Culture and language are closely related, so is it possible to understand one from knowing the other?

This is a curiosity that dates back over 1000 years to the Norman invasion in 1066. In those times meat was an expensive product, eaten by the Norman lords, but raised by the poorer Saxon farmers. Obviously the Saxons used their words for the animal whereas the Normans used a Norman/ French words for the finished product, the meat. We still use these words today, as can be seen by this list:

So, yes looking at the origins of words can tell us something of the history and culture of that language.

I have long been fascinated by English collective nouns. They give a name to groups of or things, like a flock of birds, flock is the collective noun and birds are the individual things in that group. Usually, but not always, the noun is singular. I’ll talk about that in another post.

English has collective nouns for many things, here are some common ones:

Team (of players)

Orchestra (of musicians)

Herd (of cows)

School (of fish)

I find them interesting because there are some very unexpected ones:

Gaggle (of geese, on the ground)

Skein (of geese, in flight)

Pride (of lions)

Ambush (of tigers)

and of course a Bench (of Bishops)

Often it seems obvious why the word came into common use, a pride of lions is just that, but why a school of fish?