Could you specify some places this applies to? It certainly isn’t the case with in New Zealand, and I’m reasonable certain that applies to Australia and the UK too.
Perhaps it is not current usage, but I guess it might have be common English usage till 19th century. I think that I have seen corn used generically in novels and other works from before that time.
May be you can find reference to corn in Chaucer, I don't exactly remember if it is there for sure.
UK farmer here - since childhood in 1970s we've always called it "corn harvest" when talking about wheat, barley, oats, rye, etc.; sometimes Maize is referred to as corn-on-the-cob.
In English, it used to mean a grain of anything, not just a cereal grain.
This usage surives in "corned beef", which refers to granular salt used for preserving the meat, nothing to do with cereal grains.
"Corn" still refers to multiple cereals in British English; what Americans call "corn" is "maize". Or so it used to be; perhaps it is changing?
"Corn" also refers to a lump of hardened skin; but that has a different origin, related to "horn", going back to Greek. It shares with "cornucopia" and "cornet" and "keratin".
"acorn" is also not derived from "corn", interestingly; it has its own etymology. It is not a portmanteau of "aiken corn" (oak tree's corn) or anything like that as might be wrongly guessed.
"kernel" is related to "corn" though, not to horns or keratin. OS kernels are named because they are the central part, like a seed, not because kernel programmers have thick skins or devil horns.
Corn (resp. maize) flour is also interesting for being an unusually 'correct' usage of 'flour' - if you look on Wikipedia it's easy to think it's 'incorrect', because it will show you 'cornmeal' and say 'for maize starch called cornflour in the UK' etc. but actually the starch, the endosperm, is the part of the grain (resp. corn! But that's too confusing) that when milled is properly called 'flour'. In general many 'flours' are more properly 'meals'. ('Cornmeal' is similarly accurate, but the meal vs. flour is a correct distinction, not a language error/regional difference that ought to lead to mistakes. I suppose it's just called 'starch' in the US hence the wording of the 'if you mean'.)
Corn only refers exclusively to maize in North American English. Corn is a catch-all term for all cereal grains. Maize is the cereal grain from Mexico that everyone makes tortillas from...
Reminds me of a section in The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt:
I said What I mean is, though I believe the [Rosetta] Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity.
You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.
What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island.
Interesting how stable French has been over the centuries - at least when judging from these four lines.
By no means the same, but much closer to modern French than the language of the sagas is to modern Scandinavian. Not to mention how far English has drifted.
French orthographic and grammatical history has been non-linear and it's not uncommon for texts from the 16th century to be harder to read than from the 13th c., while at the same time the Medieval texts have sometimes confusing syntax for modern French speakers because of the declensions. For example in the sample given by the article :
Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit
It's not something that a modern native French speaker would understand at first sight. Li quiens (or li cuens in more standard Old French) is the cas sujet of "count", the form that survived in French is the cas régime, le conte.
For what it's worth, I understood at first sight "Mauvaisement, le <honorific title> Bertram a dit" which happend to be the intended meaning.
I actually had more trouble with "Bacin" starting with a capital B which would indicate a proper name. That's the only line I wasn't sure of.
I was surprised by the fact I could understand that while I know I can hardly understand anything from the 16/17th century old french. Thanks for your input for clarifying that.
A fraction from a 12th-century French poem beforehand believed to have been lost eternally has been found by a tutorial in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
Dr Tamara Atkin from Queen Mary University of London was researching the reuse of books through the sixteenth century when she got here throughout the fragment from the hitherto lost Siège d’Orange in the binding of a e-book printed in 1528. Parchment and paper have been costly on the time, and undesirable manuscripts and books have been incessantly recycled.
https://www.upsers.tips/
Astonishingly accessible with a little knowledge of French:
“Il li demande coment se contient il? / Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit / Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin / Garison nule dont il puisse garir / Mais ke de sang li lessai plein Bacin,”
“He asks him, ‘How goes it with him?’ / ‘Badly,’ said Count Bertram. / ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; / He has no supplies with which to save himself, / Except for one basinful of blood, which I left him.’”
