Idle shower musings
I was in the shower this morning, waiting for the water to turn back from frigid cold to blisteringly hot when my mind began playing with the idea of the word cheval, and it's linguistic history and impact on the English language.
Now, as most of you know, English is the bastard love child of German and French. There was a steamy, passionate night on the bank of the Thames a few centuries ago, fueled by too much high quality Champgane and Black Forest beer, that neither lanuage ever really wants to talk about again. And, as my icon points out, English was left to beat up other languages in dark alleys and steal their spare vocabulary. We get much of our grammatical structure from German, as well as our more basic words, words that would have been used by early settlers to the British Isles, and French gave us some of our more complex linguistical structure, and many of our fancier words, as the French string of invasions began later than the Saxon, well after Britian had basic civilization, and brought us complex government and poetry.
This is of course is a major oversimplification of the history of the linguistic evolution of the English language, so please do forgive me.
So anyway, back to cheval. In French, cheval means "horse". If you're a fan of horses, never eat cheval when you're visiting a Francophonic country. It'll scar you for life. While contemplating the word cheval, my mind then made the jump to the word chevaliar, which is French for knight. When pronounced properly (something like "Shuh val yay") it sounds a lot like the English word "chivalry". It fascinates me that that the root of the word chivalry, which has come to mean so much to so many people. Some see it as the glorious "old days", when men were men and women knew their place, and some see it as the horrible "old days" when men and women were forced to follow unequal gender roles that heavily favored men and relegated women to little more than pretty ornamental baby machines. When in actuality, chevaliar has more to do with riding a horse, and extrapolating from that anthropologically, being wealthy enough to own a horse and it's acroutments. At it's base, before it became known as "knight" and developed all of the romantic and political connotations surrounding it, it's was really just about being a person who rode horses.
Going further, chevaliar is also probably where we get the word "caviler" from. So chevaliar has gone from horse rider to giving us both chivalry and a word that basically means "careless jackass". Hmm... fascinating!
And you know what got me started on all of this? A friend loaned me a couple trade versions of a comic called The Avengers I have no links for you right now, because my internet connection is not great, and won't allow me to have more than one window going at a time right now, but you should definitely go check it out. Much like the Watchmen, but not as horribly dark and depressing.
In one story, an rogue militiary force of frustrated and forgotten American service men and women invades various world capitals. When they get to Paris, one of the men says "I don't know Sarge. It doesn't feel right, firing on civilians." To which Sarge replies "Civilians are civilized. These people are French. They eat horses."
Which just totally brings us back full circle.
And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get ready for another 12 hour day at the office. Yay!
Now, as most of you know, English is the bastard love child of German and French. There was a steamy, passionate night on the bank of the Thames a few centuries ago, fueled by too much high quality Champgane and Black Forest beer, that neither lanuage ever really wants to talk about again. And, as my icon points out, English was left to beat up other languages in dark alleys and steal their spare vocabulary. We get much of our grammatical structure from German, as well as our more basic words, words that would have been used by early settlers to the British Isles, and French gave us some of our more complex linguistical structure, and many of our fancier words, as the French string of invasions began later than the Saxon, well after Britian had basic civilization, and brought us complex government and poetry.
This is of course is a major oversimplification of the history of the linguistic evolution of the English language, so please do forgive me.
So anyway, back to cheval. In French, cheval means "horse". If you're a fan of horses, never eat cheval when you're visiting a Francophonic country. It'll scar you for life. While contemplating the word cheval, my mind then made the jump to the word chevaliar, which is French for knight. When pronounced properly (something like "Shuh val yay") it sounds a lot like the English word "chivalry". It fascinates me that that the root of the word chivalry, which has come to mean so much to so many people. Some see it as the glorious "old days", when men were men and women knew their place, and some see it as the horrible "old days" when men and women were forced to follow unequal gender roles that heavily favored men and relegated women to little more than pretty ornamental baby machines. When in actuality, chevaliar has more to do with riding a horse, and extrapolating from that anthropologically, being wealthy enough to own a horse and it's acroutments. At it's base, before it became known as "knight" and developed all of the romantic and political connotations surrounding it, it's was really just about being a person who rode horses.
Going further, chevaliar is also probably where we get the word "caviler" from. So chevaliar has gone from horse rider to giving us both chivalry and a word that basically means "careless jackass". Hmm... fascinating!
And you know what got me started on all of this? A friend loaned me a couple trade versions of a comic called The Avengers I have no links for you right now, because my internet connection is not great, and won't allow me to have more than one window going at a time right now, but you should definitely go check it out. Much like the Watchmen, but not as horribly dark and depressing.
In one story, an rogue militiary force of frustrated and forgotten American service men and women invades various world capitals. When they get to Paris, one of the men says "I don't know Sarge. It doesn't feel right, firing on civilians." To which Sarge replies "Civilians are civilized. These people are French. They eat horses."
Which just totally brings us back full circle.
And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get ready for another 12 hour day at the office. Yay!