dcarson's example is one of many in which English has word pairs or triplets with the same or similar meanings, in which one word can be traced back to Old English and the other comes from French or directly from Latin. English is a Germanic language, but much of our vocabulary comes from French. (Think "Norman Invasion.") The Old English terms tend to be more casual in nature. The French and Latin terms tend to be more formal.
Some examples (taken from Crystal's Encyclopedia which I mentioned in my previous post):
Old English French Latin
----------- ------ -----
rise mount ascend
ask question interrogate
holy sacred consecrated
sweat perspire -
climb - ascend
dcarson's example is especially interesting in that beef/cow share a common ancestor.
Edit: Contrast the "feel" of the following two sentences. They mean pretty much the same thing and have similar, although admittedly not identical, sentence structure. The first one contains more terms that can be traced back to Latin, possibly via French, the second one has more terms that have been in English longer. The first one would be more appropriate in a scholarly setting, the latter in a friendly (informal) conversation.
1) If it is your desire to appear erudite, utilize terminology derived from Latin.
2) If you want to seem learned, use words from Latin.
In the humourous rephrasings of common sayings available
here , many of the words that have come down to us from Old English have been replaced by words originating in Latin, again possibly via French.
This division makes sense when you think about it -- nearly a millennium ago, the English of the day was the language of hearth and home for the Anglo-Saxons. The French of the day was the language of the court. Had the Norman Invasion been repelled, English would be a very different language today. One of the things that amazes me about language is that the geopolitics of a people can influence their language centuries, even millennia, later.
Joy,
Lynn
