connection although I am quite familiar with the 'vulgar' word in question. The phonetic similarity sounds farfetched to me, one ends with a hard consonant, the other with a vowel sound.
It's not that "coney" sounds like "cunt". It doesn't. It's that it sounds like "cunny", which is a diminutive form of "cunt". Just like "Annie" is a diminutive form of "Anne", or "kitty" is a diminutive form of "cat".
Oh I wasn't comparing coney and cunt. To me even cunny and cunt seems quite far apart, admittedly not familiar with the diminutive or adjective form. Thanks all for the education in the colorful English vernacular (I mean that with sincerity, I can well imagine getting into a tough spot by dropping the word 'coney')
Interesting maybe that Coinín (sp?) is rabbit in modern Irish/Gaeilge and is pronounced in the former manner. Presumably it has some indo European roots, that didn’t spread into common English usage.
Yep. In fact, depending on which classification scheme of the Indo-European languages you follow, it could be argued it's closer to Irish than it is to English (Italo-Celtic branching). But I was just agreeing that it did come from, essentially, a dialect of French.
Even in Dutch they use the word konijn, I actually had no idea that "coney" was an English cognate for that word until reading this thread, I love learning these associations as making connections like this really helps in learning new languages.
I knew about Coney Island but I had never made the connection between Coney and Rabbit, I thought it was just a name.
Curiously there is another Isla Conejo / Rabbit Island near here too.
From Wikipedia:
It may be because when the Dutch people arrived in New Netherland, this island had many rabbits, so they named it 'Konijn Island', which became 'Coney Island', using the archaic term for rabbit in English.
You are; coney in English generally has a long e sound at the end (like saying the letter 'e'), not a long a sound (like saying the letter 'a'), so it wouldn't be the same or rhyme with the first two syllables of conejo (which has the long a sound in the second syllable).
Tangent, but in line with what others have commented, American English tends to pronounce the first syllable with a long o (like saying the letter 'o'), whereas British tends to pronounce it with a long oo sound (like the vowel sound in the the word 'food'). I've never heard it pronounced with a short 'u' sound (an 'uh' sound), but others intimated they either have, or have heard it pronounced close to it, which is interesting.
> conejo (which has the long a sound in the second syllable).
The Spanish word is pronounced more like "koh-neh-hoh" (or [ko'neho] in IPA), no "long a" ([ei] in IPA) there. The English "long vowels" (diphthongs really: a combination of two vowel sounds) would be written with two letters in Spanish (and IPA).
Good clarification. Depending on the variant of English, "long e", "long u" and "long a" may or may not sound like diphthongs. They can be analysed as /ij/ and /uw/. Wikipedia puts them under "potential diphthongs".
Living near the University of South Carolina (Gamecocks), always tickled my inner twelve year old to see a constant stream of garnet hats with "Cocks" on them.
Yes, I read about the historical aspect a few years ago.
This said, I am still amazed that someone is fine with that (some "Richards" I discussed with presented themselves as "Rich", and some willingly as "Dick")
That's not exactly a unique phenomenon. For example, it's how "rabbit" replaced "coney".