They mean the same thing .One in English and the other one in French.Yet their roots are latin. How could their spelling be so far apart?
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06-10-03, 11:16 PM
methos
etymology online says that

cheese evolved from the latin word for cheese, caseus.
fromage evolved from the latin word forma, for "shape, form, mold"

06-11-03, 08:43 PM
Tree
I'm just shaking my head at
methos!

He has every answer in the
WORLD!!!!!!!!!

- or should I say the universe?

WOW, you blow my mind!


Eek

06-12-03, 05:02 PM
maiku
The word cheese is in fact one of the very earliest of borrowings from Latin into Germanic. This borrowing happened even before English became differentiated from German, which is why its reflex in English is nearly the same as the Modern High German word Käse.

In this case, as in many others, Spanish is still closer to the original Latin than French is. Compare Spanish queso with French fromage, (which, as Methos has noted, is from an entirely different root.).

There was a delightful cartoon published in the New Yorker, I believe, many years ago, in which a man in a beret was photographing his family in front of the Eiffel tower. The caption read simply, Dit fromage.

There is another one due to the great linguist Roman Jackobsen, which maybe only a linguist such as myself will appreciate. A certain lady who was a native speaker of German, upon learning that the French referred to cheese as fromage said, "Warum denn? Käse ist doch viel natürlicher!"

06-12-03, 05:24 PM
methos
maiku - I think I get it (sort of), but I don't actually speak German... would you care to translate?

I'm also curious if you know how forma evolved into a word meaning cheese (I have my own speculation, but am curious if the real evolution is known).

06-12-03, 05:38 PM
maiku
The German lady said, "Why is that? Surely Käse is much more natural than fromage."

As to how a word for cheese was derived, in French, from one that meant form, I can only speculate. But even in modern times cheese is marketed in molded forms like wedges and wheels, isn't it? I think that's the key.

06-13-03, 12:23 AM
mozart56
Thanx guys ,I knew this one needed some work!

Is there something wrong ?I just click on 'Tree "'s profile who has over 1600's posts and her date of birth according to her profile is 06-18-00?? Confused

06-13-03, 03:45 AM
Ewood27
Mozart, there are three possibilities.

1. Tree is a very busy young lady.
2. Tree is a very busy old lady.
3. Tree had a slip of the typing finger when entering profile details.

Because Tree surely wouldn't mislead us, would she?

Change the above to male gender and it all applies to Maiku also!

06-13-03, 05:27 AM
FredPuli
Latin 'forma' was used for a mould used in making cheese. Among many definitions in Lewis and Short ( the great Latin-English dictionary) is 'a mould that gives form to something' and the first quotation to illustrate this use is from L. Junius Moderatus Columelia ( living in A.D. 50 )who was a writer on husbandry. The quote translates as ' ( Cheese) is either shaped by hand or it is pressed into moulds made of box-wood'.

Association, so a meaning is transferred from one thing to another is not unusual. The strangest example may be 'treacle' ( British English for a kind of dark molasses ). At one time it meant ' a salve' in English .It comes from a Greek word meaning 'wild animal'. The original Greek had two parts 'wild animal'( therion;the adjective is theriake) and 'antidote' (antidotos ) and described a mixture applied to the wound from a wild boar or a snake. The 'antidote ' ( antidotos) part got left off at some point and by the time the word reached Latin it had become 'theriaca' meaning only 'antidote against a bite, particularly a snakebite'.As the salve for wounds was something sticky when made by C19 British pharmacists the meaning transferred to the sticky molasses.It's possible that this was used in it anyway, once sugar cane was available, and finally the old meaning died out. The old, medicinal, meaning only survives in the plant name 'treacle mustard'.
.
Latin 'testa' originally any piece of baked clay, became the standard word for an earthenware pot and was then was later used jocularly or vulgarly for the skull. The French for head, 'tete' ( with a circumflex accent, indicating the missing 'S') comes from this familiar, jocular use . Regular Latin for head is 'caput' ( adjective 'capitalis ) , hence 'capital'.

