[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.