You don't even need to go back to old english: per your source, definition 1 under english etymology 1 is:
(chiefly Britain, uncountable) Any cereal plant grown for its grain, or the grain thereof.
edit: but yes, in the context of discussing a poem from the 12th century, old English would make more sense :) Interesting that the translation is from the french ble , which I would intuitively associate with the modern french blé meaning[1] wheat
Corn originally meant “small seed”, and then was generically used to refer to what are now typically called grains or cereals (wheat, oats, rye, ...).
The new-world grain maize, which had no existing name in English, was called “Indian corn”. Later, that was shortened to just “corn”, which eventually resulted in the generic word “corn” losing currency in North America.
Relatedly, from roughly the same time period La Chanson de Roland / The Song of Roland
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Roland) which has survived to the present day and is considered the oldest surviving work of French literature.
38 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 83.0 ms ] thread> Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin
> ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine;
nope: ble is wheat in modern French, and corn had not been brought back from the new world yet when this poem was written.
Otherwise 'sweetcorn' or 'corn on the cob' ('corncob') are common. But you can't have e.g. 'wheat on the cob' so it's not ambiguous.
May be you can find reference to corn in Chaucer, I don't exactly remember if it is there for sure.
This usage surives in "corned beef", which refers to granular salt used for preserving the meat, nothing to do with cereal grains.
"Corn" still refers to multiple cereals in British English; what Americans call "corn" is "maize". Or so it used to be; perhaps it is changing?
"Corn" also refers to a lump of hardened skin; but that has a different origin, related to "horn", going back to Greek. It shares with "cornucopia" and "cornet" and "keratin".
"acorn" is also not derived from "corn", interestingly; it has its own etymology. It is not a portmanteau of "aiken corn" (oak tree's corn) or anything like that as might be wrongly guessed.
"kernel" is related to "corn" though, not to horns or keratin. OS kernels are named because they are the central part, like a seed, not because kernel programmers have thick skins or devil horns.
In the UK, there are some exceptions, where it specifically refers to maize: cornflakes, corn on the cob, sweetcorn, and cornflour.
0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn
I said What I mean is, though I believe the [Rosetta] Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity.
You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.
What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island.
More on the book:
https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-helen-dewitts-the-last-s...
By no means the same, but much closer to modern French than the language of the sagas is to modern Scandinavian. Not to mention how far English has drifted.
I actually had more trouble with "Bacin" starting with a capital B which would indicate a proper name. That's the only line I wasn't sure of.
I was surprised by the fact I could understand that while I know I can hardly understand anything from the 16/17th century old french. Thanks for your input for clarifying that.
Dr Tamara Atkin from Queen Mary University of London was researching the reuse of books through the sixteenth century when she got here throughout the fragment from the hitherto lost Siège d’Orange in the binding of a e-book printed in 1528. Parchment and paper have been costly on the time, and undesirable manuscripts and books have been incessantly recycled. https://www.upsers.tips/
“Il li demande coment se contient il? / Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit / Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin / Garison nule dont il puisse garir / Mais ke de sang li lessai plein Bacin,”
“He asks him, ‘How goes it with him?’ / ‘Badly,’ said Count Bertram. / ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; / He has no supplies with which to save himself, / Except for one basinful of blood, which I left him.’”
TIL: garrison <> supply
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn
(chiefly Britain, uncountable) Any cereal plant grown for its grain, or the grain thereof.
edit: but yes, in the context of discussing a poem from the 12th century, old English would make more sense :) Interesting that the translation is from the french ble , which I would intuitively associate with the modern french blé meaning[1] wheat
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bl%C3%A9
The new-world grain maize, which had no existing name in English, was called “Indian corn”. Later, that was shortened to just “corn”, which eventually resulted in the generic word “corn” losing currency in North America.