[ComputerGuru]

I am not sure that holds because the same split is observed in other languages, too. See el pez vs pescado in Spanish, for example.

[jgilias]

Yes, but if you look at the etymology for “sheep” and “mutton”, they literally come from Old English and Old French respectively.

Does the same (different source languages) is true for “el pez” and “pescado”?

[awelxtr]

Piscis and piscari repectively, both from Latin so no

[valleyer]

Maybe there are better examples, but pez and pescado are pretty obviously derived from the same source (pescado literally meaning a thing that is fished [i.e., captured from the sea]).

[kazinator]

But the interesting thing is that in French, sheep and mutton are both mouton.

[jjgreen]

The English peasants raised the sheep, the French masters eat the mouton.

[kazinator]

Sure, but in France, the peasants were French.

[ComputerGuru]

Right, but that’s a non-sequitur.

[kazinator]

"French is an example of a language in which the meat and animal name are the same, at least in the case of the sheep (mouton)".

"The English peasants raised the sheep, the French masters eat the mouton." <-- this is the non sequitur

My comment was about French as such (being spoken in France by French masters and their French peasants).

So then in the case of English, the different meat names came about in a different way, from two languages that separately didn't have two meat names, which is interesting.

[ComputerGuru]

Ok I understand your point. I heard this story being told before as “the aristocratic English masters..” (implying they’d rubbed shoulders with the French enough to have adopted their lingo) which I think makes more logical sense to how it wound up being a French word in the English language.

[irdc]

Dutch too: koe (the animal) vs rund (the meat)

[mmoll]

Not quite the same. Koe/rund (and Kuh/Rind in German) is a lot more like cow/cattle, with rund naming the species and koe a female animal.