Slightly away from transferred meaning but illustrative of how some conquered people adopted colloquial Latin concerns horses. Classical Latin had one word for horse 'equus'. The soldiery, drawn from and stationed all over the Empire had a vulgar word 'caballus'in their Latin, which they'd apparently taken from a Celtic language. They used it for any ordinary, inferior kind of horse, ' a nag', 'a pack horse', 'a jade'. The first became 'equine'and French 'equitation' and the second 'cavalry' ( well, it was soldiers' Latin) , 'cavalier' and French 'cheval'. The English , having had more varied invasions and more languages to draw on, used a Germanic word for 'horse', Ancient Norse for 'hack' ( from a placename, Hackney) and they invented 'nag' and'jade' themselves.

I can't explain the change from 'forma' to 'froma-' though. That's Maiku's territory !

[P.S. Tree is really Sapling. Tree is a pseudonym ]

06-13-03, 01:41 PM
maiku

quote:Originally posted by FredPuli
I can't explain the change from 'forma' to 'froma-' though. That's Maiku's territory !



This is not really an explanation in the full sense of the word, but there is at least a term for this kind of sound change in historical linguistics. It is known as metathesis, and for whatever reasons it happens very frequently in the history of language development.

And for reasons I once again can't explain, the sound [r] has undergone metathesis more than almost any other. In English, original thrid has given rise by r-metathesis to third (compare the position of the [r] sound in three, for example, and even in cases like North Riding, originally Norththridding). A much more recent example of r-metathesis has happened in the word comfortable, which is practically universally now pronounced in relaxed American speech with the retroflex vowel, still represented in the spelling by "or," occurring after the "t," not before it.

The Cajun quarterback Brett Favre even mispronounces his own name, so that the "r" comes before the "v" instead of after it.

The thread Word Rot Peeves," which I recommend reviewing to all of you, mentions a number of these things. It also mentions the metathesis of "s" in the verb "ask" (originally acsian, with the "s" clearly preceding the "k.")

While I'm at it, why has no-one so far responded to my last post in the Word Rot Peeves thread about mixed metaphors involving roadmap?

06-13-03, 07:48 PM
newnickname

quote:..why has no-one so far responded to my last post in the Word Rot Peeves thread about mixed metaphors involving roadmap?


Sorry, I guess we're all tied up with our noses to the grindstone and our ears to the ground.

06-14-03, 12:44 PM
maiku
Thanks for your reply, nnn.

I encourage you to keep on keeping your shoulder to the wheel and pulling your own weight whenever you step up to the plate.

Jacques Chirac may think he's some kind of grand fromage, but I guess GWB showed him who was really the big cheese, didn't he?

06-15-03, 11:08 AM
FredPuli
President Chirac could be 'la grosse legume' ( 'the large vegetable' ) or 'la grande huile' ( 'the great oil') ; both mean 'the big shot (around here)', 'the big cheese'. Food is plainly important to the French and goes with power. They had a prime minister Madame Cresson, after all ('watercress'). She may have been meant as a match for Herr Kohl ('cabbage', I take it).
He can't be 'le grand fromage' but Chirac did manage 'to find a good cheese' ( trouver un bon fromage ). It's 'to be on the gravy train'; this train is the safest place in view of the charges of misuse of funds and corruption that he would face were he not president !
Anyway,our 'big cheese' turns out to have nothing to do with caseine or cheddar. It's from Urdu, meaning '(quite) the thing' hence ' the big 'I am'; a self -important or important person' from Persian 'ciz', 'thing', so we're on the wrong lines to start with !
I really am cheesed off by that discovery ( British English for 'fed up; annoyed' ) . Somehow the image of the (wooden) cheese in skittles or ninepin bowling, rolling to knock down all in its way or the (real) cheese chased headlong down a hill by the local men in some festivals here, with consequent broken and twisted limbs, seemed appropriate.

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