English food words carry a history that most speakers never notice. Cow, pig, sheep and deer are the animals. Beef, pork, mutton and venison are the meat. The pattern is too neat to be chance.
The animal words come from Old English, the language of the people who kept the animals. The meat words come from French, the language of the people who ate them after 1066. For several centuries the farm and the table used different vocabularies, and the split survives in a kitchen nearly a thousand years later.
The same layering appears throughout English. Ask, question and interrogate mean roughly the same thing at three levels of formality, and they arrived from Old English, French and Latin respectively. This is why English has so many near-synonyms, and why the formal one is so often the Latin one. A learner who knows this can guess register fairly reliably: a short word with Germanic shape is usually the plain one, and a longer word with Latin shape is usually the formal one.
The practical use is in writing rather than in vocabulary lists. A paragraph made entirely of Latinate words sounds official and tiring. A paragraph made entirely of short Germanic words sounds blunt. Good English writing moves between the layers, and knowing that the layers exist is most of what it takes to start hearing them.
Vocabulary in this text
- notice /ˈnoʊtəs/ — to see or become aware of something
- century /ˈsɛntʃɚi/ — a period of one hundred years
- appear /əˈpɪɹ/ — to become possible to see, or to seem
- synonym /ˈsɪnəˌnɪm/ — a word with almost the same meaning as another
- register /ɹˈɛdʒɪstɚ/ — how formal or informal language is
- paragraph /ˈpæɹəɡɹˌæf/ — a group of sentences about one idea