I trust we’re all familiar with the phenomenon of English names for animals being good old Anglo-Saxon words (pig, cow, sheep) while the meat from them is called by names deriving from Norman French (pork, beef, mutton); John Cowan quoted the famous passage from Ivanhoe in which Wamba describes it back in 2015. Well, my friend Mapraputa asks “whether there are other languages where the word used to describe a live animal and the word used to describe the same animal when it’s dead (and being eaten) are etymologically rooted in two different underlying source languages.” I thought this was an interesting question, and I figured I’d pass it along in case the Hattery can help her answer it.
Japanese does something similar with Chinese roots: cattle are 牛 ushi, while beef is 牛肉 gyūniku; horses are 馬 uma, while horsemeat is 馬肉 baniku. A mixture of both is used for pig/pork: pigs are 豚 buta and pork is 豚肉 butaniku, but the Chinese root appears in words like 豚カツ tonkatsu (pork cutlet) and 豚汁 tonjiru (pork miso soup). Chicken (which, like other poultry, interestingly doesn’t follow this pattern in English) is usually just 鶏 tori or niwatori, though the Chinese root does appear occasionally in words like 鶏肉 keiniku.
Korean provides an another example: 물고기 mulgogi ‘fish (as an animal)’ is a compound of native Korean words; 생선 saengseon ‘fish (as food)’ is a Sino-Korean word (cf. 生鮮, Mandarin shēngxiān ‘fresh produce’; Japanese 生鮮 seisen ‘fresh (of food)’). A quick search finds a video on just this topic in Korean on YouTube here.
Oh. Denasalization (m > b) strikes again.