Anglo-Saxons did not use the four-letter profanities we credit them with

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/culture/it-wasnt-all-nasty-brutish-and-short/2017639.fullarticle

by benbreen • 12 years ago

52 18 12 years ago

timeshighereducation.co.uk

kazinator• 12 years ago

"ears-þerl for buttocks" ...
"“Fart”, which is believed to have existed in Old English as feortan

Perl, Fortran ... priceless!

pluma2• 12 years ago

Except "þerl" is actually "therl", not "perl".

Also, OE "feortan" sounds nothing like modern "Fortran" ;)

agrona• 12 years ago

Sorry to rain on your parade, but þ is a voiceless "th" sound (as in "thing"). Also, that's the part that means "muscle".

javert3• 12 years ago

Not a linguist, but there is a popular idea that many Anglo-Saxon words only became profane when one had the option of instead using the French (Norman) words. After the Norman conquest. Once the French became common, using the old version was seen as crude.

This also explains pig vs. ham, cow vs. beef, etc. The farmer raised the cow; his lord ate the beef.

Here is my point: This article was frustrating because it did not squarely address this theory. It feels to me like the article is avoiding the elephant in the room. This theory is too compelling to me to discount simply because we don't see certain words in writing. I wonder if this article is drawing hasty conclusions.

The swear words had to have come from somewhere, and the above explanation still seems to me to be the most compelling explanation.

pluma2• 12 years ago

Also, more interestingly, during the Norman period English wasn't even remotely as standardized as we like to imagine it today. French was not only the language of the nobility, it was also wide-spread and relatively consistent. English wasn't, at all.

barry-cotter• 12 years ago

The French nation-state, which appeared after the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon's empire, unified the French people in particular through the consolidation of the use of the French language. Hence, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm, "the French language has been essential to the concept of 'France', although in 1789 50% of the French people did not speak it at all, and only 12 to 13% spoke it 'fairly' – in fact, even in oïl language zones, out of a central region, it was not usually spoken except in cities, and, even there, not always in the faubourgs [approximatively translatable to "suburbs"]. In the North as in the South of France, almost nobody spoke French."

Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 : programme, myth, reality (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990; ISBN 0-521-43961-2) chapter II "The popular protonationalism", pp.80–81 French edition (Gallimard, 1992). According to Hobsbawm, the main source for this subject is Ferdinand Brunot (ed.), Histoire de la langue française, Paris, 1927–1943, 13 volumes, in particular volume IX.

philwelch• 12 years ago

Plus, the good old English profanities tend to have Germanic cognates: the German "ficken", "scheiss", and "kott"; the Dutch "fokken", "schijt", and "kut", the Swedish "focka", "skit", and "kunta".

kylebgorman• 12 years ago

I think you want pig-pork, not pig-ham. (Ham is an Anglo-Saxon term.)

IIRC, this "theory" first appears in dialogue in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820).

kyllo• 12 years ago

Right, ham refers specifically to cured pork.

thret• 12 years ago

Ah, that's where I'd heard it. I was wracking my brains for a minute, thank you.

It is a good book, I heartily recommend it. I was perplexed by the anti-Semitism of WW2 (Where did it come from? How? Why?) until I read Ivanhoe.

javert3• 12 years ago

Re: pork, yes, you are correct, thanks.

Re: The provenance of the theory. It makes a lot of sense to me, but I don't know how valid it really is. If it first appears in Ivanhoe, that's very interesting.

cafard• 12 years ago

There was a wave of gentility that set in about 1800, and words good enough for the King James Bible fell out of use for much of the population.

cHyDblia• 12 years ago

If anyone is interested in a more detailed history of profanity in the english language check out: https://books.google.com/books?id=hPfuSMp_70oC

joshu• 12 years ago

oh, shit.

Anglo-Saxons did not use the four-letter profanities we credit them with

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